What do you think, Hunter?
A letter to Hunter Thompson
Kasey Brooks, '10 | Senior Editor
Issue date: 2/19/10 Section: Opinion
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It's been five years since you kicked it, and, according to your note, even longer since you thought you should have kicked it. How's the afterlife? Who's right? Is it the Christians, the Muslims, or the Buddhists? I tend to think none of us are right, but I guess I'll have to wait and find out on my own.
If you can see us from whatever plane you are on, your legacy is probably making you chuckle. You brandish your cigarette holder from T-shirts and posters. Kids with habits mutter your words to each other under their breath like initiation rites. Your books, dog-eared and greased with fingerprints, are passed back and forth in high schools and college universities, chosen time and again over assigned readings. On Halloween you come out en masse, grinning and shouting and guzzling rum or tequila, and I'd bet good money on it that every summer, many take road trips across the country in your honor.
How would you have reacted on election night in November? You were an avid follower of politics, so there is no doubt in my mind you would have been watching along with everyone else as America elected its first black president. Would you have maintained that hardened sense of skepticism until you saw what this Obama would actually do for the country? Or would you have felt like maybe, finally, that wave you wrote about had come around again and crested, that the good guys were winning again?
More people in the 18-25 age groups voted in this election than had voted in any other, and they voted for the young, smiling black man in droves. It felt like the system worked as advertised for once, like cause and effect had stopped being corrupted for an instance.
Would you have been watching as the Saints overthrew the older half of the mighty Manning legacy during the Super Bowl? My father cautioned me that "you're going with your heart and not your head" when I told him I wanted the Saints to win, and when they were down by 10, it seemed a sure bet they weren't going to. But you would have loved a game like that, the hopeless first half giving way to the recovered onside kick. You would have loved watching Pierre Thomas race down the field like a demon out of hell to put them in the lead for the first time all game.
At least, I think you would have. Or maybe the rampant commercialism and the admittedly sad sight of The Who with their paunches and their un-smashed guitars would have turned you off completely.
You were always in search of the great nerve underneath everything. You lived life as close to that nerve as you could get, and sometimes it shocked you and sent you reeling, but never without whispering a lesson into your ear before you went sprawling on your back.
Human frailty was your burden, just like it is for anybody else. Your work was usually late, half-done, and about something completely different from whatever your assignment was. But you lived life on your terms and refused to be at the mercy of anyone else's limitations.
So we will keep passing along your stories to each other until each one becomes so intrinsic that we just accept it as fact. We will forget where exactly we've heard it, but we'll still know that its source is meaningful because of the effects the words have on us. And when we do figure out that the words were yours, it will make perfect sense.
Mahalo.