Freak Out! 'The Weekly Standard' Looks at Hunter S. Thompson
Last week, Stephen Schwartz took a look at Hunter S. Thompson in The Weekly Standard, Rupert Murdoch's proudly unfair and unbalanced journal of opinion. Predictably, he didn't like what he saw.
Schwartz, whom you might know as "a vociferous critic of Wahhabism" (seriously, we think it's on his business cards), doesn't so much offer an obituary. Instead, he tosses fists full of dirt on Thompson's grave then pisses on it. (Before you write to remind us that Thompson requested to be cremated and shot out of a cannon, we're using, like, a metaphor.)
Here's what Schwartz had to say:
When a major representative of any dramatic period in history dies, it is tempting to proclaim the end of an epoch, but the lonely death of Thompson—he shot himself in his kitchen—seems more emblematic than any other associated with the '60s. The incident might even have been accidental, brought on by one of Thompson's self-storied flings into the ingestion of garbage drugs. Who knows?
[...]
Indeed, it would be one thing to say that Thompson and the others like him, such as Burroughs and Ginsberg, are dated. Even embarrassingly old-fashioned artistic works, bereft of immediacy for those who are not part of the environment from which they emerged, have the capacity for revival. But Thompson produced a clamor without content. Doubtlessly, the most pathetic aspect of the '60s phenomenon was the absolute conviction of Thompson and those who encouraged him that "living in the moment" really did count more than anything else in the world, that history never existed and that the future was their property.
Yeah! Fuck the sixties, man! Damn hippies and their garbage drugs! Who needs 'em, right?
But reading the above, ArtsJournal blogger Jan Herman found himself tripping down psychedelic memory lane to Summer of Love era San Fran, a time of incense, peppermints, and a very different Stephen Schwartz:
Well, Schwartz must still be having nightmares. I remember him as a teenage freak who used to come into the City Lights Bookstore in 1966 and '67, spouting Surrealist doctrine and declaring himself the San Francisco incarnation of a Surrealist movement that didn't exist. His freakishness consisted of a three-piece suit, not some hippie garb, the intense babble of an academic proselyte and a self-regard bordering on the autistic. (He eventually converted to Sufism.) He was wrong then. He's wrong now. And my bet is he'll always be wrong.
Maybe Schwartz's business cards should say that instead?
Also, clearly not everyone at The Standard hates Thompson. How else to explain how Senior Writer Matt LaBash shamelessly rips off the Doctor's shtick?
The End of the Counter-Culture [Weekly Standard]
NOTES FROM THE SURFACE [ArtsJournal]
