Hunter's Ghost
On the hard work of staying vigilant in the darkness.
I’m supposed to be taking a break from writing and getting some rest.
But it’s the week before the election—3am, and I’m already on my second cup of coffee.
By now, regular readers will be familiar with my insistence that I Don’t Talk About Politics. Apart from a few recent tumbles off the wagon, I’ve mostly kept my vow for the past two years, and resisted the urge to turn this space into a soapbox for political tirades.
I will do my best not to turn this into a typical rant. This is my second attempt. I’ve already written one 4,500-word draft, which is now destined for the digital bin, because it’s exactly the thing we don’t need more of right now: shrill, peevish, partisan moralizing about who should do what, who’s Right and who’s Wrong.
I Don’t Talk About Politics online because it brings out the absolute worst in me.
Like bourbon for Jack Torrance, cocaine for Tony Montana, or a six-gun for Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven—the format of an online political debate is the ignition key for my lizard brain. It’s easy for a quick writer to get into a fugue state of button-mashing, firing off one salvo after another, like hammering out combos in Street Fighter. There is a perverse pleasure in honing a handful of sentences to just the right cutting edge and hurling it at an opponent. In the real world, I don’t play contact sports, and unlike the characters mentioned above, don’t have many real vices. But when our political discourse moved to social media—where snarky, belittling arguments are the lingua franca—I became a virtual brawler, a pedantic Mr. Hyde.
So I had to quit.
I should apologize to those subscribers who chose to follow me because of my political abstinence, and might have caught me mixing it up in the comments around here.
I promise I’ll get clean again soon.
Just need to get some things off my chest.
Like many journalism students, Hunter S. Thompson became one of my idols in college.
Thompson’s stock began to fall around the time I graduated. Not long after his suicide in 2005, our culture began to turn against a certain class of male writers who were identified, perhaps correctly, as “problematic.” Thompson was put in the same wagon as figures like Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, and David Foster Wallace: although their work was recognized as influential, their personal escapades—especially their attitudes toward women, both on and off the page—made them notorious. Saying you admired these writers in mixed company was likely to earn you some stern looks. I don’t know if Thompson has been officially entered into the “lit bro” canon (I don’t get the newsletter) but I suspect he’s at least being considered by the Papal Committee on Literary Chauvinism.
Obviously, it would be a mistake to defend Thompson’s character beyond a certain point. He was undoubtedly an asshole. Probably a lousy tipper. He’s a heroic figure for morons who confuse the polarity between bad behavior and genius, which is what the “lit bro” trope is really tilting against: those who think that doing a bunch of drugs and not giving a fuck about social mores like “consent” is the path to literary greatness. If you say you admire Thompson, people often assume you’re talking about Johnny Depp’s character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—the guy driving through the desert with a headful of acid, on his way to trash a series of hotel rooms and bill the expenses to Rolling Stone.
He was that, certainly. But this is where the idea of “separating the art from the artist” gets tricky. In fact—the idea that we should separate the two, if that were even possible, is part of the ethos that Thompson’s work is criticizing. This is exactly why his writing is still valuable in spite of (because of) his moral failures.
The backlash against Thompson and his literary co-conspirators is a reflection of a perennial obsession in our culture: the idea that America can be perfected, that the soul of the nation can be purified.
Thompson was an anti-utopian realist. He was part of the pushback against the American culture of the 1950s. At that time, the country still saw itself as “the summit of the world,” according to Winston Churchill’s postwar assessment of the United States. Thompson’s writing exemplified the popular revolt against the mythical “City on the Hill”—the image of America as a colony of sober, straight-laced, crew-cut worker bees, building a brighter global future, one manicured suburban lawn at a time.
People mistakenly assume that because Thompson was part of the Sixties counterculture, partying to the same music and taking the same drugs, he must necessarily have made common cause with the Hippie movement. But the hippies also thought that America could be perfected—just in a different way. While they were resisting the patriotic evangelism of the 1950s, they were promoting their own long-haired utopian vision, which Thompson never fully bought.
