From the Editors
February 23, 2005
I read of Hunter Thompson’s death and decided to use this space for an unraveling of my mind. First, I thought I’d tell a story of intersection, where my life and his work came together to spark some personal meaning. Then I decided not to. Considering the inevitable pattern of celebrity deaths with personal importance attached, it seemed too repetitive. I could have done it with Richard Avedon, Jacques Levy, or Janet Leigh. It really does feel like all the figures of an era keep dying in quick succession, but I don’t want to write obituaries for every member of my pantheon of dearly departed because I don’t want to risk repetition begetting more repetition. That option seems inadequate.
Perhaps “way back there” really was a time disproportionately packed with greats and the present is just the mathematical end for them all, or perhaps because the “dead heroes” category is so permanent, it overshadows that every era really is loaded, but only apotheosized down the road. Either way, the months pass by with casualties and it seems only imitators survive, who steal only the style from the greats and leave all the purpose and truth behind.
From those bleachers, the cycle is depressing; more, it’s meaningless, because it says that ultimately these figures only comment and never incite change. It assumes that with their death the world is free to re-board a moving walkway and coast passive and blinded forever. From a different angle, though, it’s perennial. And infinite. Neil Young sang All the great explorers/ Are now in granite laid thirty years ago, and he might have been quoting someone that much older than him.
This is for sure: there will be a next thing. And the only sure descriptions of the next thing are that it will be next and it will be unlike anything you expect, not even in the same category. The tools available today to determine and deconstruct such things will be worthless, and need to be re-forged.
Deep inside all these deaths are opportunities, positions to be filled and challenges to be accepted. The best eulogies will not be the ones that wonder what the world will be like without Thompson, but the ones that imagine, with arms akimbo or fists in a fighting stance and with a devilish grin, what the world can be like because of him. And all of those others who have left something worthwhile behind, famous and not.
–Eric Lidji
