PHST ure writer is gone-zo worked for me. a person, but never turn your when it’s waving a razor-sharp bear under control. It’s not bad igh—it’s good for them. wild, drink whiskey, and drive nothing in mind except falling ested. p police. The cops are not your py thing. er who considers your whole Life- is not a happy prospect. nting the most hateful kind of ike fucking, which is only fun dont do much gigeling. el and shallow money trench, ere thieves and pimps run free, s. There’ also a negative side. the weird turn pro. whole world would be doing on xis had won the war. tvo-hundred million used car ey we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. [Americans] have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world—bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are whores for power and oil with hate and fear in our hearts. The 2004 presidential election will be a matter of life or death for the whole nation. We are sick today, and we will be even sicker tomorrow if this wretched half-bright swine of a president gets re-elected in November. To say that this goofy child president [Bush] is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon. For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beau- ty, many souls must be trampled. Some may never live, but the crazy never die. I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time. There he goes. One of God's own prototypes, Some kind of high-powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare twrdie. $: Sadly enough, the burial will have to be ‘accomplished without the usual fanfare—trumpets, sobbing lovers, and that sort of thing—and the ceremony will be brief and without melodrama of any description. It will nonetheless be final—and wild. March 2/2005 a The Good Doctor is “Out” Hunter $. Thompson puts money, and gun, where his mouth was CF Miley, Opinions Editor unter S. Thompson, writer, mad- man, dreamer, and_ riverboat gambler, died after shooting him- self in the head in the evening hours of February 20, 2005. There are many rumours floating about the inter- net right now as to why the author decided to check out. And one that is mysteriously not (yet). Currently leading the pack is the idea that Thompson wanted nothing to do with old age and the inevitable problems it brings. It’s a decent theory. Anyone even remotely familiar with HST’s barbed wit and cutting insight could see this being the case. I mean, forgetting my friends and family, shitting the bed, eating mush, driv- ing like you’re stuck in reverse in the dead of night with no working lights, it doesn’t sound like much fun to me either, But sui- cide is final, and I think there may well have been another reason that Hunter did the deed. Did anyone else happen to notice the date that he decided to leave this world? It was February 20, the eve of yet another “President’s Day” in the US. Thompson was an insightful and brutal critic of US politics—especially presidential politics, with special attention given to crooks named Nixon and idiots named Bush. I’m contending that the timing of his death was chosen as a last “Fuck you” to the president he so hated. According to wikipedia.org, “After Nixon’s death in 1994, Thompson famous- ly described him in Ro/ling Stone as a man who “could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time” and said “his casket [should] have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.” Thompson hated Nixon with a religious zeal. Skipping ahead ten years to 2004, HST wrote, “To say that this goofy child presi- dent [Bush] is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon.” The depth of his disgust with Dubya was almost infinite. I’m thinking, among what I’m sure were many layered and complicated reasons for killing himself, Hunter S. Thompson just couldn’t bear to see another President’s Day during the reign of King Peon II, Supporter of Life (so long as it hasn’t yet been born). He put his money, and unfor- tunately one of his many guns, where his mouth was. www.theotherpress.ca | iS