..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

There’s probably something in the Law of 3’s that covers of the passing of Dr. Gonzo, Gidget and Billie Bigelow -- a.k.a. Hunter S. Thompson, Sandra Dee and John Raitt -- all in the same news cycle. Only God knows what the connection might be, however … or Kevin Bacon.

Let’s try this: Raitt was the father of blues-rocker Bonnie Raitt, and Thompson probably sipped whiskey at the Woody Creek Tavern while listening to her music on the jukebox. And, who’s to say that Dee and her former husband, Bobby Darin, didn’t harbor ambitions of starring in a Broadway revival of “Carousel.” Perhaps, they all shared a Beverly Hills dentist with Bacon, or watched an academy screener of Beyond the Sea in the weeks before their demise.

Any way you slice it, the passing of three headliners in one day is worthy of note.

As much as I dig Bonnie Raitt’s slide guitar and was impressed by Dee’s form on a surfboard, Hunter Thompson was the only member of this trio who had much of an impact on my life and so-called career. It was immediate, powerful and persistent.

Before joining the ranks of ink-stained wretches -- in the days before J-schools overflowed with Woodward and Bernstein wanna-bes -- I became enchanted with those writers whose work would be anthologized in Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson’s influential “The New Journalism.” Thompson had already published “Hell’s Angels, a Strange and Terrible Saga,” but the gonzo label wouldn’t be attached to his reporting until several years later. Besides Wolfe and Thompson, the practitioners of this atypically immersive and wildly inventive school of journalism included Paul Krassner (editor of the Realist, which practically invented the form), Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Terry Southern, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Truman Capote, Jimmy Breslin, George Plimpton, Ken Kesey and Charles Bukowski. Their work appeared first in the New York Herald-Tribune; magazines like Esquire, the Nation, the Paris Review, Playboy, Rolling Stone, New York, Scanlan’s and even Sports Illustrated; and such books as “In Cold Blood,” “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” “The Studio,” “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and “The Armies of the Night.”

All appear to have been influenced in one way or another by such Beat writers as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gary Snyder, whose spiritual travelogues purposefully confused fact and fiction, prose and poetry, confessions and braggadocio. Throw in bits and pieces of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Nelson Algren, James Agee, Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Upton Sinclair, H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain, and it becomes clear was Thompson wasn’t alone.

Indeed, he may not even have been the most stoned, stewed or tattooed member of the authors assembled by Wolfe. Not that he didn’t try.

As a regular contributor to Rolling Stone (along with sympatico artist, Ralph Steadman), Thompson was able to exploit the then-relevant magazine’s huge demographic base of teens and young adults who shared his appetite for drugs, drink, music and anti-establishment behavior. The vast majority of Rolling Stone readers -- among them, many aspiring reporters, hippie capitalists and political activists -- mistrusted the mainstream media, which were perceived as being as culpable as the government in their support of the Vietnam War, apathy toward corrupt politicians and union leaders, and unwillingness to address institutional racism. It was in this atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that the underground press and college newspapers flourished as primary sources of information … much as the Internet does today.

Thompson’s 1966 masterpiece of masochistic reportage, "Hell's Angels," didn’t have the same broad impact on middle-class kids as would "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," published first in Rolling Stone, in 1972. Nevertheless, it introduced an edgier sort of participatory journalism than that already being practiced by the soft-spoken intellectual, Plimpton. Instead of merely risking a sprained ankle or severely bruised ego, as Plimpton famously did in “Paper Lion” (Alan Alda played the author in the movie version) and “Shadow Box,” Thompson literally got the crap kicked out of him by the same bikers with whom he once caroused.

A natural-born sportswriter and politics junkie, Thompson gravitated to the biggest stories of the day, and he fully immersed himself in the sidebar action, whether it involved betting, boozing or trading lies with fellow reporters, athletes and politicos. His willingness to indulge in all manner of intoxicants before, during and after games, press conferences and political conventions often resulted in blown deadlines and wonderfully erratic prose. That his view of the events unfolding before his eyes rarely coincided with what was being reported in the New York Times and CBS Evening News was of little bother to readers of Rolling Stone.