Thompson wasn’t interested in perfecting America.
His first book, Hell’s Angels, explored the murky twilight between the bright idealism held in common by the hippies and the squares, and the darknesses they were trying to cast out. The outlaw bikers that Thompson described were complicated people: fiercely loyal; sometimes surprisingly thoughtful and sensitive; fully capable of beating the ever-loving shit out of their adversaries. Thompson experienced all of this firsthand over a year spent with the Angels—including the beating.
His reporting came to an abrupt end when, with courageous stupidity, he asserted a Southern gentleman’s morality in the company of the outlaws. An Angel named Junkie George was known to slap his wife around, and Thompson called him “a punk” for it. The brutal stomping he received in reply—from the men he had spent a year riding and drinking with—only stopped when the gang’s senior members stepped in. Nevertheless, he published the book, and allowed his complex portrait of the outlaws to stand, with himself as a participant (and eventual victim) rather than a neutral observer.
Hell’s Angels distills the vision that guided Thompon’s writing throughout his career. Even the title encapsulates the complicated morality reflected in his work—what he saw in American society, in politics, and in himself. In Thompson’s view, contrary to the utopian ideals on both sides of American culture, the good and the bad weren’t easily separated. The bikers he admired were free-spirited rebels, warrior-poets, and ugly, violent sociopaths, all at the same time. Bad people could sometimes be good; the righteous were often villainous; ordinary people weren’t redeemed by an absence of darkness, but by wrestling with it.
Thompson’s brand of gonzo journalism refused to take any self-mythologizing seriously, starting with himself. He leaned into his presentation as a completely unreliable narrator. Unlike other “serious” journalists (then and now) Thompson didn’t hide behind the façade of a detached, sober narrator. His opinions were always front and center. He freely admitted to covering stories while high as a kite within the narrative itself. His self-reported failures were often more insightful than other journalist’s polished successes, and orders of magnitude more interesting. He bedeviled his editors by trashing hotel rooms, missing deadlines, and faxing last-minute stories through the “mojo wire” one hastily-written page at a time—often while ripped to the tits on some combination of Wild Turkey, Dunhills, and speed. Sometimes he just made shit up, like when he almost single-handedly torpedoed Ed Muskey’s 1972 presidential bid with a fabricated tale about the candidate’s addiction to a fictitious drug.
His radically subjective reporting challenged his audience in a very specific way: if anyone had to wonder whether something so outlandish was possible—wasn’t that a kind of truth in itself?
Cops were crooks. Elections were a passable substitute for watching football. Society’s elites were decadent and depraved. The civil rights movement was shot through with grifters and short-change artists. Hippies who saw themselves saving the world were dopey dreamers sold downriver with false hopes. Wars advertised as spreading democracy were criminal enterprises of extortion, rape and murder—no different than the gangland hits perpetrated by a similar breed of thugs in less expensive suits.
The public figures in these stories all got regular glow-ups from a national media invested in the inherent nobility of American values. (Sound familiar?) By contrast, Thompson’s street-level view of the elite class—and, sometimes, the self-righteous people opposing them—provided a necessary counterbalance, especially when combined with Ralph Steadman’s livid, grotesque illustrations: we are not so pure, any of us. You are just as ugly and complicated and fractious as the people you look down on. So get off your high horse and quit bitching.
To quote another cultural critique from the same era, more subtle than Thompson’s bareknuckle bomb-throwing: “Senator, we’re both part of the same hypocrisy.”
