RIP, Uncle Duke
March 5, 2005
Sure Gonna Miss Him
Hunter Thompson Considered
Funny. As skeptical as I am about everything, and as many times as I've been through the process, I still believe the stories the first time I hear them. When I heard about Hunter Thompson's apparent suicide, I guess I reacted like most other people who liked him: How sad! The loss of a unique and powerful voice in American life. But he killed himself, they say. So if it was a choice he made, then I honor that choice, and I am less sad ... than I might be.
Looking back I can see in myself an effort made subtly and subconsciously to push out any thoughts that there was anything sinister involved, anything wrong with the official story. Surely this was only yet one more violent death of a person who could coincidentally be an irritant to the fascist power structure, if not an actual danger.
Maybe it's just a natural tendency to block out any things that complicate the situation and distract from one's central objectives. I did not want to think about Thompson's death and whether or not it might not be a suicide. Then I started hearing one thing after another, after another, to the point that I began to question my starting premise. Why should I start from the presumption that the "apparent suicide" was in fact an actual suicide. What if we looked at it from a neutral position, like a homicide detective? What if the gunshot wound was not self-inflicted?
The question is there whenever a person dies a violent death. Suicide is presumed without the emergence of a strong case for murder. But as the default position, it is not always correct, even if the truth cannot be proven. It starts with a hypothesis.
Well, what if?
The Thompson interview played on Democracy Now dropped a couple of disturbing hints. First, he minces no words about his passionate opposition to the war machine. "We’re defending freedom? We'll fight to the death for freedom? That's absurd. This country is no more a capital or bastion of freedom now than Nazi Germany was in the 1940s. This country is a rogue nation in a way, but worse than a rogue nation. We're a war-crazy, war-dependent, really, nation and that leads right to the oil industry. It is ridiculous. And particularly in the media; with the media I noticed. To not discuss the connection between oil and bombs in Iraq is disgraceful. Winston Churchill said, 'In times of war, the first casualty is always the truth.' Truth is the first casualty of any war."
It was two years ago, January 2003, and Thompson was going to New York to "stir up trouble. I'm not going to change hats, yeah, Saturday in the park, Sunday in New York City, Monday night, Conan O’Brian, or something like that. I just believe in this. I'm offended and insulted by the slope of the American people, and that means us. That means these bastards who just sit around – "
Bush, he said, "should be run out of office. He should resign right now, in my opinion. I did call for his resignation, but I don't think we would have a groundswell immediately for that. There will be a lot of people who agree with me."
Thompson is powerful. He was knowledgeable and gifted as an analyst and writer. He was gutsy and not afraid to tell the truth even if it required him to jump outside the framework of proper journalism. Besides all that, he now has a reputation as a Great Living Writer, which could carry some serious cachet, especially in a situation in which the population may be on the verge of a change of heart, of view. Someone like Thompson, who is not afraid to see it and say it could be very dangerous.
He predicted it himself in the interview with Mary Suma played on Democracy Now. First check out what he says about Iraq, but pay special attention to what he says after that: "I don't really know Iraq. I made a point of getting to know it a lot better. It was a very advanced, progressive country, had, what, 90% literacy, health care for the whole entire population. They were doing well, prosperous, high literacy. Many more book stores per capita in Iraq than there are in this country. Many. No more. We bombed their children. We killed their husbands and wives and we bombed them, and we saw her, and we're going to do it again. Just random killing like that, mass killing to force a population to get rid of Saddam so we can move in and take over and control the oil, God damn it, if that's not evil, I don't know what would be. You know, Bush, he’s really the evil one in here. Well, more than just him. We're the Nazis in this game, and I don't like it. I'm embarrassed and I'm pissed off. Yeah. I mean to say something and I think a lot of people in this country agree with me. A lot more never say anything. We'll see what happens to me if I get my head cut off in the next week by -- it's always unknown Bush [inaudible] strangers who commit suicide right afterward. No witnesses. They have a new kind of crime." Mary Suma asked: "Is that the CIA kind of crime?" Thompson answers: "Oh, absolutely. Anyone who’s a successful criminal has got a crime. Absolutely no witnesses, no records. We can go on and on. I have to be restrained on the subject."
Funny that he predicted his own assassination. What a coincidence! It's also a great coincidence how many voices that oppose the war machine are silenced by violent death. It's always just random killing, no reason, weird mishaps, plane crashes. Funny how many more of the liberal side die these violent random deaths than the side that advocates and wages war. What connection could there possibly between war and murder? Murder on the homefront. The war machine turns inward. Homeland security. Centralization of power. Loss of human rights and due process of law.
