The Gonzo Journalist

Alex Gibney’s film Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is about a very different kind of man and journalist, one who tested the edges of human possibilities, while staging a spectacular career critiquing the mind-control matrix of the political power structure. The Gonzo journalist is the same character that Native American myth calls the Trickster or Coyte – telling stories of his misadventures and “bad boy” capers, designed to shock you ouf of your accustomed reality framework and assumptions. In the book Ram Dass and I have just written about our Harvard and Millbrook psychedelic explorations with Tim Leary, we describe how our project of careful consciousness exploration with mind-expanding drugs, in a quiet setting, differed from the Ken Kesey and Merry Prankster approach of going as far-out as possible on a creative limb, with huge doses of a variety of hallucinogens and high-volume rock music. “The drugs were beginning to come on as we drove across the desert…” writes Thompson in his insanely brilliant book (made into a film with Johnny Depp), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, describing the escapade that made him famous, where his acid-addled brain caused him to see the hotel lobby filled with two-legged reptiles sitting at their cocktail tables. I’m not making invidious comparisons here, although this approach to working with psychedelics would not be my chosen way. He took what I would consider reckless amounts, in chaotic settings, but he did not use the drugs to surreptitiously brainwash other people.
Thompson’s infatuation with guns and shooting is also alien to my nature, although as the film makes clear in the interviews with his wives, friends and admirers, he never used them to hurt or threaten others, and in general seemed to limit his violence to verbal abuse. In his writings on the 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns he used his writings like a rapier to ferociously and hilariously skewer the pretentiousness of the candidates he detested (Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon) and to support those he admired (Jimmy Carter, George McGovern). I believe that Thompson’s bravoura persona masked a sensitive soul who reacted keenly to the injustices and inequalities of American society. When he came home from reporting on the 1968 Demcratic convention in Chicago, where Mayor Daley’s police clubbed demonstrators with bloody brutality, Thompson’s wife Sandi says it was the only time she saw him weep – tears were streaming down his face. Unlike the French aerialist Philippe Petit, the Gonzo journalist did not retire gracefully: the contradictions he found in himself and in his country seemed to finally get to him, and he shot himself at age 67. I can’t help but admire his high-spirited and zany contribution to our culture.