In the wake of Thompson’s self-inflicted death on Sunday, his obituaries have played fast and loose with the foundations of “gonzo journalism“ and the over-all concept of the “counterculture,” for which the Good Doctor was an iconic figure. Hearing network anchors stumble in their attempts to describe Thompson’s distinct influence bordered on the absurd. If Bill Murray and Johnny Depp hadn’t impersonated Thompson in a pair of little-seen, but very decent movies -- and his Raoul Duke persona hadn’t inspired a character in “Doonesbury” -- it’s possible his death would have gotten less attention than funk-master Rick James, whose obituaries made local and network anchors look similarly befuddled.

Fact is, Thompson represented the kind of loose-cannon personality mainstream media would rather observe from afar than warmly embrace, even with faint praise. In his musings on the American political process, Thompson loudly and sometimes viciously denounced the same people -- Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, the presidents Bush, among them -- other reporters were required to handle with kid gloves (while holding their collective noses). Thompson’s opinions could be as unnecessarily cruel and exaggerated as they were hilarious to read, but, to those so inclined, his rants seemed far more genuine than the sugar-coated portraits painted on the national news shows.

Today, gonzo journalism is reserved for the half-baked reactionary opinion-makers on Fox News and talk radio, where truth and accuracy play second fiddle to character assassination and hypocrisy (most of the commentators would wave a red flag in Times Square, if it meant a raise in pay and free meal). Today’s moderate- to left-wing pundits are so obsessed with being perceived as “liberal” that they’ve moved from the middle ground to the sidelines, while even more progressive thinkers are confined to NPR and Pacifica outlets.

It isn’t likely that today’s generation of newspaper editors and broadcast news directors will ever clamor for reporters who would -- or could -- eulogize a former president as a man who “could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time" and that "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."

Men and women who can turn slander into poetry and insight remain few and very far between. The writers who try hardest are often the ones who make the biggest fools of themselves. The glossy “lad” mags, snarky movie rags and high-profile book reviews are littered with feeble attempts at humor and profundity.

No one doubted the sincerity behind even the most toxic of Thompson’s rants. The same can’t be said for the celebrity-bashing of Joe Queenan, Dennis Miller’s well-timed right turn, Ariana Huffington’s ill-timed left turn and the bleatings of Rush Limbaugh. The well-polished contrariness of such writers as P.J. O’Rourke and Christopher Hitchens, documentarian Michael Moore and humorist Bill Maher -- while humorous and often on-target -- increasingly feels forced and specifically manufactured to keep the authors on the A-list of talk-show guests, bi-coastal party hosts and book publishers.

So, what will Thompson’s legacy actually be, and how will this thing called “gonzo” be remembered by future generations of journalists? For a scholarly dissertation on the subject, check this out. In the 6,300-word “What Is Gonzo? The Etymology of an Urban Legend,” the University of Queensland’s Dr. Martin Hirst goes to great lengths to define something he readily admits is a “small word.”

“The delightfully enigmatic and poetic ‘gonzo’ has come a long way from its humble origins as a throw-away line in the introduction to an off-beat story about the classic American road trip of discovery,” he wrote. “‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ is definitely a classic of post-war literature and this small word has taken on a life of its own.”

Thompson is largely credited for popularizing the term, which, today, is used to describe everything from outside-of-the-box marketing campaigns and Xtreme sports, to pedal-to-the-metal porn. It actually was coined by a Boston Globe editor, Bill Cardoso, in his praise for a rough draft of one of Thompson’s boozy dispatches from the 1970 Kentucky Derby, for Scanlan’s.

