February 22, 2005
Steve Gilliard : Bloggers are the spawns of Hunter S. Thompson. Thanks Dad!
by Liza Sabater
MSNBC - Writer Hunter S. Thompson commits suicide
When I read the headline about HST taking his life, I did not blink. I have never read HST's books but I have caught his articles at Rolling Stone once in a while and have read so much about him that it did not shock me he did so. Suicide is all about power, not powerlessness. It is the ultimate act of assertion of one's will. Suicide says "I control my life, I control my destiny"; and Hunter S. Thompson, through his writing and his flamboyant life was one who always asserted his individuality.
I did not post about Thompson's passing earlier because I did not know what to say. I will leave that to Steve Gilliard, one of my daily must reads. Steve has written an amazing homage to the quintessential "fore-father" of the blogosphere. Here is a taste of the obit but, please, go read the whole thing.
Steve Gilliard's News Blog : Outlaw journalism and the blogs
Notice the trivial nature of these books. Their self-absorption and lack of interest in the wider world. It is masturbation in print for the most part, and irrelevant. You would hardly know that men are hunting men in the mountains of Afghanistan and dodging roadside bombs in Iraq. The world of the vital has escaped our fiction, to be replaced by the world of the trivial and self-involved. Why? Because that is what drives the writing program, those who write well about themselves, but without the real introspection needed to be honest. The Naked and the Dead is a savage tale of men at war, Catch 22 lacking in any kind of larger heroism. These were not tales which made the authors heroic, but exposed their foibles and their fears. What is usually missing from the description of these modern novels is the condescension the authors feel for their subjects. These books are about revenge on imperfect lives, the failures of their parents and those around them. There is no honesty in them, because the honesty is bred out of them.
Their template is the Catcher in the Rye, but lacks the brutal self-analysis JD Salinger brought to it. But then, like his peers, his anger was driven by the war he had fought. These program-raised authors are angry because their lives were imperfect. They have never missed a meal, felt fear at seeing the police, much less rode in a truck past a bomb. They are angry at the safety and comfort of their lives.
So when you need a brutal, honest fiction to deal with lives in Bush's America, and it's contradictions, you get bitter drivel. Or you get the 'sploitation novels which is best-selling black fiction. They aren't exploitation, because most are barely literate. 'Sploitation plays off the fictional criminal world created by studio gangsters and rim-tricked out cars. It's as self-indulgent and masturbatory as the lamest writing program fiction. Just written without a spell checker and sold in the street next to Message for the Black Man and the Autobiography of Malcolm X. The glorification of criminal life is nothing new, but it isn't reality either.
The outlets to discuss American life are now closed off because one group is afraid and the other indifferent.
Which is why blogs are so popular. There is no other outlet to explain the contradictions in American life cleanly and clearly. The outcasts are more unwelcome now than ever in newsrooms battered by greedy owners and vindictive politics, fiction created to explain the anger at middle class suburbia. Honesty and truth have no place in either forum.
Which is why Hunter Thompson was a hero. He was honest to a fault and mean to a fault. In a world where journalism has become about asking questions politely and fiction about settling grudges with parents and schoolmates, he was about something far more important.
Blogs follow in the tradition of outlaw journalism, but without the flourishes he liked. It's not about just being outrageous, most of the bloggers are little different than their peers in newspapers, clean living young men and women. They don't get drunk and naked for fun, they pay their bills, stay faithful and maybe have a beer too many. However, it is the spirit of what Thompson meant, to be outside the laws of journalism, not the rules, but the laws. The laws of not offending advertisers and friendly pols. The laws of family friendly copy. Those laws. Not the rules about honesty and decency.
Posted by Liza Sabater in Blogs, Culture, Journalism, Literature, Obituary, Politics, Pop Culture
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