Underneath the gleaming promises of a better future was a world hopelessly mired in petty violence, paranoia, greed, and hungover despair. Even Your Humble Narrator was complicit in it. And throughout all of it were the ordinary people, among whom Thompson counted himself. Trying to make sense of these bad omens, to ride out this heavy trip through these savage times, while keeping their own demons at bay. Trying to make rent or make bail, or to make things a little better for their community without getting their skull caved in by a teargas canister. Never quite rising to the heights of heroes or sinking to the depths of true villainy; those extremes were reserved for the powerful and well-connected. These people, like Thompson himself—late, broke, sick, stoned—were just trying to get through one more day.
Thompson spent his career covering the ugly side of America, and ended it by blowing his brains out while sitting at his typewriter.
It’s hard to see him as an optimist.
Nevertheless, his writing preserves the sense that we should keep fighting through it. Don’t let the bastards win. Keep covering the story. Keep trying to tell the whole truth—in spite of the facts, if necessary—to save our souls, by wrestling with the darkness instead of denying it.
He died with his boots on, in true outlaw fashion. He was an American shaman: the drugs and hard living were an occupational hazard for someone wanting to cover the raw truth, to get right to the marrow of the thing. He was a correspondent on the front lines of a spiritual war, writing dispatches from the dark heart of the homeland; unlike journalists who parachute in and retreat back to safety, he stayed fully embedded in the twilight world he chronicled, right through to the bitter end.
That’s why his work is still valuable today, even though—because—he was, himself, a “problematic” shit-kicking bigot. He couldn’t have seen what he saw without being complicit in it—without being entangled in all that darkness, and having the courage to be honest about it.
I’m glad he’s dead.
Or rather—I’m glad he didn’t live to see the mess we’re in now.
Fans of political journalism often lament the fact that Thompson wasn’t alive to cover the Trump Era. What would he have said about all this? What remorseless takedowns would he have proffered? What darkness would he have gleefully exposed?
The reality is that the past eight years would probably have broken his spirit more thoroughly than the Bush Administration did. He definitely would have been cancelled. Probably ignored. Possibly turfed out as a useful idiot for Russia. He might have died in disgrace, rather than being remembered as a complicated but influential genius who knew when his time was up and went out on his own terms.
If he was brought back from the dead to see all this, he would promptly shoot himself in the head a second time.
Our culture is celebrating exactly the kind of easy morality that Thompson spent his life fighting against. We’ve fallen back into the old faith of perfecting America. People want to believe we’ve made great progress in escaping the repressive exceptionalism of the 1950s; in some ways, that’s true. But we’ve also slipped back into thinking that we can drive out the darkness completely. If we just get the right institutions in place—use the right language, police the right beliefs, turn the powers of the state against the real deviants and anti-American agitators—by God, we can be the shining City on the Hill again, only without all the bigotry and crew cuts and manicured lawns.
That same brand of dualistic thinking is reflected in one of Thompson’s biggest unacknowledged failures: his treatment of Richard Nixon.
For a multitude of good reasons, Thompson loathed the disgraced president throughout his career. The scathing obituary he wrote for Tricky Dick in 1994 is still celebrated as a monumental classic in the genre of journalistic kneecapping. But in this case, his instincts failed him. He missed the bigger picture.
Maybe he slipped back into the reflexive conservatism of his Kentucky upbringing, wanting to believe that the establishment was still capable of honorable conduct. Maybe he got too high on his own supply, hooked on the keyboard-mashing fugue state of those devastating combos, the well-honed precision of artful insults. Maybe, nearing the end of his career, he sensed that his powers were fading; he wanted an easy moral victory, a chance to spike the ball in his old enemy’s endzone one last time.
In any case, he decided to cast Nixon as the Ultimate Evil in American politics, and didn’t see the circumstances around Nixon’s impeachment for what they were. Nixon was undoubtedly a crook. But Thompson’s tolerance for moral gray areas should have revealed that two things can be true at the same time: Nixon could be a striving, knife-fighting, self-promoting opportunist—and the people who brought him down could be at least as corrupt as he was.
