I was saddened, but not surprised, by the suicide on Sunday of Hunter S. Thompson. You can only play around with rum, hard drugs and guns for so long before the logic of that catches up with you. And Thompson, like Richard Brautigan, clearly bought into the Hemingway myth. Hemingway’s father Clarence committed suicide in 1928, the same year Farewell to Arms was published. His son the novelist died in 1961. Brautigan shot himself in 1984. Ernest’s oldest granddaughter Margaux committed suicide in 1996, tho at least she took pills. Who says this isn’t contagious?

 

I was never a big fan of Thompson’s writing. It struck me as too undisciplined, the wrong lesson to have taken from the work & life of William S. Burroughs, Thompson’s other obvious source of inspiration. Yet I felt that Thompson, more than any other single individual, was responsible for Jimmy Carter becoming president in 1976. Thompson was covering the campaign for Rolling Stone back when Rolling Stone still mattered. It was obvious that Thompson felt that all the other Democratic candidates were professional weasels, or worse. And yet here was this one-term Georgia governor who seemed to be the squarest human being on the face of the planet. That was the person who struck Thompson as an honest human being. Thompson’s reporting catapulted Carter into becoming something like the Howard Dean of his day in an era when the combination of “early capital” and cable news didn’t exist to overwhelm any outsider candidacy the instant the candidate made one mistake. What a weird model of Diogenes Thompson made.

 

In 1979, one of my two best friends, Elliot Helfer, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. I recall at the time being struck at the emotional devastation his death left in its wake, on his wife & mother & friends. The idea that this was a victimless crime, a concept that was sometimes bandied about in the media, was patently a joke. Since then, I’ve had too many other occasions to relearn that same lesson.

 

I’ve noted here before, tho maybe only in the Squawkbox tool, that I think depression is the most under-diagnosed & untreated disease in America. This in spite of all the pills that the pharmaceutical industry throws at the problem, now augmented with ever so much television advertising. I still think that. I think we’re going about it entirely the wrong way. And this is the result.