HOUSE RESOLUTION ___________
Sponsored by Representative ________________________
WHEREAS, This House of Representatives has learned with great sadness, but absolutely no surprise, that this high priest of Gonzo Journalism, Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson, clicked “30†with his very special personal digital assistant for the last time this weekend, and
WHEREAS, what the F—-, right now Hunter S. would have blurted out “Dude, I croaked myself to see if I could push the untimely demise of Sandra Dee off the lead story perch of Entertainment Tonight, and
WHEREAS, had cable t.v. and talk radio been in vogue in the ‘70’s, a coked up Rush would still be pitching underhand in Kansas City and O’Reilly would be picking some “no spin zone†out of his a.., while T.H.E. Doctor was dazzling likes of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer with his feisty .no Bulls…. Style, and
WHEREAS, if there had ever been a Hunter S. Thompson fear and loathing roadshow to the statehouse media’s government subsidized work crew, the PAR intern posse, would have been told to ditch those bureau chief gnomes and head for the sun, and
WHEREAS, had the tour coincided with the full lunar eclipse and a gubernatorial drop-in; the mind conjures visions of the Doctor descending the grand staircase, Wild Turkey in hand, to eyeball Governor Elvis’–laden media stunts and a head snapping, â€Hey A—hole. I knew Elvis. Plowed down some Reds and Jack with Elvis. You, Sir Gumby, are no Elvis,” and
WHEREAS much like the day the music died; the of end Dean Gonzo’s tenure came at a troubling time in the nation’s history — ensnarled in Bush War Machine machination, death from the meds designed to save us and who knows what toxic poisons the biz world whizzes at us — now therefore be it
RESOLVED that these words be quietly passed from desk to desk on the floor of the Illinois House with a blank roll and those with balls marking “yes†and those caught in the ugly mucked filled world that is the far right staying mute. And be if further
RESOLVED that a copy of this document be smuggled to the family of Doctor Hunter S. Thompson with a fond recollection that his work made many laugh, cry, rant and rail about the human condition to a level not likely to be seen in a long, f— ing time.
Mahalo
can we please replace sb 499 with this?
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 7:44 am
We’re supposed to believe that you, Dring, and Aaron Chambers didn’t huddle down on the second floor crafting this gem?
That’s rich.
Comment by Chris Rhodes Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 7:55 am
Wasn’t me. Honest.
Comment by Rich Miller Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 8:02 am
This cries out to be a referendum.
This could draw my ideological base to the polls like gay-marriage bans worked for Bush.
Gonzo is Dead!
Long Live Gonzo!
Comment by So-Called Austin Mayor Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 8:54 am
You guys are all ignorant. HST committed suicide! In most religions, that means he will rot in HELL forever! I will concede that he was a brilliant writer, but he was a drug addicted, wacko and should not be someone to “look up to”. Leave it to the liberals who are trying to remove religion and God from our government to idolize this freak.
I wish that he could rest in peace, but unfortuately, my faith tells me differently.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 9:36 am
I wondered when the wingnuts would weigh in.
Go back to your rock.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 10:07 am
Well, assuming you’re a Christian, your faith also tells you something in Matthew 7:1.
You should look it up.
Comment by BuckTurgidson Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 10:09 am
Hey, wingnut, if ridding the world of evil is good, then Hunter did good, right?
Cocaine and pistols, please.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 10:30 am
Hey lefty, do me a favor and move to Canada like you all promised when GWB was re-elected.
Buck, I know Matthew quite well and really don’t see your point. I’m not judging, I’m stating a fact. People who commit suicide are taking the easy way out and do nothing but leave their loved ones to suffer. They should not be “idolized” as I see many doing on these boards.
My opinion, I’m entitled to one just as anyone else is.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 2:07 pm
…You guys are all ignorant.
…In most religions, that means he will rot in HELL forever!
…wacko and should not be someone to “look up to”.
…People who commit suicide are taking the easy way…
…My opinion, I’m entitled to one just as anyone else is.
You are indeed entitled to your opinion. No doubt about it.
But an opinion and a fact are animals of different colors. No one knows what dwells in an individual’s mind when he or she chooses to use narcotics or to take their own life.
No one.
