I find this by Stephen Schwartz in The Weekly Standard especially tasteless and lacking in class -- even for a Republican. And that's saying a lot.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/274xgjeb.asp< snip >
Indeed, it would be one thing to say that Thompson and the others like him, such as Burroughs and Ginsberg, are dated. Even embarrassingly old-fashioned artistic works, bereft of immediacy for those who are not part of the environment from which they emerged, have the capacity for revival. But Thompson produced a clamor without content. Doubtlessly, the most pathetic aspect of the '60s phenomenon was the absolute conviction of Thompson and those who encouraged him that "living in the moment" really did count more than anything else in the world, that history never existed and that the future was their property.
His enablers included lefty journalist Warren Hinckle III, who first published Thompson's experiments in incoherent "reportage" in a forgotten magazine called Scanlan's, and pop huckster Jann S. Wenner, the grand ayatollah of Rolling Stone, a tabloid which began as a pop music paper, then tried to make itself over as a serious journal, and is now read by . . . who? For some commentators, the greatest compliment paid to Thompson was the incorporation of a dishonest, heartless figure modeled on him, and named Uncle Duke (after Raoul Duke, the narrator of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) into Doonesbury. But that strip is generally known for its tone of dishonesty and heartlessness, and, like the writings of Thompson, seems extremely dated, increasingly unread, and finally irrelevant in its mean-spiritedness.
Thompson, as I can say from personal witness, was not flattered by the Doonesbury valentine. "I don't steal from his stuff, do I?"
Thompson grunted in a bar one afternoon in San Francisco. For him, imitation, or caricature, was the least sincere form of flattery, and in his bilious reaction there might have resided a microscopic element of self-awareness. He may well have understood that the drugs, gunfire, motorcycle mishaps, public rantings, and widespread adulation in which he was immersed were evanescent, and that his books were too thin to keep his memory alive for very long.
One must imagine that in his own middle '60s Hunter Thompson looked into the mirror and saw that nobody needed a gonzo interpretation of the world after September 11, that nobody was amused by his capacity to survive fatal doses of sinister concoctions, and that, increasingly, nobody knew or cared who he was.
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