Contrary to Thompson’s prediction in that storied obituary, not all “honest historians” remember Nixon “mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.” In fact—this wasn’t even true in Thompson’s own lifetime. By the mid-eighties1, some “honest historians” and serious journalists were beginning to see the contours of something much broader around the events of Watergate. Researchers have since recognized what Thompson and Tricky Dick himself both missed: that the Nixon Whitehouse was a rats’ nest of spooks and double agents, whose true loyalties lay outside the Oval Office.
These accounts suggest that the Watergate break-in and the attempted disgrace of Daniel Ellsberg were not simply fumbled plots masterminded for Nixon’s gain. Instead, the evidence indicates that they were only the visible tip of an iceberg submerged in shadow, one part of an intra-governmental turf war between the Nixon Administration and the intelligence community—what became colloquially known as “the Deep State.”
While the Deep State has been transformed into an exclusively right-wing trope over the past eight years, its existence is not some paranoid fantasy. The mushroom-like growth of a clandestine bureaucracy outside our democratic government is part of our history. It’s a well-documented fact—and it began to emerge on Nixon’s watch. 1974 brought the Church Committee investigations, which revealed a whole slew of black-ops programs run by elements of the CIA and the FBI: MKULTRA, COINTELPRO, CHAOS, foreign assassinations, electoral sabotage, and—most significantly, for a fiercely independent journalist like Thompson—Operation Mockingbird, which implicated a network of domestic media outlets and NGOs in CIA-sponsored propaganda campaigns.
These things happened—and this is just what we know about.
Describing all these programs in detail is the work of a graduate-level college class. The net of it is that an administrative apparatus was created within the Washington establishment, powered by black-money slush funds and a matryoshka nesting-doll of secrets within secrets within secrets. It was accountable to no one but itself. The purpose of this Deep State was to subvert democracy at home and abroad—with extreme prejudice, by any means necessary. It saw no difference between rabble-rousing peasants in tinpot dictatorships and American citizens exercising their Constitutional rights. They were all the same kind of threat, because they all wanted independence from exploitative systems. This para-government turned the apparatus of the state against its own people: secretly dosed them with LSD, spied on them, lied to them, deliberately made them paranoid, and when all else failed, killed them.
These things happened—and this is just what we know about.
People forget (or choose not to remember) that in 1975, the House Select Committee on Assassinations found credible evidence of a conspiracy in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. While there might not have been a second shooter on the Grassy Knoll, the Committee found it impossible that Lee Harvey Oswald planned and carried out the attack by himself. This is not just the crackpot theorizing of the Lone Gunmen from The X-Files: it was the official conclusion of a years-long governmental investigation. This also signified that the Warren Commission, which explicitly set out to find evidence that Oswald had acted alone, was not an independent investigation of the single-most consequential event in the history of the United States. It was an extremely public and very effective cover-up—and the Deep State’s fingerprints were all over it.
These investigations came after a determined reorganization of the clandestine services during the Nixon Administration. While they uncovered some important facts, there were too many crime scenes and too many suspects. We know for certain that the vast majority of CIA documents pertaining to MKULTRA were hastily destroyed. There were other mysterious fires in places where black-ops records may have been kept. A few key witnesses had extremely unfortunate, ill-timed medical events that prevented them from testifying: heart attacks, suicides, fatal car crashes, drownings.
Accidents happen.
In the absence of bombshell accounts or undeniable documentary evidence, these issues were resolved with quiet administrative shuffling and unremarkable hearings. It’s telling that most Americans only know of the most powerful and dangerous players from this time as boring bureaucrats or background characters, if they know them at all: Allen Dulles; James Jesus Angleton; Richard Helms; E. Howard Hunt; James McCord, among many others. George H.W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and a cheapjack toadie named Richard Bruce Cheney (most recently of the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign) would emerge from the shadows later; at this stage, they were already involved, largely out of the public eye, moving the pieces around the board.
