Defending Dr. Gonzo. . .
(March 2, 2005)

        L.A. Times media columnist Tim Rutten wrote a long, considered appraisal of the late Hunter Thompson last week, in which he concluded that Thompson was not a journalist, but a "performance artist."
        Yes, and Christo is a writer.
        Perhaps Tim overstroked his big, bushy beard this time. Call me didactic, but I believe that those who comment on major news events in major publications still fall into a journalistic category known as "commentator." No matter the writing style.
        Given Rutten's assertion, one has to wonder: could it be that Tim, who is a writer of enviable erudition and clarity, didn't enjoy sharing a category with Thompson? Could it be that because Thompson made himself into a fabulously successful one-man writing circus, that Rutten felt sullied by association?
        Or could it be that he was just rising to the damnable columnist task of "saying something new?"
        Whatever the case, Rutten plainly objected to the widespread eulogizing of the late Dr. Gonzo, suggesting that "everybody take a deep, deep breath---or, in the spirit of the occasion, another hit (huh huh, see, that's hip inside druggie lingo, folks)---and get a grip."
        Get a grip? Um. . .why? The man died. He was prolific. He was enormously influential. He was widely read, and his work widely loved. Eulogies are not an occasion for restraint, last I checked. What's more, Thompson killed himself, which is something that doesn't usually inspire tap-dancing.
        So perhaps Tim is the guy who needs to take a hit here. On the other hand, his complaints are piffling compared with those of another highly highly paid journalist (as opposed to performance artist), one A.S. Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle.
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That's right, folks. A.S. Ross likened Thompson to a fake, a liar, a cheat. At least he stopped short of criminal.  (Unless you count his fashionably right-wing point that "much of his (drug) consumption was illegal.")
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        Ross, who rakes in a rumored $250,000 a year (!), had far greater trouble coming to terms with last week's effusive praise for Thompson from the likes of Tom Wolfe, Studs Terkel, Gay Talese. He fulminated in print over the fact that "so much worshipful ink been spilled on the occasion of a mere mortal's passing."
        Ross, who is probably also a mere mortal, isn't a writer by occupation, to be fair. Although I've heard him described as a "stooge" of Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein, I'll stick with his more conventional job definition: foreign and national editor. (For those readers unfamiliar with Bronstein, here's a resume: his marriage to actress Sharon Stone ended not long after a Komodo dragon tried to bite off his big toe at the L.A. Zoo.)
        Ross did a soft shoe in the ashes of Thompson's corpse in a Feb. 27 Chronicle piece headlined Gonzo king's brilliance had burned out; Hypocritical reverence for drug-fueled scribe. This Brit transplant must have tilted his head very, very far back when he typed, because he looks a long, long way down his nose.
        "Who cared that for years he had been a largely burned-out case," Ross wrote, "more of a circus act than a serious writer, reveling in adolescent stunts with firearms, alcohol, narcotics -- the predictable paraphernalia of the self-styled outlaw who wowed the chattering classes and other assorted rubes and poseurs long after his appeal had worn off for almost everybody else?"
        Gosh. Good thing Thompson died, or Ross would never have had occasion to make such degrading remarks. But. . .burned-out case? Circus act? Adolescent stunts? Predictable? Wowing the "chattering classes and other assorted rubes and poseurs?"          You'd think the man wound up working on a streetcorner with a troupe of trained chihuahuas, begging for change.
        Speaking as a rube, poseur, and longtime card-carrying member of the "chattering class" (whatever that exactly is), I must conclude that A.S. Ross considers himself to be an elevated, dignified, serious journalist who engages in careful statement to a discriminating audience and never, never chatters. Wonder why I've never heard of him before.
        Let's examine a few of his specific charges. First, I wouldn't mind being accused of adolescent stunts. That's really sort of enviable. I often wish I could engage in some of the adolescent stunts that once made my life so mirthful, before I was forced to impersonate an adult.
        Yes, Thompson was as predictable as Tuesdays. You always knew what you would get: unhinged comment, deep and informed perspective hiding in the beautifully deranged declamation, imagery that seemed to writhe and wriggle right off the page, keen intelligence, outrage that was both uproarious and disquieting.
        Circus act? I would not mind a bit being considered as entertaining and thrilling as a good circus act. That's an astounding feat of derring-do for someone hiding behind a computer in a shady room.
        Then there is Ross's accusation that 67-year-old Thompson was a burned-out case. Suffice to say that rare is the keyboard that keeps producing shockingly sharp prose under the weight of sixty and seventy-year-old fingers.
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Is Ross an astoundingly overpaid, pompous nobody embittered over laboring in journalistic obscurity for a mediocre newspaper?
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        Yet for a "burned-out case," Dr. Gonzo sure wrote a hell of a lot of books---far more than A.S. Ross, certainly---including one just last year, "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, The Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness." And workaholic Thompson's final article, written for ESPN only days before his death, was a farcical sketch about a new sport called "shotgun golf," in which points are scored for blasting an opponent's ball out of the sky. I'd have enjoyed authoring something as droll and wacked. (If he had help with it from Bill Murray, as reported, well, hey Bill, help me.)
        Ross implied that the shotgun golf article was silly and unworthy of Thompson (apparently he is the one to decide such matters) and went on to suggest that not only was Thompson a bad boy because he enjoyed drugs (you know, like George W. Bush and Al Gore) but---and here is where the commentary veered into fantasyland---Hunter T. was engaged in "pretend journalism" on par with New York Times con-artist Jayson Blair!
        Fore! Boom.
        That's right, folks. A.S. Ross likened Thompson to a fake, a liar, a cheat. At least he stopped short of criminal. (Unless you count his fashionably right-wing point that "much of his (drug) consumption was illegal.")
        Well, I hate to be pedantic again, after having chided Rutten for saying Thompson was not a journalist. But likening the man to Jayson Blair, a con-artist sociopathic punk who deliberately defrauded the nation's most credible newspaper, makes me wonder if perhaps A.S. hadn't been into the peyote.
        What this grand foreign and national editor seems to have forgotten is the simple distinction between commentary and newswriting. This is something that used to be taught in your first semester of journalism school, if not by high school journalism advisors. Yet it is apparently foreign info to the foreign editor.
        So let me help you, A.S.: Thompson engaged in commentary, and Blair in newswriting. I've never encountered another rube or poseur or a single member of the chattering class who thought that Thompson's hallucinogenically satirical, hyperbolic, madcap, profanity-ridden commentary was meant to be taken as newswriting. Neither Thompson nor his publications ever tried to pass it off as such. Blair deliberately passed off fiction as fact in the NYT's news section.
        All of this leads to several possible conclusions. Is Ross an astoundingly overpaid, pompous nobody embittered over laboring in journalistic obscurity for a mediocre newspaper? Does he feel that his profanity-free prose merits far more than an hallucinatory $250,000 a year---something along the lines of a Thompson paycheck, perhaps? Or is he just a sad soul who has tragically lost the ability to appreciate humorous, even wildly nutball, journalistic commentary? Being a foreign and national editor certainly isn't as much fun as writing about shotgun golf, that's for sure. Maybe he's taken in too much territory.
        Well, given that Chronicle editor Bronstein once issued an insanely fascistic memo warning Chronicle employees against using sarcasm in conversation (!), one suspects that Ross might have indeed gotten his seriousness all confused and balled up with humorlessness.
        Disparaging a dead man in print is not the best place to make such a mistake.
        I'd say that A.S. has just earned himself an extra "S."

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