Today was my birthday, so I've spent a mostly leisurely day relaxing at my club, swimming in the pool and enjoying an almost perfect Brasilian day, then a nice meal at a great steak restaurant and finally I sit to check my email once more and post some thoughts.
The first thing and the last thing I do each day is to check Internet mail and have a quick look at the most recent news on My.Yahoo. All day I kept remembering that HST was dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gun shot wound, which doesn't sound surprising. Never the less I think it's a loss. His writing had an effect on me and I know that his "fear and loathing" type lifestyle was very common in my generation. Adios Dr. Hunter, you'll be remembered.
Hunter S. Thompson helped inform many people that American Politics were corrupt and to this regard, far too many people lived in fear from what they were told by media-spin and with not enough loathing of the people who were vying for the power. Right up until the end HST was trying to remind all of us to see through the rhetoric.
My favorite HST quote;
"when the going gets weird, the weird turn Pro" HST
During some years is was hard to find anything written by Hunter S. Thompson but then his name would appear on the cover of either Playboy or more ofter Rolling Stone Magazine. Here is an excerpt from RS about the infamous Hunter S. Thompson;
His first book, Hell's Angels, published in 1966, was an inside look at the notorious biker gang. For his efforts, Thompson got himself roughed up by some of the gang's members. From then on, however, it was Thompson who did the roughing up, with words that he wielded like weapons. His political coverage was famously irreverent, often to the brink of viciousness. In a recent piece for Rolling Stone on the 2004 presidential campaign, he called George Bush a "treacherous little freak." To Thompson -- who once threatened to run for the presidency himself and narrowly lost an election in 1970 for sheriff of the Aspen area, running on the Freak Power Party ticket -- politics was a blood sport, and American politicians, so prone to corruption, were only too deserving of contempt. Observing President Bush's poor performance in a debate with "my man" John Kerry, he wrote for the magazine, "I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him 'Mister President,' and then I felt ashamed."