As Cardoso reportedly wrote his pal, “Congratulations . . . It was pure Gonzo.” No one can precisely pinpoint the derivation of the word, but it most likely was South Boston slang for something deliciously off the wall. Wikipedia, the Internet encyclopedia, adds, “Central to Gonzo Journalism is the notion that journalism can be more truthful without strict observance of traditional rules of factual reportage. The best work in the genre is characterized by a novelistic twist added to reportage, with usual standards of accuracy subjugated to catching the mood of a place or event.”

It further quotes Thompson as saying, "I don't get any satisfaction out of the old traditional journalist's view: 'I just covered the story. I just gave it a balanced view.’

"Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon. How can you be objective about Clinton?"

You can‘t. In fact, it’s practically impossible these days to even fake objectivity. At a time when Dan Rather was famously ending his newscasts with, “Courage …,” he presumably was commiserating with his TV audience, which had just been beaten over the head with 30 minutes of bad news. The gesture could also have been a way informing viewers that the fix was in, and we’re all in deep shit.

Thompson first employed the word, “gonzo,” as the name of a character -- Duke’s drug-addled 300-pound Samoan lawyer -- in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Soon, thereafter, Ted Nugent and Jerry Jeff Walker would embrace the concept in their music. By the ‘90s, when Thompson was making headlines for his erratic and sometimes violent behavior back home in Aspen, any reporter who could write a complete sentence after taking two hits from a bong fancied himself to be “gonzo.”

Like the posters made of Crumb’s “Keep On Truckin’,” in the ’60s and ’70s, the whole concept of “gonzo journalism” had become corrupted. Attendance at any event where Thompson was the star attraction no longer required a heightened awareness of politics, merely an huge appetite for inebriants.

Although he was wracked with persistent back pain and hobbled by a broken arm, Thompson would continue writing commentaries on the current state of sports and politics right up until the time of his death. No one’s yet blamed his suicide on the re-election of George Bush, but it’s possible the seeds of tragedy were sown back in November.

“I am no stranger to the anguish of losing a presidential campaign, and this very narrow loss with John Kerry is no exception,” he wrote in his ESPN.com column. “It hurt, as always, but it didn't hurt as much as that horrible beating we took with George McGovern in 1972. That was by 22 points, the worst defeat in any presidential campaign since George Washington ran for a second term in 1787.

“And the winner that year was a conquering hero named Richard Nixon, who got whacked out of office two years later because he was a crook. We had a very angry Democratic majority in the Senate that year, which is not the case now.

“No. Today, the Panzer-like Bush machine controls all three branches of our federal government, the first time that has happened since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House. And that makes it just about impossible to mount any kind of Congressional investigation of a firmly-entrenched president like George Bush.

The time has come to get deeply into Football. It is the only thing we have left that ain't fixed.”

Compared to his earlier work, that was pretty tame stuff. He actually reserved most of his anger for those young Americans who either didn’t vote, or favored the candidate least likely to serve their interests. But, then, Rolling Stone -- for which he still occasionally labored -- had turned into a bad imitation of Tiger Beat magazine, pimping for the highly paid publicists and overexposed celebrities who spread their legs for the moguls who control the multibillion-dollar music, television and movie industries.

After “Where the Buffalo Roam” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” emerged as cult hits -- and he had become the patron saint of over-served hipsters and long-haired gunslingers -- the media pretty much decided Thompson no longer was relevant. He wrote passionately about John Kerry, just as he had once rhapsodized over a largely unknown Georgia peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter … almost single-handedly making him a candidate to be taken seriously by young voters. His public appearances still drew large and enthusiastic crowds, even if there was no guarantee he’d be willing or able to play through his pain (or hangover).

If there was any irony to be gleaned in the timing of Thompson’s death, it came in knowing that newspaper editors from around the country chose last week to wring their hands over the sad state of their industry. Their general cluelessness was obvious in the many stories and letters reprinted on James Romenesko’s much-read media-gossip site (www.poynter.org/column). The blame was laid mostly on such usual subjects as Internet competition, apathy and time-starved consumers.

