Hunter Thompson Dead

[Delirium]

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~53~2723492,00.html

Gunshot wound to the head, ouch. Sorry if this was posted already. I just saw it and was in shock and figured Stanley would have posted but i didnt see it in my quick run by. Its amazing to me a published author with other documented proof of greatness could fall into the pit of depression.

[Apotheosis]

It's unfortunate, but he said that his biggest thing was proving the death of the american dream, I think I can understand what he was thinking..

On a side note, a friend of mine who's been working in medical billing for years has recently seen an increase in the amount of people committing suicide 15 - 25.... (is it possible to get this information as a medical biller?)

hmmmmmmm...........time to create an american culture post?

[Electrawn]

Probably considering that more than half of all bankruptcies are because of medical bills...I can draw a correlation?

-Elec

Who?

[peam]

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. "

RIP.

[Asha]

For a while , I based my entire life on this guys.
Bless you Mr Thompson. Sleep well.

[StrayRogue]

Originally posted by RangerD1
Who?

Learn to read more books other than Bingo and the Magic ball and you might find out.

This is a fucking shame, even if his last few books were cast into the sea of mediocrity.

[Edited on 21-2-05 by StrayRogue]

Eh, the guy had skills for sure. He was one of the greats, but to base your life around his books? Hrmm...

- Arkans

[Asha]

You obviously missed the part where I said I based my life on his life.
Not books.

Although since Hitler died before your time . .
What do you base your life on?

[Asha]

:heart:

Just because somebody dies before you time does not mean you can't base your life on them.

- Arkans

[Asha]

Well if it's a nazi . . It kinda does.

:whistle:

anyhow. great guy dead = tragedy , either way.

I agree. Not my favorite writer, but it is a shame. Sucks that he had to take the way out that he did.

- Arkans

[Warriorbird]

Sucks. He wrote some great stuff. His book on Hell's Angels saved a research paper of mine completely at one point. The gonzo style has always been an inspiration.

Learn to read more books other than Bingo and the Magic ball and you might find out.

^


Lol okay. I'm currently reading creation by gore vidal. Sorry I don't keep on whatever it is you think is good.

[OreoElf]

Some people have always been inspirational.... Better to burn out than to fade away?

Perhaps not... He will be missed.:bye:

[Warriorbird]

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=thompson/050216

His last article.

[xtc]

Originally posted by RangerD1
Learn to read more books other than Bingo and the Magic ball and you might find out.

^


Lol okay. I'm currently reading creation by gore vidal. Sorry I don't keep on whatever it is you think is good.

Is someone helping you with the big words?

[StrayRogue]

He has the pop-up edition.

[Warriorbird]

Gore Vidal loves himself far too much. Hunter S. Thompson loved himself far too much and was actually entertaining.

[SnatchWrangler]

Originally posted by Arkans
I agree. Not my favorite writer, but it is a shame. Sucks that he had to take the way out that he did.

- Arkans

I have a feeling it had alot to do with his ailing health. He seemed to be in pretty bad shape for a few years now. Maybe he got sick of being constantly in pain. Who knows...it could have been peyote induced. I'm kinda suprised he didn't leave some big, long, insane goodbye letter.

[peam]

I'll just assume the final rambling hasn't been found.

[Warriorbird]

The only reason he was still alive at 65 was the megadoses of vitamins he'd always take while and after he did drugs, according to him a couple years back.

[SpunGirl]

Suicide is for sissies.

-K

[peam]

In certain cases.

If I was going out with ascending bowel cancer or something similar in the painful factor, I'd probably dance with the ol' Mossberg too.

[Warriorbird]

Yeah. My great uncle shot himself. Cancer was making his face melt and moving onto his brain.

At first I was sort've horrified. He had a thriving business and a wife that loved him. Then I concluded I really didn't blame him.

[SpunGirl]

If you need to quit life because of something like an incredibly painful terminal illness, I would agree with a person's right to do so. However, there are lots of ways to kill yourself, and letting your friends and/or family find you with the back blown out of your head isn't very nice. I had two friends that killed themselves in high school. It was an incredibly stupid, selfish, and cowardly thing to do.

-K

[peam]

I think shotgun to the head is more of a given to kill than the alternatives.

