Mistah Thompson, He Dead.

One of the great counterculture icons slash journalist slash sports analyst Hunter S. Thompson died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Sunday. Just hours after his demise the newspapers, bloggers and news media outlets are rushing to spin their take on what is undoubtedly a harsh and sickening time for the Thompson family. Naturally, I must participate.

Of all the things Thompson did in his life, his work did the most to expose the hypocrisy in a artificial and stale social world that the United States had become after the torment and violence of the late sixties. When he decried the death of the American Dream in his books, it seemed obvious to everyone. But it took Hunter to put the pieces together.

Thompson was the most avid of critics when it came to his own profession. Stripping away at the professional veneer that journalism had enjoyed for so long was a pastime of his, enjoyed with the same sort of relish that the average American enjoys a cheeseburger. He simply loved to bite the hand that fed him. In his own way it was this paradoxical self-loathing that made an indelible mark on the work that sustained his fame.

Some will denounce Hunter S. Thompson as the poster child of the hippie culture. The last standing monument to a burned-out, dead end scene that siphoned the soul straight from its participants. But he wasn't the legacy of failure that he made himself out to be. If anything, he was living proof that while the American Dream may be barely breathing, it sure as hell isn't dead. After all, if the Dream was over, how could a man like Hunter exist? How could he be allowed to go on his merry way, drinking, indulging in illicit substances and shooting anything that moved? No, the Dream was alive. IS alive. But Hunter isn't. To quote an oft-used reference in his works to the passing of his fellow travelers, "Mistah Thompson, he dead."

Thompson realized that the news operates in cycles. As a continual cycle of birth, death and decomposition, it is forever consuming itself in order to bring new information into the world. Now that he has passed, and in such a dramatic and tragic fashion, his death becomes the story as his life once did. The endless, relentless 24 hour news cycle will consume this story and digest it in the vain hope of distilling some sense of meaning or hope out of this meaningless and hopeless event. It will chew and gnaw on the story like a teething child, attempting to break open the significance of his brutal act of self-implosion. But it will fail. And long before the cycle becomes aware of this failure, it will have moved on to something equally void of meaning.

Hunter knew this. He also knew that, for reasons that are his own, he couldn't face the light of another day. He is with us no longer. But I have his books and his articles, and that will have to do. In his absence, how many new writers and journalists will attempt to fill his void? The number can't be known. Wherever he may be right now I think he knows just how ironic it is for a man who loathed journalism so much to have inspired so many.