"The Gypsy Flies From Coast To Coast"

A eulogy for Hunter S., probably more apporpriate than the one I wrote earlier, and an indictment of the Beats. I just posted the first bit in Monica's Live Journal, but feel it bore repeating and expanding here:

I was thinking about Kerouac the other day, and realized he really had it
all wrong. You look at On the Road. You look at where he found his true
happiness--among the migrant workers in Mexico. You ever actually talk to one of
those migrant works, though? They're miserable. They're scraping by on pennies a
day, poor and hungry and discontent and unable to do anything about it. Their
existence wasn't bliss, it was sadness.

In a way, then, I think the Beats were all sorta charlatans. They provided
us with this glimpse of an utopia that does not and cannot exist. They might've
been seekers, but they were really more escapists than anything else. They
weren't really looking for something, they were running away from something
else. Rather than trying to change the world we live in, they sought a separate
world where they could hide from reality. And it tore them apart, mentally and
emotionally. It wrecked them, leaving their savaged carcases scattered down the
highway. And it depresses me to realize that, really. You hope and hope that
maybe they'd actually latched on to some sort of truth, that they'd figured
something out that the rest of us hadn't. But that wasn't the case.

Part of me wants to be able to respect the Beats. But another part of me realizes what fakes they were, in a sense. They were afraid. Hunter S. was at least honest about this fear, expressing it in manic fits of booze, drugs, and insane stories that were all too true. I mean, this is the lunatic who went and lived with the Hells Angels for awhile as a sociological experiment. He got six kinds of crap beat out of him in the end, but he was honest about what and who he was. But you look at the Beats--Kerouac, Ginsberg, the rest of them...all pretending to be geniuses when they were really just sad, confused, messed up people trying to make sense of who and what they were and failing in a very real way. Thompson was aware of this failure, saw it as a huge cosmic joke, and embraced it as fully as one could. He knew the Beats weren't people to idolize or immulate. He saw through them, and hoped people would be intelligent enough to see through him as well. He wanted people to be able to see through all of the fakers--through the politicians, the media, the guy who lives next door to you--and recognize that none of them knows what the hell they're doing, none of them can or should tell you how to think or feel or believe. Thompson got it. Dylan got it, too. He didn't want to be anyone's spokesman, didn't want to repeat the same mistakes. He didn't have the answers, didn't want to tell folks how to think. He got it. "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," Dylan sang, and it's true--you can figure things out without having to have someone tell you what to think all the time.

And that's why it's tragic that Thompson is gone--he was a raving lunatic, and he was full of shit, but he knew he was full of shit and he wanted you to see that everyone else was, too. The government is, the media is, the big businesses and the machines are all chock-full of shit. We need folks like him to wake everyone up, to shock folks into recognition.