Afternoon Comrades.
I read a lot of Hunter S. Thompson books whilst on vacation, re-read to be honest and I often do as I have found different truths in them with each passing decade. There was a lot of misplaced idol worship at play when I first started reading his works as a teenager followed by refusal of his ideas and works during the period of my life when I tried my best to “fit in” and now coming back around to a lot of his ideas, after ten years of fucking around and finding out. An important side note here being, re-visit ideas and books often, things change and so do you, but that’s not the point of this dispatch, nor is this a review / uncritical appraisal of the life that he lived.
An often touched upon theme in his work and life is the identity of the outlaw, what it meant at the end of the American Century - and thus at large at the end of the Western World. Hunter draws very clear distinctions being an Outlaw and a Criminal and without realizing it himself at the time created an archetype of behaviour and ideas that I believe is desperately needed in our times. To be clear, there are three distinct era’s at play: his time, from the 60s to 9/11 - the decade of unrest between 9/11 to about 2008 and the end times we find ourselves in today. I will not touch on my own rose tinted memories of what it was like to fuck with the man prior to 9/11 but call for a new invention thereof in a time where “the man” seemingly has won, has gotten fat and thus increasingly paranoid / violent towards any notion of refusal and resistance.
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