Hunter Thompson (1937-2005) and the Art of Listening

Hunter S. Thompson is dead, and therefore immortal.

The grandfather of “gonzo journalism,” he taught us:

"Objective journalism is one of the main reasons that American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long."

(For those of you scratching your heads asking, “Who was Hunter Thompson?” here’s a link to a Denver Post obituary that is surprisingly comprehensive and fair.)

I met Hunter Thompson just once, in 1976 when he was at the height of his fame. He was in New Hampshire covering that year’s presidential race, the first since the publication of his bestseller about the 1972 elections, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. I expected to meet a flamboyant, loud, and extravagant party animal dancing on the head of the establishment to the rhythm of the frenetic clickety-clack of his manual typewriter keys.

To the contrary, as I, starry-eyed, watched him conduct his craft the thing I noticed most of all – the unexpected thing that elevated his entire concept of journalism for me - was that he was, above all, a painstakingly attentive listener… Thompson created for himself a public persona of a wild man; a scary, gun-slinger, drug-taker, and irreverent defiler of social norms. I believe to this day that it was mainly a journalistic technique: to throw everyone off their carefully-constructed scripts and then be able to observe – and report – the essence of the characters: the politicians, the reporters, and everyone else he encountered while chronicling what he called “the death of the American dream.”

He would hit them with behavior that nobody expected from a journalist, and then sit back, listen to them wail, watch them flail, and tell the tale as it really was – not according to the agreed-upon steps of the American political dance.

It was January or February of 1976 – I was a lad of sixteen – in the Concord, New Hampshire office for Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris’ presidential campaign. Harris, with his calls for a “redistribution of wealth and privilege” was decidedly an underdog (he came in fifth in that first-in-the-nation primary). Not a single political reporter took the campaign of “Fightin’ Fred” seriously, and I’m sure that Thompson had no illusions, either, that the country was ready for a political leader who titled his manifesto The New Populism.

Thompson walked up the stairs to the second-floor campaign headquarters on a snowbound North Main Street, with a back room where we, a posse of young volunteers, slept on old mattresses or in sleeping bags on the floor after long days of trudging through neighborhoods and towns, knocking on doors, handing out literature, and talking up Harris’ “Take the Rich off Welfare” platform. We had a campaign song that would likely be banned from any U.S. political campaign today:

Take the rich off welfare
Bust up monopolies
Break up the oil and gas crowd
Bring the big boys to their knees
President Fred Harris
His story we will tell
We won’t just win the White House
But our country back as well…

He walked into the crash pad, not announcing his name, and sat down on one of the floor mattresses. He took out his pad and pen, and began asking quiet questions of the volunteers. He was polite, attentive, softspoken… in other words, the antithesis of his public image (that we, in those times, mainly got through his portrayal as a drug-addled “Uncle Duke” in Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip that was a mainstay of daily newspapers back then).

After an hour or two, one of the other volunteers whispered, “do you know who that is? It’s Hunter Thompson!”

There he was: no booze, no guns, not apparently suffering from hallucinations… just a reporter, asking questions, taking notes, letting his sources speak, and evidently listening… and then listening some more.

I am guessing that he felt sufficiently at home among this ragtag band of idealist campaign volunteers that he didn’t see a need to bounce off the walls in the grand acts of theater that so many today remember aloud of him conducting in the practice of his craft.

Anyway, that’s the Hunter Thompson I remember from one short exposure to the man: a listener… a reporter…

And as Hunter said to a public audience on the sad April night, years later, in 1989, when news had spread that Abbie Hoffman had committed suicide: “He lived courageously and he died with his boots on.” While everyone else was gnashing teeth or proclaiming assassination or some such thing, Thompson chose, rather, to simply salute the way the fallen comrade had lived.

So before my email box runneth over with emails titled “HUNTER THOMPSON WAS M-U-R-D-E-R-E-D” and the similar nonsense that follows the frequent suicides of great men and women in a society all lathered up in denial that it has already, collectively, died, I’ll offer him the same worthy tribute: Hunter S. Thompson lived courageously… and he died with his boots on.

In a meritocracy, his column, in place of being exiled to, of all places, the ESPN sports pages, would have been published in every daily newspaper. But it wasn’t. Those same newspapers are today penning obituaries and eulogies to Thompson’s public persona, and none of them seem to “get” that the joke was on them. But, now that all has been written and done from his outpost in the mountains of Woody Creek, Colorado, I’d like to point out that Hunter S. Thompson was a better listener than all of ‘em – and that is what made him the most unique observer of “the death of the American dream.”

The dream is dead inside those borders, and this is especially true of the journalism sweatshop in which he labored. There, simply, wasn’t a shred of dream left for him to cover. And to those who follow, or wish to follow, in his gigantic footsteps, I’ll repeat: Look south, young Americans. After all, it’s no accident that Thompson himself cut his journalistic teeth as a Caribbean and South American correspondent before returning to the United States in 1963 with the hawk eyes able to observe the absurdity of a land that has forfeited the right to take itself anywhere near as seriously as it does.

He killed the king named “objectivity” and created the model of a journalist as a sniper and sharpshooter, rather than a mere obedient foot-soldier of false norms and decayed politesse.

And it was Hunter Thompson’s subjectivity – in defiance of the doctrine of journalistic objectivity that some dinosaurs, the walking dead of the profession, still practice – that made him interested enough in his subjects to be able listen authentically… and to therefore be able to observe and chronicle history as it really was and is - messy, tumultous, and above all, human - and not merely as the weak-minded control freaks who call themselves "objective" want it to be.