I experienced skinned-knees, double-dutch, and Captain Kangaroo’s parenting in the sixties. The Beatles were mod ‘roos, the White Album let-me-down, and hippies were reality-challenged kids who wondered if Paul was dead. They dropped acid and called it a movement; I learned that from Woodstock, the movie. Hollywood confiscated hippie-ness and neutralised white dissent from a studio in Beautiful Downtown Burbank; Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was America’s rubber soul.
Above the ancient mosh pits poets flew. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was one of those, a stake in Burroughs’ camp, a pulse in Ken Kesey‘s; a thoroughbred in unicorn drag. He bartered equisitely unique talent for iconoclastic glory and called it bread and butter; his gonzo journalism tasted like humble pie masqued in a glaze of depraved indifference. It was a stepping stone he administered like a last stand. Thompson’s suicide was no surprise. Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004 was a death rattle. He pulled the plug on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Malcolm X‘s assassination.
Intentionally or not, their legacies will now be revisited in the same news cycles. I’m the same cynical 13-year-old who jostled the perimeter of a staggering crowd spilling out of downtown central at a Free Bobby Seale rally in New Haven, Connecticut to hear Angela Davis and others speak; I was elevated by echoing, electrified waves of acclamation and luminous, breatheable, spiritual expansiveness. The Black Panther Party‘s newspaper and handouts were the first public records that came close to representing my instincts. Who could tune in to that and drop acid? Advocate it? The only ism that served was racism.
Thompson stoked the control fire. Timothy Leary was a fire-starter who died in his sleep in his Beverly Hills home. In 1977 when NBC attempted to revive Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Robin Williams appeared as one of the supporting performers. Last week he appeared as a liberal on Real Time. When Maher resurrected last season’s punchline that giving Muslims a “lap dance” isn’t torture, Williams affected an African American dialect and mannerisms to describe how prisoners in the United States would react to being smeared with menstrual blood. He then went on to say that Iraqis and Afghanis who experience it are up-for-grabs in a comedic sense since their first sexual experiences are with their cousins or goats.
A short interview with David Gilbert is included in The Weather Underground DVD. In it, he explains how sometimes opposition is really just the flip side of the coin. Malcolm X was killed because he possessed the rare ability to underscore the futility of such pursuits with the inspiration to rise above them. Thompson was afforded the privilege of choosing his place and time to die; I’d like to think he did it because he couldn’t stand being on the same coin with Williams & Associates.
In any event, I’d have preferred a sober investigation.