One or two of the commentators argued that the collapse in circulation was attributable to newspapers increasing willingness to be “boring.” No argument there. It’s the rare day when an article or column actually jumps off the page of a newspaper and demands to be read.

In their campaign to wipe out anything remotely controversial or upsetting to their readers -- young, old and in between -- newspaper editors now produce the journalistic equivalent of margarine: slick, absent of taste and artificially yellow. They’re just as likely to apologize for an opinion stated in a column, as defend the writer’s right (duty? obligation?) to have an opinion contrary to that of the majority of a paper’s subscribers. If a reporter displays any writing skills at all, his or her copy will have to elevate itself above a compost heap of advice columns, stale wire copy, celebrity puff pieces, syndicated op-ed slop, wishy-washy editorials and space-hogging stock tables that long-ago were made redundant by the Internet.

To prop up the bottom line, many newspapers and magazines have bought out or laid-off all the curmudgeonly old-timers, and fired all the eccentrics. These employees have been replaced by bright-eyed and bushy-tailed youngsters, who work cheap and likely will move on before they’re fully vested and their benefits accrue (which is what the publishers desire, anyway). Big-city newsrooms now are designed to exude a palpable aura of corporate sterility, and cleanliness is religiously maintained to help bean-counters contain the hours logged by janitors and cleaning ladies.

How desperate are the publishers? Editors of papers in Chicago and Philadelphia have actually been asked to take time out from their busy schedules -- and, in some cases, those of their underlings -- to respond to readers who dropped their subscriptions over endorsements of George Bush. The subscribers’ complaints had more to do with the twisted logic and feint praise used to justify the endorsements -- made on the orders of publishers and owners -- than the editorial board’s right to take such a stand.

Original thinkers on the order of Thompson, Mike Royko and Mencken would feel very lonely in the newsrooms of today. Sports columnists now tend to save their best smack for television, rather than risk a slap on the hand by timid bosses. Ombudsmen worry more about those few readers who might be offended by a photo of a flag-draped coffin on Page 1, than a frank and open discussion of the conditions that might have caused the soldiers’ deaths in the first place. At a time when mild profanities are routinely heard on broadcast outlets and in schoolyards, editors will still demand that “ass” and “crap” be spelled “a**” and “c**p,” or be completely eliminated from quotes and comics.

Increasingly, once-proud and independent newspapers are being edited to satisfy the whims and prejudices of a handful of particularly vocal readers, just as TV networks and radio chains have begun to over-react to complaints lodged with the FCC by special-interest groups. This, in the face of much evidence that the vast majority of subscribers and viewers still value diversity of opinion, flashy content and reasonably provocative images.

Are there many Roykos, Breslins, Hiaasens, Hamills, Barrys, Ivins and Thompsons -- none of whom got into the business to collect stock options or log guest spots on MSNBC -- waiting in the wings? In the wake of Dr. Gonzo’s death, it’s a legitimate question to ask.

If so, it’s likely they‘ve already got their sites set on more prestigious gigs in Hollywood or New York. And, given the money involved, why not? It’s the rare movie critic who doesn’t dream of someday sitting in the same chair once occupied by Siskel, Ebert and Roeper. And, what political beat reporter doesn’t aspire to membership in the punditacracy? Entertainment columnist Joel Stein’s only been at the Los Angeles Times a few weeks, and he’s already conflicted himself and the paper with a sitcom deal.

For most young, untainted reporters-in-waiting there simply are no wings left in which to wait. The sign went up long ago: Only dweebs, doormats and ass-kissers need apply.

The gods of journalism broke the mold after Hunter S. Thompson left Louisville, in 1956, and began writing about sports for the newspaper at Eglin Air Force Base. Here’s hoping, though, that comedian Chris Rock -- a kindred spirit in many ways -- comes out with his guns blasting, during this Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday. Even better, he wears out the poor sap assigned to edit out obscenities and other things that might offend the FCC.

If he does, each and every bleep will ring out like a bell built to be heard by Thompson in heaven.

- by Gary Dretzka

February 24, 2005