It may seem cruel to say it, but the death of Hunter S Thompson may be raising a discreet smile or two among the world's journalism lecturers. For while the great "gonzo journalist" was responsible for some of the most influential American writing of the 70s, he also spawned generations of campus newspaper wannabes who - to the despair of their mentors - never saw that Thompson was a unique product of his own talent and chutzpah, and of the age in which he did his best work.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1971, was perhaps his finest hour; a first-person account of a journalist and his attorney's trip to Las Vegas to report on a narcotic officers' convention and a free-for-all motorcycle race. The book opens with a memorable description of the duo racing through the desert in a hired car full of drugs - just as the first effects of those drugs start kicking in, still more than 100 miles from Vegas.
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats..."
The book goes on, and on - Thompson wasn't one for brevity - in similar vein, and it is a unique romp, full of biting wit and lengthy descriptions of bad trips in hotel lobbies (you can read an excerpt on Amazon). The trouble for many of us was that it could only really be a one (or, at most, twice) off - attempts to copy the style always looked lame, and even Thompson seemed to descend into self-parody eventually.
His 1992 account of Bill Clinton's election campaign received only mixed reviews - while you'll find glowing tributes on Amazon, others felt it was clearly some way short of his efforts 20 years earlier, when his coverage of the election battle between Nixon and McGovern was seen by some as the definitive account of that era's politics. It was - journalism students take note - not as wild as some other bits of his writing; a surprisingly straight set of accounts, closer to the "new journalism" of the era (what, today, we expect magazine journalism to read like) than the crazy "gonzo journalism" he was credited with giving birth to.
Thompson's modern-day cult hero status means that, despite his best stuff being written long ago, there are plenty of people keen to see his legend live on. According to his Wikipedia entry, Thompson "is generally regarded as the grandfather of the blogging movement" - a statement that's news to me but which, presumably, refers to blogs' tendency to place the author and his prejudices at the heart of the narrative, just as he did, rather than to any propensity on the part of bloggers to consume vast amounts of narcotics (and there are no prizes for suggesting such drug intake might liven up portions of the blogosphere).
[Update: Jeff Jarvis explains one reason bloggers might wish to remember him: "Thompson was really the first reaction to one-size-fits-all journalism. He was the argument that the grand shared experience of media in a three-network, one-newspaper-town world was actually bad because it was boring and institutional and inhuman. Thompson tried to inject humanity back into journalism."]
Meanwhile, like Kurt Cobain and Diana, Princess of Wales, we can now expect a rapid process of beatification. The nature of Thompson's death, and the re-print ready legacy of anthologies he leaves us, could mean his drug-fuelled prose inspires a new generation of blogs from trainee hacks who get the drink and drugs, but not much else. The celebrations of those journalism lecturers could, perhaps, be premature.
