Beitzel: Thompson dead, but Freak Power can live

Hunter S. Thompson would have been 72 this month if he hadn’t shot himself in the face four… Hunter S. Thompson would have been 72 this month if he hadn’t shot himself in the face four years ago. On a piece of paper, he scribbled, “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.” Then came the gunshot.

With that, the United States’ premier rebel made his exit. In his life, work and toils, Thompson searched for truth through defiance — still an important virtue, but with new meaning in our “post-Sept. 11 world” — a dubious rhetorical device, as it allows an infinite time span for fear and subordination until an even greater tragedy supplants it.

So what does rebellion mean today? Hint: certainly not shrieking along to the newest Taking Back Sunday album tucked in the safety of your automobile. Thompson’s life presents some guidance.

It’s a common mistake to reduce the Good Doctor to some drug-addled cadaver whose only remaining relevance is to drug-addled larvae. If he was merely some burnout who could write, then Muhammad Ali was just some dude who could box.

Rather, Thompson was an anti-authoritarian of the first order. Along with all of his lionized drug use and mischief was a mission to unite the world with the weird. He was the King of Freaks and the Bane of Squares, refusing to assimilate. It was a popular and lucrative character only afforded to artists — a caricature to which he was sometimes beholden and pigeon-holed — but he represented it without apology. And, he only ascended to that mutant celebrity status after years of infrequent work and failure, including a discharge from the Air Force for an insubordinate attitude.

Forthcoming graduates, take note. You are about to enter a world where conformity is king. The message is: “Get the job done, that’s all that matters. While you’re on the clock, there is no You.” Yet, Thompson proved that you don’t have to choose between oppressed conformity and rejected minority. With ardor, misfits can thrive, and the counterculture can become the new culture.

“In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile,” he wrote. Either stick your maw in the trough or change the leaders. In 1970, when Thompson despised the attempts to exploit and commercialize his then-hometown of Aspen, he ran for sheriff on the Freak Power ticket. He supported decriminalizing drugs, tearing up paved roads to make grassy areas, demolishing buildings that obscured the view of mountains, and renaming Aspen “Fat City” to deter tourism. To satirize political attacks against hippies, Thompson shaved his head and referred to his Republican rival (who wore a crew-cut) as “my long-haired opponent.”

By any traditional metric, he should have lost in a landslide. But Thompson’s strength was the destruction of the traditional. He carried the town of Aspen, Colo., but eventually lost countywide after the Democratic and Republican candidates made a deal to congress the terrified, whimpering anti-Thompsonites. The rubes had their way — but only by 400 votes.

However, Thompson showed that counterculture can be influential if its members involve themselves. You need not fear the government as a merciless, detached entity, nor must you bend to the social norms of the Cleavers. If you believe in a lifestyle, advocate it and don’t be ashamed —‚ Thompson said, “The only compromise I made on the platform was that I agreed the deputies would not be allowed to eat mescaline while on duty.”

It would be difficult to find someone today, even among university students, willing to risk public ridicule and the sacrosanct “job security” to consistently stand for such provocative ideals. While movies and other media depict college life as free from inhibition, that often isn’t the case, at least not in the public sphere.

Don’t post that online, don’t challenge the police and, for God’s sake, man, don’t dance if you’re sober. A prospective employer might see you. Just tune yourself with pills and booze. Keep to the shadows, stay in line and convince yourself you’re rebelling.

This is a terrible and dangerous mindset. It encourages sublimation from a sedated mass. Meanwhile, The Truth is getting strangled by Rupert Murdoch in a greasy alley somewhere. Without Thompson to articulate their evil, goons like this could stomp on the head of a puppy and get away with an apology issued through their press agents. If it were Dick Cheney, the puppy would bark the apology. When the time comes, who will write George W. Bush’s malignant obituary with the same venom Thompson wrote Nixon’s?

The moral is to change the system around you. Defend your ideals and let your freak flag fly. We’re all degenerates in some way. Systems like corporation and government are just made up of people, they’re not autonomous creatures. Some are even sympathetic — Thompson would have never gotten published otherwise.

His suicide reminded us that even the grittiest among us spiral toward our own mortality. So indulge in fun and games while you can. Don’t hold back for the future, because for all of us, the future doesn’t exist forever.

Famous for ignoring deadlines, Thompson even missed his final deadline by 17 years. Eventually, though, his dark plan to die by his own hand overtook him.

He was “getting Greedy,” as he wrote, but even across a wildly self-indulgent life, Thompson served on the advisory board for the National Organization for Reforming Marijuana Laws and championed Second Amendment rights as an NRA member. He created the Hunter S. Thompson Foundation to help release wrongly imprisoned convicts, and co-founded the Fourth Amendment Foundation. He was the perfect monster: an amalgamation of activism and egotism, social liberalism and fierce conservative individualism.

After all that, Thompson had finally found something he searched for his whole life: The Edge. He wrote, “There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others — the living — are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.”

After 67 years, Thompson chose Later, but his spirit can carry on. Happy birthday, you old buzzard. Unlike you, Freak Power might not be dead just yet. There are plenty of upcoming elections, including one for Student Government Board president, if any freak has the mettle. Mahalo.

E-mail Dave at drb34@pitt.edu.