GOODBYE DOCTOR GONZO

"But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country - but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that."

- Hunter S. Thompson, " Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," 1971.

Hunter S. Thompson worked in darkness. An incurable night owl, he often didn't start writing until 2 or 3 in the morning, a bottle of Chivas Regal always at hand, clacking away at amphetamine speed on his IBM Selectric as Bob Dylan or Howlin' Wolf or Jim Morrison rattled the mainbeams of his Woody Creek, Colorado, headquarters. "After midnight," he believed, "all things are possible."

The nighttime solitude honed his perspective; like an owl, he saw best in the dark. He spent those nights - those long, desperate pre-dawn hours - patrolling his beat, as he put it, on "the Death of the American Dream." While the rest of us slept, he wrestled with shadows, trying to make sense of a country he saw so full of corrupted possibility. His America was the bastard child of Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald, an atavistic mutant where James Gatz grows up to be Richard Nixon - Colonel Kurtz with a studied veneer of gentility - a hustler and low-grade monster whose capacity for reinvention betrayed his lack of a soul. He looked into the heartland of darkness and saw the land of the free and home of the brave as "really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."

It was President Kennedy's assassination that first provoked his fear and loathing. Kennedy - the charismatic, youthful leader Norman Mailer once described as America's "romantic dream of itself" - died in Dallas in 1963. From then on it was the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. It was Altamont, Manson, and the Age of Nixon, America's first crooked-used-car-salesman-as-President. It's been said that every people gets the government it deserves, but Thompson never took that ride. He never blamed America for what it had become; drain the swamp of Nixon's depraved, backstabbing administration, he believed, and you'd still find the shining city on the hill - the last, best hope for mankind. He recognized Truth as the only counter to corrupt power - and there is no other kind of power.

It's a lonely job, looking truth in the eye. The world offers up a select few shamans, seers, prophets, to take that journey for us, and we typically crucify or ostracize them. Thompson, who seemed to take his own measure when he remarked, "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over," knew this to be his lot. He knew "the dead-end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules." It's the loneliness of a man out of sync with his time, whose rage is awesome and self-consuming, inexplicable to those who don't share it.

For too brief a time it seemed as though he wasn't alone. "There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs," he wrote in 1971. "We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." The freaks and misfits had their day in the sun, and then power brutally reasserted itself.

His writing - like his life - always seemed ready to exhaust itself, on the brink of self-immolation in its precarious balance of cynicism and hope. With each battle it seemed hard to believe he'd recoup, but he drew inspiration from John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelations, the man who kept his head while all about him were losing theirs; even if it meant turning his body into a pharmacology experiment and throwing himself into the corpse of the American Dream, he would be there to perform the autopsy. Autopsy - from the Greek, seeing for oneself . His cynicism let him see clearly; his idealism let him see something better .

That Hunter S. Thompson killed himself is not a rebuttal to his life's work, but a consummation of it. Shooting himself in the head with a .45 Magnum was not the act of a coward, but the final exit of a man who lived life on his own terms, with the integrity he expected of the world. We are all terminal cases; no one here gets out alive. Maybe it's ok, then, to respect the man who with a steady hand writes his own ending. For while he was here, Hunter shook the Earth with a righteous fury that leaves a scorched hole in his passing. He showed us what it means to live up to the possibilities of life in this country, and how to maintain hope. Fundamentally he was an optimist, a true believer in all that is right and true in the national character. And we are all the poorer in his absence.