Artist Betrayed

I watched "Where the Buffalo Roam" over the weekend. Some obscure cable channel. I forgot how much I liked it. It wasn't a hit. Bill Murray is Hunter S. Thompson. I think he nails it.

As you may know, the good doctor killed himself a couple of years ago. Shot himself, they say, because of a broken leg and a broken marriage.

But I think it was a broken spirit. He was the ultimate rebel. He walked his own path, whether it was with Hell's Angels or Nixon's campaign trail. He was an iconoclast of the highest order. A crazy man, certainly, but he really believed in freedom. And in his era, freedom seemed most compromised and threatened by the Right. Thompson was fully invested in hating Republicans and everything he thought they stood for.

It must have brought on the bad fever when he realized that his people, the democrats and so-called Liberals were the ones building the concentration camps; making everyday behavior crimes; outlawing common sense; declaring certain kinds of thought a crime.

Hunter walked the same path I did...well...he stomped, pounded, chewed up the same path, anyway. He believed that the Left was for freedom, for fairness, for decency, for compassion, for equal rights, for leaving you alone to do what you wanted, as long as you weren't hurting anyone.

I finally figured out that the Left was the embodiment of only slightly less insane Charles Manson level control freaks. I was able to make the transition. Probably because at the time, I hadn't poured my soul into 20 very loud books that read the whole situation wrong...whose vibe was acid flashback with a splash of creative alzheimers' amnesia; missing all the signs of incipient tyrannny the Left revealed as early as the Free Speech days in Berkeley...when we all thought it was the voice of the new American Revolution. We were drunk on our own appetites. And the new Left was telling us that getting high and getting laid were almost social responsibilities...not forbidden sins.

What kid is going to argue with that? But Thompson never saw the bullet coming. He saw the "peace" kids, and the "love" kids, and the "pot" kids, and the "commune" kids...and loved them. The cops were pigs, agents of the corrupt power-mongers and greedy capitalists, beating up the beautiful children.

When you're as high as he got...reality gets lost in the hallucination.

So by the time his body suggested that he slow down, he awoke from his 40 year chemically induced alternate reality to find Bill Clinton, Leader of the Free World molesting girls with cigars and lying his Arkansas ass off for most of his 8 years in office, corrupt, power hungry, sleazy...reminding him of his ultimate nemesis: Richard Nixon. Federal agents murdering citizens at Waco and Ruby Ridge; he saw college students disciplined and expelled for speaking words their overlords disapproved of; the government taking people's property away; thought declared crimes; the nanny state invading the social, private and personal lives of every citizen; helmet laws, smoking laws, an avalanche of spurious gun laws.

His heroes had become (indeed they always were) the greatest enemy of liberty, and his worst enemy. The true intentions of the glorious Left were revealed to his sober mind in their sickening rot. And freedom, for which Hunter argued, wrote and lived so long...was being stolen by those he had painted and pledged as heroes.

I loved Hunter Thompson, but for a creative, observant, hilarious critic of the status quo, he had a monumental blind spot. In early life, he'd decided that the implacable enemy of human fulfillment was American traditionalists and their conservative values. And he embraced the first rebellious movement that came along. He never asked the hard questions; he never questioned his own loyalty.

I choose to believe he was honest enough that when he finally discovered the treachery, the betrayal, the lies, the corruption, the power-madness, that hunger that sacrifices everything and everyone else for it's own fulfillment...he couldn't live with it.

His level of emotional investment in the wrong side must have turned his spit to poison. I'm almost surprised he had to shoot himself at all.

The Gunslinger