John Judge wrote a realistic historical study of the use of assassination by the Nazis. In the Weimar Republic in the years leading up to the takeover of Germany by the Nazis, there were many killings that were recognized as assassinations, but the perpetrators were never found. Judge makes a compelling case that what we are seeing is a broad program of neutralization of live wires who could potentially catalyze a spirit of rebellion. (See Assassination as a Tool of Fascism)
The initial February 21AP report was unequivocal. He shot himself. His own wife and son issued a statement to that effect.
(The obit-style biography in that article is quite good, by the way. The story might be told differently if it were a recognized fact that he was assassinated. But it's a good neutral history.)
Then I started seeing more articles, more research and analysis, gatherings of links, the cybercharged grassroots development of an idea carried on in the public domain, like Linux or MP3 ...
There was an article in The Globe & Mail on February 26, which is hard to get now if you aren't a subscriber, but it said this: "Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did. He'd been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: 'They're gonna make it look like suicide,' he said. 'I know how these bastards think . . .'"
Whew! That's a little hard to dismiss without some consideration. He was working on an article about the WTC attacks and supposedly had "hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations." Hard evidence to verify what the whole world could see with their own eyes, but refused to see that way. Three buildings, not only the two that were hit with jets, imploded exactly the way buildings do when they are knocked down with strategically placed charges. Still, though it looks that way, you need hard evidence to make such a startling leap. Hunter thought he had it, according to the Globe & Mail. Soon after he died of a gunshot to the head, "apparently" self inflicted.
Can anyone imagine how important it would be to keep the lid on a crime like that? That is, if there really is some kind of complicity among high government officials in the catastrophe of 9/11 in order to create an environment that would be congenial to a militaristic agenda. Would a power structure that would wage shock-and-awe warfare on an innocent population in Iraq with no logically supportable justification be restrained in its effort to rid itself of all serious opposition with murder if necessary?
Once that particular hole is blown in the official world view of American citizens, the rest could come unraveled. And that is not what the Cheneyites want to see. And in case you haven't noticed, Cheney is not a kind sort.
Neither is Bush of course. I heard a clip of him this morning on Democracy Now. His hatefulness is becoming more overt. His threatening, swaggering manner is becoming more open as he leaves his Compassionate Conservative disguise far behind. But we're getting off track... The point is, these are very serious people, not at all averse to using violence, all available force, to the point of mass killing to achieve their objectives.
On February 25, the Associated Press tells us that "Thompson shot self while talking with wife". (Or in the Star Tribune version: "Hunter Thompson shot himself while wife listened on phone, she says".)
According to the AP report, "She said her husband had asked her to come home from a health club so they could work on his weekly ESPN column -- but instead of saying goodbye, he set the telephone down and shot himself."
Hey baby, why don't you come home so you can work on my ESPN column with me. Excuse me, just a minute, I'm going to put down the phone and shoot myself.
According to the article, "Thompson said she heard a loud, muffled noise, but didn't know what had happened. 'I was waiting for him to get back on the phone,' she said. (Her account to Rocky Mountain News reporter Jeff Kass is slightly different: 'I did not hear any bang,' she told Kass. She added that Thompson's son, who was in the house at the time, believed that a book had fallen when he heard the shot, according to Kass' report.)"
We report, you decide. In the context above, Thompson is having a routine conversation with his wife. He is not distressed. Suddenly he puts down the phone. She hears a "muffled noise," she says. She says it's not a "bang". Thompson's son was in the house and thought he heard a book fall.
As the Infowars site suggests, this scenario perfectly fits a killing by a hitman with a silencer. It does not fit a suicide without a good deal of bending.
There is a lot of smearing going on now of Thompson, an orchestra of discrediting going on among the character assassin team of the White House, the payola "journalists". Predictable. Thompson said more damning things about the Bush mob in a paragraph than most "respectable" journalists would in a lifetime.
Here are some more quotes, leads and links on Thompson:
In an interview with Marty Beckerman, Thompson said, "The end of the world is not just coming; it's here. Until Bush came in it was still possible to be successful, happy. That was two years ago, but now the wheel is turning and I don't think what we're in now will possibly get any better."
One of my favorite Thompson quotes was in his irreverent postmortem of Nixon: "Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place." (--Hunter S. Thompson, "He was a crook," Rolling Stone, June 16, '94)
More on Thompson, in "The Return of Hunter Thompson"
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