February 22, 2005

Here's Stephen Schwartz's excellent take on the final meaning of Hunter S. Thompson's suicide (As ever, read it all, but here are some highlights):
The End of the Counter-Culture

THE SUICIDE of Hunter S. Thompson, aged 65, according to the New York Times, or 67, according to the Washington Post, at his home in Aspen, may definitively mark the conclusion of the chaotic "baby-boomer" rebellion that began in the 1950s and crested in the 1960s, and which was dignified with the title of "the counter-culture."

"Counter" it was, as an expression of defiance toward everything normal and reliable in society. "Culture" it was not, any more than Thompson's incoherent scribblings constituted, as they were so often indulgently described, a form of journalism.
[...]...He [Thompson] may well have understood that the drugs, gunfire, motorcycle mishaps, public rantings, and widespread adulation in which he was immersed were evanescent, and that his books were too thin to keep his memory alive for very long.

One must imagine that in his own middle '60s Hunter Thompson looked into the mirror and saw that nobody needed a gonzo interpretation of the world after September 11, that nobody was amused by his capacity to survive fatal doses of sinister concoctions, and that, increasingly, nobody knew or cared who he was.

He was flattered to be described as chronicler of "the death of the American dream." In reality, he described a nightmare from which America awoke years ago.

This makes the second "artist" this week who died whose work's theme was the "death of the American dream," the other being Arthur Miller.
(There's a message there, when the dream lives on well into the future and these bitter cynics don't.)
For Miller, the dream died when he couldn't make his marriage to Marilyn Monroe work.
For Thompson, this is what happens when one's idea of the American dream is to abuse drugs and alcohol and to go through life with untreated mental illness and depression.
(Note that neither man was failed by the American dream in terms of money, success and fame.)
Poor Hunter--he was probably very bright, but very disturbed.
It must finally have been "weird" enough for him...
All I'll remember is his virulent hatred of President Bush in the last few years and for those who support Bush's vision, like me.
Guess I'm not cool, after all.
As for Miller's demise, no-one sums up what the playwright's contributions ultimately meant and makes it so killingly funny as Mark Steyn:
Ballyhooed 'Crucible' was way out in left field

That, by the way, would be a better name for his Centre for the Advancement of American Studies: the Arthur Miller Sad Hollow Center of the American Dream. But that's why attention's paid: The author of "The Crucible'' gave the American left its enduring metaphor for the McCarthy era -- the witch hunts -- and, indeed, for the post-9/11 Bush-Ashcroft reign of terror, and for terrors yet to come. It's the all-purpose portable metaphor for anti-Americanism.
[...]
Miller was the most useful of the useful idiots. It was a marvelous inspiration to recast the communist "hysteria" of the 1950s as the Salem witch trials of the 1690s. Many people have pointed out the obvious flaw with ''The Crucible'' -- that there were no witches, whereas there were certainly communists....[...]His genius was to give his fellow lefties what's become their most cherished article of faith -- that any kind of urgent national defense is, by definition, paranoid and hysterical. It was untrue in the '50s, and it's untrue today. Indeed, the hysteria about hysteria -- the ''criminalization'' of ''dissent'' -- is far more hysterical than the hysteria about Reds.

'The Crucible'' will survive because it's the modular furniture of left-wing agitprop: Whatever the cause du jour, you can attach it to, and it functions no better or worse than to anything else, mainly because it's perfectly pitched to the narcissism of the left. But I'd happily have a bet with David Thacker that in 20 years even the subsidized British theater will have given up on its favorite heavy-handed doctrinaire American leftist. And round about 2020 the Arthur Miller Centre will be running a week of lectures headlined, ''Why Is Attention Not Being Paid?''

I'm sorry, but I thought this was hysterically funny and spot on...!
(I can remember suffering through a performance of Miller's excruciatingly auto-biographical "Under Milkwood" years ago and I want revenge!)