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Words & Reflectionssaid, ‘but I’m going somewhere.” Whyis McKeen so sure the kid in questionwas a “snot”? What’s more, givenThompson’s personality, isn’t it morelikely that he was the one backing the“snot” up against a wall?This unwillingness tosquare evidence with judgmentpersists throughout“Outlaw Journalist”—andultimately dooms McKeen’sattempt to make sense of hissubject. The interpretation ofThompson that he finally proposes(with assists from RollingStone’s Jan Wenner andSandy Thompson, Hunter’sex-wife) is both exculpatoryand hagiographic: Thompsonwas a tremendously talented,fundamentally decent humanbeing who was ultimatelycrippled by external pressure to playthe part of the sociopathic buffoon.Based on the trove of biographicaldetail McKeen provides, though, thatcan’t be right. Thompson’s darkestadult tics—his abuse of women, hisself-mortification with drugs andalcohol, his seething contempt forall authority and convention (exceptliterary authority, which he coveted),his narcissistic need to have all eyestrained admiringly on him—didn’t suddenlymaterialize when Garry Trudeaumade “Uncle Duke” a regular characterin Doonesbury. Nor did they bubbleup when legions of professed fanswho hadn’t actually read Thompson’swork started pestering him for hisautograph. Instead, they were fully inkeeping with the identity Thompsonhad cultivated from childhood on.That’s who he was.Man and Moment MeetEven if McKeen’s analysis falls short,his prolific reporting helps us makesense of Thompson’s place in journalistichistory. There are those whosincerely believe that Thompson’sdeath left a profound vacuum. Westill need his excoriating presence,or so the argument goes. But no onehas quite managed to take up theThompsonian torch.In fact, Thompson’s stylistic inheritorsare everywhere in contemporaryjournalism: think of Matt Taibbi (everyone’sfavorite neo-Thompsonian)hilariously eviscerating Tom Friedman… it’s often hard to say where, inThompson’s oeuvre, the line ofdemarcation between fiction and factcan be found. In the 1960’s and ’70’s, thisadded to the Thompson mystique; today,it would make him a professional pariah.in the pages of the New York Press; orfood/travel writer Anthony Bourdainshocking his way to dyspeptic multimediaprominence; or sex columnist/Seattle Stranger editor Dan Savage lickingdoorknobs at the Iowa Republicancaucuses in order to give Gary Bauer theflu and readers a great story; or evenTime’s Mark Halperin telling BarbaraWalters, during the fight for the 2008Democratic presidential nomination,that John Edwards might back HillaryClinton because he considered BarackObama to be a “pussy.”So why, then, does no one figure loomas large today as Thompson once did?To be blunt: blame the times. After all,it was Thompson’s great good fortuneto come of age, professionally speaking,at a point where his own proclivitiesand the broader Zeitgeist dovetailedto an almost absurd degree. Prior toThompson’s heyday, Americans wereconditioned to view authority, conventionand conformity with deep skepticism,both by the academy (think ofDavid Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd”)or the literary world (“RevolutionaryRoad,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” etc.).Then, just as the arc of Thompson’scareer took off, that skepticism souredinto downright (and often justified)contempt—courtesy of the civil rightsmovement and its opponents, and theassassinations of JFK and MLK andRFK, and the Vietnam War, and thedepredations of one Richard MilhousNixon.Absent foils like these—and withoutindirect assistance from cultural contemporarieslike R.D. Laing,who subverted establisheddefinitions of sanity andmental illness—Thompson’sscrew-the-hypocrites shtickmight not have been quite sowell received. As fate wouldhave it, though, Thompsonseemed, instead, to be offeringjust the sort of bracingjournalistic tonic that thetimes required.Don’t forget, either, thatThompson’s timing relativeto the craft of journalismwas ideal, too. When a drugand-booze-fueledThompsonwas hammering out his propulsive,hilarious, disturbing treatments ofeverything from the 1972 presidentialcampaign to the Kentucky Derby, theNew Journalism was still ascendant.And within the journalistic fraternity,it was still acceptable—as it had beenfor Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Lieblingdecades earlier—to fictionalize largeportions of allegedly “true” reportage.Of course, as McKeen rightly notes, it’soften hard to say where, in Thompson’soeuvre, the line of demarcationbetween fiction and fact can be found.In the 1960’s and ’70’s, this addedto the Thompson mystique; today, itwould make him a professional pariah.(So, too, would Thompson’s habitof burning through mass quantitiesof expense money, then failing—orrefusing—to write the item in question.The money was there then. It’snot anymore.)This, then, is the profound revelationcontained in “Outlaw Journalist”—evenif it’s not what McKeen intended.Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t a tragicfigure. He was, instead, a deeply flawedtalent who was blessed to work at thebest of all possible times. His untimely,tragic end notwithstanding, we shouldall be so lucky. Adam Reilly is the media columnistfor The Boston Phoenix.96 Nieman Reports | Summer 2009