Hanging, OD, intentional car crash, slit wrists, attempted asphyxiation, etc. aren't guaranteed to kill in the same way a scatter of 12 gauge is, and a few could leave the person in a state of life more deteriorated than their previous.

[SpunGirl]

I actually read something that said men will statistically choose "more fatal" methods of suicide (jumping off of a building, shooting self) more often than women will. I can see the not wanting to fail bit, but I guess I would be more concerned about upsetting the people who would find me.

-K

If someone wants to snuff it go ahead. Not like I'm going to respect them for it. Do us all a favor and pull the trigger or get help.

- Arkans

Is someone helping you with the big words?

^

ooooh. You got me.

[Prestius]

=============================

HE WAS A CROOK
by Hunter S. Thompson


MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK
DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF
AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD
HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the
great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils,
and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and
hateful bird."


---Revelation 18:2


Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real
thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very
dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back
at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of
his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who
pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil
fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told
more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go
to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."


I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but
I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have
already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for
it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable,
and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends
have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son
hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.


Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too,
am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's
gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was
politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could
always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no
need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting
instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over
on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and
lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it
is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a
beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the
enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.


That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a
lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why
God made dachshunds.


Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of
his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William
F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.


These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate
family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style,
the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in cnvas
sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles
off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the
corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable
form.


The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the
potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed
burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of
the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions
to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their
hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable --
some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas
corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay
off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and
duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have
somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to
fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.


It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-
stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his
casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals
that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine
of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked
that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every
morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest
way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.


These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President
Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written
worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that
I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a
mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it.
He was scum.


Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard
Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe
in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was
utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.
Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest
historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to
get back on the ship.


It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American
people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts
that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and
permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about
another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place,
which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a
graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of
values."


Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was
nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president
sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons.
It was Nixon's last war, and he won.


The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly
dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The
Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was
billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996
GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete
Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll
numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who
somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a
shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the
end of it.


Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP
front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an
Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-
elected as governor of California in November.


The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry
Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous
revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day
with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as
even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike
accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger,
who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new
book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great
minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.


Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to
see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed
to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he
has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed
arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other
Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor
Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of
an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the
20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon
in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar
from Duke University.


It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he
was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston
Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who
bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army
lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his
death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested
the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops
from the National Guard.


Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for
Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It
was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that
allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He
looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight
unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that
he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You
had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of
recognition was often painful.


Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice
presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had
come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog
Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio
or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican
newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real
in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-
headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his
cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard
those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the
mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car
salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14
years that Nixon lost an election.


When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a
smart young man on the rise -- a hubris-crazed monster from the
bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an
overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run
for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of
his friends.


Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and
they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972
that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone
with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or
the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in
Washington.


Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how
Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It
permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at
Gettysburg.


For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of
Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an
unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in
hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and
fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap
and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by
Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right
in front of our eyes on TV.


That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished
attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a
textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon
walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what
Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after all, the President of the
United States.


Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was
why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years
after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does
it, it can't be illegal."


Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out,
knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was
Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he
was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the
White House.


Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the
night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S.
District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery
and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-
tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf
and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon
again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him
Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological
Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they
die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.


Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and
Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates
worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men
Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.


It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his
crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it
would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class
hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak
spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and
Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.


Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger
and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to
know about the Age of Nixon.


Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether
you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or
Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your
fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and
his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not
a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon
was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.


He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a
classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also
shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on
his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency
of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased
cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.


Copyright © 1994 by Hunter S. Thompson. All rights reserved. Used
by
permission.
Originally published in Rolling Stone, June 16, 1994.

[Prestius]

Jesus Hated Bald Pussy
By Hunter S. Thompson
From "Kingdom Of Fear "
2003


Let's face it, the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He
is a dunce. He does what he is told to do, says what he is told to
say, poses the way he is told to pose. He is a fool.


No. Nonsense. The president cannot be a Fool. Not at this moment in
time, when the last living vestiges of the American Dream are on the
line. This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the
White House.


Which is, after all, our house. That is our headquarters, it is
where the heart of America lives. So if the president lies and acts
giddy about other people's lives, if he wantonly and stupidly
endorses mass murder by definition, a loud and meaningless animal
with no functional intelligence and no balls.