Comment by BuckTurgidson Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 2:32 pm
Buck, I’ll give you point one, but the others are not judgements. Let me ask you this, and only because you threw out the Matthew reference, do you know what the bible says about taking your own life?
My point is that HST was an entertaining writer, BUT he is certainly not someone I want my kids to look up to or aspire to be.
Lastly, don’t preach to me about what “dwells in an individuals mind when…” I don’t really care. I just lost a friend to suicide. He left a wife and three young children. The guy had “demons” his whole life, but instead of seeking out help, he decided to slit his wrists. In my opinion, he took the easy way out and left the 4 people he loved the most to live the rest of their lives with that horrible memory.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 3:19 pm
Not preaching.
I do indeed know what the bible says about suicide. I also know what it says about shellfish and usury, among other things.
I think suicide is horrible. I also question the hell out of the thought process behind why someone like my cousin - who could well have turned to his family or a professional counselor before hanging himself and leaving his kids behind.
But the fact is, I don’t know. I don’t know what motivates someone to do something like that. I don’t know why people don’t break through the macho stigma against counseling to get help. I don’t know what “bargains” they have made with their own take on God. And we don’t know what happens when you die. Murderers and rapists can repent, but the mentally and emotionally ill can not?
Maybe they’re taking the easy route - maybe they’ve reached the end of their rope.
You may know, but I do not.
Comment by BuckTurgidson Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 3:34 pm
I have a feeling the good doctor is having a good chuckle at your pointless argument.
“Oh, Oh I know someone who killed themselves too” Please.
The man made a decision that had nothing to do with the bible or bravery. He spent his life talking about the death of the American Dream, he found it, end of story.
And btw, just becasue you don’t want your kid to be like him does NOT take away from his greatness.
Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Feb 24, 05 @ 6:11 pm
Geez, who knew Hunter’s best friend visited this site.
Comment by Anonymous Friday, Feb 25, 05 @ 9:23 am
Well, opportunity for snarky comments aside — the back and forth between anon and me which included the dueling “I know someone who offed themselves” lines, was miles from having anything to do with HST. Here in the real world, conversations sometimes get off course.
If indeed people are capable of carrying on the minutia of the physical world in the afterlife, then it is I who get a chuckle at the thought of Thompson -or anyone for that matter- using this power to follow the Capitol Fax blog (no offense Rich - among the living, it is a bit hit).
I still contend that one doesn’t know a person kills themselves - famous or otherwise.
Death of the American dream? What exactly does that mean?
Comment by BuckTurgidson Friday, Feb 25, 05 @ 9:44 am
Although Buck and I may have different “views”, I found this article quite interesting, strange, but interesting. Enjoy,
ASPEN — Hunter S. Thompson heard the ice clinking.
The literary champ was sitting in his command post kitchen chair, a piece of blank paper in his favorite typewriter, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot through the mouth hours earlier.
But a small circle of family and friends gathered around with stories, as he wished, with glasses full of his favored elixir — Chivas Regal on ice.
“It was very loving. It was not a panic, or ugly, or freaky,” Thompson’s wife, Anita Thompson, said Thursday night in her first spoken comments since the icon’s death Sunday. “It was just like Hunter wanted. He was in control here.”
Anita Thompson also echoes the comments that have been made by Hunter Thompson’s son and daughter-in-law: That her husband’s suicide did not come from the bottom of the well, but was a gesture of strength and ultimate control made as his life was at a high-water mark.
“This is a triumph of his, not a desperate, tragic failure,” Anita Thompson said by phone, recounting that she was sitting in her husband’s chair he called his catbird seat in the Rockies.
She added: “He lived a beautiful life and he lived it on his own terms, all the way from the very beginning to the very end.”
Anita Thompson, like her husband’s other close relatives, understood how Hunter Thompson wanted to make his ultimate exit.
“I always knew that Hunter was going to die before me,” Anita Thompson, 32, said of her 67-year-old husband. “I’d accepted that. I just did not know it was going to be like this. I would rather have him back.”
Yet Anita Thompson quickly came to embrace Hunter Thompson’s gesture with a .45-caliber handgun.
She was at the gym when her husband took his life. And when family friend and Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis confirmed the news, her mind raced. “I have enough will power,” she thought. “I can turn back time. No, no, no. This is not right. This can’t happen.”