Nixon was overmatched. Still, in the final analysis, he may actually have had some vestige of what Thompson said he lacked: a bedrock sense of decency. Even if Nixon “needed servants to help him screw on his pants every morning,” he might also have felt some genuinely patriotic horror when he bumped into a tentacular, globe-spanning maze of unaccountable black ops, extending far beyond the control of the Executive Branch. Despite all his other well-documented sins, Nixon might have gone down trying to wrestle the Deep State goon squad back under the umbrella of democracy.
Two things can be true at once: Richard Nixon can be a vile scumbag, and his ouster can be something other than a triumph of Good over Evil. Contrary to the popular narrative, Nixon’s impeachment might not have been an act of lawful justice, but a political stitch-up, carried out by forces largely hidden from the American public.
These are exactly the kinds of shadow zones that Thompson would have investigated; these are exactly the types of questions our politics can no longer tolerate.
The point is not to prove exactly how, when, and why these events took place. That’s impossible. There are too many layers of secrecy and denial; too many records “misplaced” or destroyed; too many dead witnesses, from causes natural and otherwise.
Instead, the point is to understand how our government actually functions: where does real power align with the democratically-expressed will of the electorate, and where does it emerge from somewhere else?
And how do we know this anti-democratic shadow state ever stopped working?
Accusations of “conspiracy theory” rely on a Manichean dualism that many political commentators now take completely for granted. There are Bad Guys and Good Guys, black hats and white hats. We never have to wonder who the Good Guys are, or what they become when put their white hats in the closet, away from the public spotlight.
Supposedly, everything significant in American politics is now fully transparent, and happens in a way that everyone can understand. Backroom deals and no-joke conspiracies—the kind that overthrow democratically elected governments, carry out extrajudicial assassinations, and support an underworld economy only visible to those who can decode the right spreadsheets—are all relics of the past. It’s morning in America; the sun shines through the windows into all those dark corners, and no one can hide for long.
It is fitting that the Hollywood account of the Watergate investigation has become the template for contemporary American journalism. All the purveyors of recycled talking points (the kind of journalists that Thompson despised) see their work through the lens of All The President’s Men, starring themselves and their colleagues as young Robert Redfords and Dustin Hoffmans. Out there getting the scoop, pounding the pavement, meeting colorfully-named sources in parking garages; bringing down the powerful, lifting up the poor unwashed masses being duped by nefarious schemes.
Even by the standards of those soft-focus ideals, today’s journalists are still falling short—without even accounting for the possibility that the historical event itself was scripted, in a way that the original investigators didn’t detect. And they were prepared to ask genuinely tough questions, to walk farther than the conference room to interview a source.
Democracy Dies in Darkness, indeed.
Thompson fumbled the ball with Nixon. But I wonder if he’d be so sanguine about the sandbagging of Donald Trump, had he lived to see it.
Two things can be true at the same time. Donald Trump can be a vile scumbag, unfit for office. The people looking to bring him down can also be scapegoating him—trying to hang all the sins of the past decade around his neck, driving him off a cliff to create the false narrative of a fresh start. The triumph of uncorrupted Good over irredeemable Evil. Nothing more to worry about here. Back to brunch, everybody.
I doubt Thompson would have missed it this time.
The run-up to Watergate happened during the tenure of cold-blooded pros. Those people knew how to stage a murder and make it look like a suicide—metaphorically speaking, of course. But the old pros are all dead now; if there was any justice in the world, as Thompson wrote of Nixon, their caskets “would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles.”
This new crowd seems to have inherited the family jewels—the same old bag of dirty tricks—but haven’t had enough Latin American coups in which to hone their skills. They’re relying on a brute-force approach that would make Joseph McCarthy blush: Fascists everywhere! KGB agents and Iranian shooters hiding under every rock and bush! Death of democracy! Anyone who doesn’t support the right candidate is a fifth columnist—for the new Soviet Union, or the KKK, or both, we’re not sure!