To say this goofy child president is looking more and more like
Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to
Nixon.


Whoops! Did I say that? Is it even vaguely possible that some New
Age Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make
Richard Nixon look like a Liberal?


The capacity of these vicious assholes we elected to be in charge of
our lives for four years to commit terminal damage to our lives and
our souls and our loved ones is far beyond Nixon's. Shit! Nixon was
the creator of many of the once-proud historical landmarks that
these dumb bastards are savagely destroying now: the Clean Air Act
of 1970; Campaign Finance Reform; the endangered species act; a Real-
Politik dialogue with China; and on and on.


The prevailing quality of life in America-by any accepted methods of
measuring-was inarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon
than it is today in this evil year of our Lord 2002.


The Boss was a certified monster who deserved to be impeached and
banished. He was a truthless creature of former FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover, a foul human monument to corruption and depravity on a
scale that dwarfs any other public official in American history. But
Nixon was at least smart enough to understand why so many honorable
patriotic U.S. citizens despised him. He was a Liar. The truth was
not in him.


Nixon believed, as he said many times, that if the president of the
United States does it, it can't be illegal. But Nixon never
understood the much higher and meaner truth of Bob Dylan's warning
that "To live outside the law you must be honest."


The difference between an outlaw and a war criminal is the
difference between a pedophile and a Pederast: The pedophile is a
person who thinks about sexual behavior with children, and the
Pederast does these things. He lays hands on innocent children, he
penetrates them and changes their lives forever.


Being the object of a pedophile's warped affections is a Routine
feature of growing up in America, and being a victim of a Pederast's
crazed "love" is part of dying. Innocence is no longer an option.
Once penetrated, the child becomes a Queer in his own mind, and that
is not much different than murder.


Richard Nixon crossed the line when he began murdering foreigners in
the name of "family values"- and George Bush crossed it when he
sneaked into office and began killing brown skinned children in the
name of Jesus and the American people.


When Muhammad Ali declined to be drafted and forced to kill "gooks"
in Vietnam he said, "I ain't got nothin' against them Viet Cong. No
Cong ever called me Nigger." I agreed with him, according to my own
personal ethics and values. He was right.


If we all had a dash of Muhammad Ali's eloquent courage, this
country and the world would be a better place today because of it.
Okay. That's it for now. Read it and weep....See you tomorrow,
folks. You haven't heard the last of me. I am the one who speaks for
the spitit of freedom and decency in you. Shit. Somebody has to do
it. We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world-a
nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live
peacefully. We are not just Whores for power and oil, but killer
whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that
is how history will judge us... No redeeming social value. Just
whores. Get out of our way, or we'll kill you.


Well, shit on that dumbness. George W. Bush does not speak for me or
my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this
world. We didn't vote for these cheap, greedy little killers who
speak for America today- and we will not vote for them again in
2002. Or 2004. Or ever.


Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be
happy and proud of having all this innocent blood on our hands? Who
are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and
fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush? They are the
same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to
kill "gooks". They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and
vicious in the American character. They are racists and hate mongers
among us-they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these
Nazis. And I am too old to worry about whether they like it or not.
Fuck them.

[Delirium]

I think statistically using a gun has the highest success rate for suicide. Failing to execute a plan is a huge mess. Locked against your will in the psych ward of a hospital is a nightmare, trust me. At least in my town they also make you jump thru a bunch of pyschology hoops thinking adding more stress to your life will make things better. Its pretty important to be successful your first try or two or the mental health staff will be on you like white on rice. I think i read somewhere like only 2% of the OD suicide attempts are completed. So while it may be prettier for the family the odds are WAY against you. Plus the old method of CO poisoning by leaving your car on in a garage with a hose has been nerfed by those enviromental people :) Darn cars run to clean these days. Anyway thats my two cents on the subject.

[Back]

Thompson wrote a suicide note.

"Football Season Is Over (http://www.news24.com/News24/Entertainment/Abroad/0,,2-1225-1243_1767821,00.html)"

"No More Games. No More bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax This won't hurt."

[Edited on 9-9-2005 by Backlash]