But upon seeing Hunter Thompson’s body, she embraced him. “Since he’d done this, I did not want to make it difficult for his spirit,” she said. “I wanted to make it loving.”
Anita Thompson believes she will stay on at the expansive property and famous house that was an ever-changing archive of political, literary and name-your-category items. And she will continue to help administer Hunter Thompson’s works.
“I’m going to keep on working for Hunter,” she said. “He wanted this. He made sure that I was in place to continue on. I’ll just do my job until I can be with him again.”
She adds, citing the property’s nickname: “It will remain Owl Farm. It will remain Hunter Thompson’s Owl Farm.”
The last book they had read out loud together was parts of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a dense classic that explores the fragility of civilization by one of Hunter Thompson’s favorite authors. Yet, said Anita Thompson, “He thinks Conrad is funny.”
Anita Thompson and her husband had a small tiff that afternoon. Hunter Thompson told her to leave the kitchen that was known across the world as his funky and sacred work space. A weird look came across his face.
“I don’t know why he wanted me to leave the room,” she said. “It’s all speculation. He’d never asked me to leave the room before.”
But Anita Thompson did not go to the office with Hunter Thompson’s son, as he had requested. Instead, she left the house.
“I’m going to get my gym bag. I’m going,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t want you to leave the house.’”
But she went to the gym. At 5:16 p.m., according to her cell-phone display, she called and spoke with Hunter Thompson for 10 minutes and 22 seconds.
Hunter Thompson put almost everyone on speakerphone. But he picked up the handset to speak with his wife.
“I knew it was odd, first of all, that he picked up with the handset … I thought, ‘That’s sweet,’” she said.
The talk was good.
“He said, ‘I want you to come home after you work out. Come home and we’ll work on a column,’” she recalled.
The conversation, however, never really ended. Before formal goodbyes, Anita Thompson heard a clicking sound. She thought Hunter Thompson might have put down the handset and was typing. Or maybe it was the television. She waited. Maybe a minute passed.
“He did not say anything about killing himself,” she said.
The official time of death is 5:42 p.m.
But did Hunter Thompson shoot himself while on the phone with his wife?
“I did not hear any bang,” she says, noting that Hunter Thompson’s son, who was in the house at the time, believed that a book had fallen when he heard the shot.
Anita Thompson can imagine what was going through Hunter Thompson’s mind before the fatal shot: My beloved son, grandson and daughter-in-law are here. I’m in my perch. The fireplace has fire.
“I don’t know if it mattered if I was here,” Anita Thompson says. “I just like to think, and believe in my heart, he felt happy in his life.”
A woman at the gym saw Anita Thompson in the bathroom. She asked if Hunter Thompson was OK. Anita Thompson pretty much blew it off. Rumors about Hunter Thompson were always in the air. Anita Thompson replied, “Oh yeah,” but added, “he’s been pretty stressed out lately.”
A strange look was on the woman’s face. She told Anita Thompson to check her phone messages. The woman said she would stay at her side.
Now she was shaking, and could barely dial.
There was a message from Juan Thompson, Hunter’s son. “Anita, you have to come home now, he’s dead.”
Anita Thompson then spoke to the sheriff on the phone.
Had Hunter Thompson intended for his wife of two years to be in the house?
“I don’t know, and it’s not that important,” Anita Thompson says. “I know he loved me. There’s no question … I know he did not want me to find him alone. He knew I was opposed to it.”
After wading through the police officers outside, Anita Thompson recalls seeing her husband’s dead body for the first time. “He was sitting in the chair when they brought me in, and I got to hug him and kiss him and rub his legs,” she said. “All the anger was gone when I saw him.”
Anita Thompson does not know why Hunter Thompson chose the .45 from his vast collection of guns. But he was deft with his death. “He did not destroy his face,” Anita Thompson says. “He did it in his mouth. His face was beautiful. It was quick. It was not grisly or gruesome by any means. That’s probably why he took that gun. He spared us a gruesome scene.”
She adds: “His face did look calm and peaceful. He looked content. Like he wanted it.”