It’s embarrassing.
Moral indeterminacy. Gray areas. Two things true at once: we could banish Donald Trump from politics forever, and still be in very deep trouble.
This is not about who to vote for. If we’re taking a Thompsonian view of this election—and indeed, the past eight years—it is not possible to banish the darkness completely. The bad people are not all puppets of a single person, nor are they all of the same ideological stripe. Make your choice, but be prepared to keep covering the story. Keep digging for the real truth beneath the facts of the official narrative and the easy moral victory. Keep looking for light in the shadows, and shadows in the light. Stay vigilant.
No matter what happens next week, the darkness will still be with us—and not necessarily where the politicians and the “serious” journalists say it is. Real people aren’t all darkness or all light. That goes double for anyone with serious power. Anybody trying to tell you that those people are the only thing standing between us and the shining City on the Hill are not describing reality. They should not be trusted. We will not make it to the Promised Land if we just keep following them, just a little further, because the Promised Land is not where we live.
We live here.
America has always been a very complicated landscape, with pockets of shining brightness and deep shadow; it always will be. The people who live here are a reflection of that landscape, extending all the way up to the highest offices of our government. It’s a country of immense freedom, where you can ride a motorcycle through the desert for days, get loaded on acid and wander around Las Vegas, shout hateful invectives against the president. (For now.) It’s also a country capable of perpetrating spectacular evil in a way that doesn’t show up on any ballot. Two things can be true at the same time.
One of Thompson’s famous mottos has frequently appeared in our cultural discourse these past several years: When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro2. I take this to mean that, in chaotic times, the people who are naturally predisposed to outsider thinking have an opportunity to offer a different perspective. Like Thompson, these are people who thrive on chaos rather than being terrified of it. They are ones acquainted with the night—who know about darkness, and live in the gray zones of the real world.
When the going gets weird, powerful people have an opportunity to assert control by claiming to represent the forces of normalcy and stability. If everyone is too scared of disorder, no one is prepared to explore a more complex narrative, or to keep an eye out for palmed cards and ratcheting, unaccountable power. The crackpots and anarchists and ne’er-do-wells who have never had much stake in stability to begin with—they’re the ones who can keep their wits about them.
Despite widespread acknowledgment that this is true in principle, the standard-bearers of the Weird don’t seem to have answered the call just yet. Everyone seems awfully complacent in the hope that this weirdness will be neatly wrapped up with one more election, one final national exorcism to cast out a singular devil. It seems like it’s not the responsibility of people who can tolerate the darkness and travel through the twilight to offer a different perspective. Weird is bad. Weird is frowned upon. Weird is suspect—potentially useful for sinister elements who may be watching us even as we speak. Serious people on well-lit stages, who are definitely not weird, are here to explain the facts to us. It’s very simple: there are Good People and Bad People, and we know which is witch.
That’s probably why Thompson is still haunting the halls of our national psyche, like Banquo’s ghost. When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro: that was a maxim, an imperative as much as an observation. I wonder how many journalists in Washington have jolted out of dark dreams lately, with the words rat-bastard coward ringing in their heads—hissed past the spectral, teeth-clenched stem of a cigarette holder.
Thompson wouldn’t have been gulled by this shit.
We don’t have to wonder what he would think if he was still alive. Anyone who has read his work can always summon his voice in their heads. Imagining what he would say about all this—in that barking, growling, strung-out cadence—is as good as a séance.
Or better yet—step out into the darkness and see for yourself.
Go take a look, and report back.
Good luck out there.
The Rosetta Stone for this perspective continues to be Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA, by Jim Hougan.
Surprisingly, this was not the Thompson motto I had painted in whiteout above the keyboard of my laptop in college, back when I was a Very Serious Journalism Student. That was “War is Good Business”—which, unfortunately, continues to be as relevant as it is kitschy.
Thanks for the reminder. As Peter Lynch used to say, things can always get worse.