The Comment Factory

“Politics is like the guinea worm,” Hunter S. Thompson once wrote for Rolling Stone, “it sneaks into your body and grows like a cyst from within.” This kind of internal affliction can be a life-long health risk, particularly when coupled with a compulsion for writing; a habit “worse than heroin” in an industry “full of drunks and misfits and failures.”

When the occupation becomes the occupational hazard, the dangers include — but are not limited to — “death, depravity, incarceration… and of course those bastard editors.” If a writer can avoid all four as far as possible, his task becomes to report the truth. Not the truth in a conventional sense, but in a more slippery, Jamesian sense in which writing can only ever be compared to its own concrete standards of validity, to the “confusing contexts of whatever reality surrounded the act of writing.”

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Becoming submerged in these realities also involves taking risks style-wise. It provides an antidote to more conventional, dispassionate reportage which, as journalist Michael Shapiro has said, tends to produce pieces with “a dullness, a numbing predictability, a growing sense of stories crafted less with a desire for greatness than with an eye for avoiding mistakes.” This isn’t to say that facts are thrown aside, only that they are acknowledged as existing as an incomplete part of a larger, more meaningful picture.

Thompson believed that the lean towards Objective Journalism was a strong contributing factor to the continued corruption of American politics, and the phrase itself a “pompous contradiction in terms.” As a result he wrote it like he saw it: Nixon was a “swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president”, Hubert Humphrey a “shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack”, George Bush a “golem-like goofy child president”, and those who voted for him “flag-sucking half-wits.”

In essence, he wrote with his heart as well as his head. His scathing farewell to Nixon, entitled “He was a Crook” is the only obituary to really accurately sum up the man’s aborted presidency. His retrospective on the 1960’s is also one of the most lyrical and hopeful passages of reportage to have been written from the hangover of the early 70’s. Until his suicide in 2005, Thompson wrote eloquently, passionately and often angrily about political issues ranging from his local bi-elections to the occupation of Palestine to the nocturnal habits of George W. Bush.

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There’s a lot of hype surrounding the man himself. Curtis Robinson, a former editor at the Aspen Daily News, has likened him to the Dalai Lama. On recounting interviews with him, journalists have often given more page space to his already notorious drink and drug appetite than to his professional work. Thompson himself was also an eager self-publicist, sketching himself as a trouble maker (“I was a juvenile delinquent… I bit a woman on the back”), a waster (“I was drunk at all times. People trembled and cursed when I came into a public room and started screaming in German”) and even an ambassador of fate (“I consider myself a road man for the lords of karma”).

Sadly, the image has somewhat overshadowed the writing. And you can find fault with that too: most of his commentary on political figures quickly dissolves into caricature, many of his arguments are structureless or illogical, and all of it is completely one-sided.

But what it does show is a writer deeply involved with and curious about the world, and willing to take risks to express how he felt about it. His books and articles deserve to be read for this, and also for their insistence that when faced with journalistic conventions that might require the writer to dumb down or leave unexpressed elements he feels are important, the best thing to do is to abandon them altogether; to “shred the fuckers up and start over.”