For Tuesday’s cremation, Anita Thompson dressed her husband. He was wearing a light blue, seersucker suit, a Tilly hat and his reading glasses, which he had on when he died. He had asked her to include a lock of her hair with him on this occasion. She complied, and more, cutting off her one-foot long blonde ponytail.
Anita Thompson is depending on mundane chores, but also family, friends and the estimated 50 messages a day.
“Being alone with Hunter in our bedroom, and I’ve been reading his letters to me,” she added. “They have a different charge now. He wrote the most beautiful love letters I have ever seen … I’m so lucky.”
Then there was the flag. Hunter Thompson is an Air Force veteran. And following protocol, according to Anita Thompson, a deputy coroner from neighboring Garfield County presented her with a U.S. flag. It now hangs on a storyboard in the kitchen area, normally used for Hunter Thompson’s works in progress. A white, silk scarf that the Dalai Lama presented to Hunter Thompson — the two men looked alike — drapes over the flag.
The house is filled to the brim with flowers — especially orchids, Hunter Thompson’s favorite.
“It’s nice in here,” says Anita Thompson. “He would like it. He does like it, I guess.”
Yes, Anita Thompson says, the landmark writer is nearby. “Mainly in moments when you’re quiet, you can feel him; it’s a different energy than when he was in his body,” she says. “It’s in the chest. It’s all encompassing, but just for a second. It’s beautiful.”
Hunter Thompson was huge on swimming for his exercise. But he was also known for his love of fine whiskey, and to put it far too mildly, for experimenting with most every intoxicant known to man.
“He loved his body, look what he did to it,” Anita Thompson jokes. She then adds a line that maybe even she fails, on its face, to grasp the significance of: “He gave his body everything it wanted.”
Comment by Anonymous Friday, Feb 25, 05 @ 10:38 am
To religious guy:
Imposing your beliefs onto Dr. Thompson or anyone other than yourself is what has become expected by you and those who follow the same religious philosphies. Save your breath, it’s unflattering to your righteous kind.
So, why not have your children look up to HST? The man embodies critical thought, a skill we all should use more often. If they’re smart (your children), and I trust you’ll ensure that, they will get from HST what is important and leave the rest as peripheral flair. After all, we do drugs because they make us feel good. Only simpletons base such behavior on the logic that “celebrity X does it’.
Comment by Campy Friday, Feb 25, 05 @ 11:53 am
Campy,
First of all, you are probably the FIRST person who EVER called me “religious guy.” Do I believe and pray to God, I sure do. Do I attend church, yes, a couple of times a month. But I am a far, far stretch from what you would call a “bible beater.” My friends would get a good laugh at hearing I was dubbed that.I do feel sorry for you if you don’t believe in God, but that’s your call.
Next, this is still a free country, “One Nation under God” and I didn’t force you to read my post. I am not asking you to “save your breath”, and I may find you “unflattering”, but feel free to continue to express your views. We are lucky we are able to do so.
Thompson is dead and I never met the guy, so I am miffed at how you think I am “imposing my beliefs on” him. The man committed suicide! Do you find that honorable? is that someone you want your kids to look up to? Just think about it, “OK honey, this is Hunter S. Thompson and he killed himself, but he was a great writer so I would love for you to be just like him.” If that’s what you want your kids to look up to, then be my guest, I really don’t care. But I will not put this man on a pedestal. That’s my opinion, if you don’t agree, that’s fine, more power to you.
I agree that “we do drugs because they make us feel good.” Celebrities don’t impress or influence me in the least. What’s your point?
Lastly, I want my children to be happy, confident, well-rounded people. If they are “smart”, great, but I would much rather raise children who have the common sense to identify the things in life that you can’t learn from books.
Comment by Anonymous Friday, Feb 25, 05 @ 4:05 pm
God has a reason for everything, so there is some larger reason behind Hunter Thompson killing himself than we realize. Besides, John 3:17 (NIV) says “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” If God truly hated us and wanted to send us all to “burn in hell,” I guarantee you, He could. There is something larger at work here that we can’t understand.
And, I agree with the above anon. poster. The guy regularly did drugs, had many problems (as is evident by his suicide), and isn’t really someone that should be looked up to as an example for one’s kids. There are a lot of other people who would better fit that role.
Comment by Drew Hibbard Saturday, Feb 26, 05 @ 10:22 am