Editor's Note: HST, R.I.P.

Forget Woodward and Bernstein. For many journalists between, say, 35 and 55, Hunter S. Thompson was the reason they got into the business. As impressonable teenagers, they came across Thompson's Hell's Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or The Great Shark Hunt and discovered the creative potential of the news business. Thompson's "gonzo" journalism was frenzied, funny and, occasionally, enlightening, a far cry from the banality of the five W's that high school and college newspaper advisers tried to drill into their heads.

It turns out I was careening toward a journalism career before I encountered Thompson, but I'm certain I never would have ventured into the alt-weekly game seven years ago without a solid grounding in Thompson's counterculture ethic and subjective zeal. Thompson flipped journalism conventions on their head, flouting the tenets of objectivity and decorum in favor of exposing injustice and hypocrisy and revealing deeper truths. And he did this while taking readers on gut-busting roller-coaster rides through American politics and culture.

Thompson's distinctive approach to political reporting allowed him to simultaneously expose the farce of modern politics and maintain an idealistic belief that electing the right people could make America a better place. He hit his political stride during the 1972 presidential race, when mainstream reporters on the campaign trail sought out copies of Rolling Stone magazine to revel in Thompson's no-holds-barred perspectives on what they were experiencing every day. What endeared Thompson to millions of readers was that beneath the patina of irresponsible drug use, risky gunplay and hair-raising motorcycle rides was a man who cared deeply about truth, justice and other American ideals.

Thompson's death, from a self-inflicted gunshot Sunday, was a sad end to a brilliant, bizarre life that lasted far longer--67 years--than anyone, probably including Thompson himself, expected. Purely from a journalistic standpoint, Thompson would have been smarter to burn out than to fade away. Most of his more recent writings were justifiably panned by critics as pale shadows of his classic works. For a variety of reasons, some probably related to brain damage from taking massive amounts of "extremely dangerous drugs," he could not in his golden years equal the creative prowess of his prose from the late '60s and early '70s. He got comfortable, watching satellite television at his rural Colorado homestead and spewing polemics rather than circulating among the populace with a notebook in his pocket.

But Thompson's literary decline does not diminish the profound impact of his earlier works, which have always occupied the most prominent position on my bookshelves and those of thousands of other journalists across the country. To this day, I thrill at cracking open Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and reading that famous opening line: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold." Some of Thompson's observations about Las Vegas have become legend, particularly his take on a well-known north Strip casino: "The Circus Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war."

I cringe at the scores of would-be journalists who try to imitate Thompson's style rather than find their own voice. As author Timothy Ferris notes, they all "fail hideously, of course; nobody writes like Hunter." The lesson to take from Thompson is not his unique writing technique or his reckless lifestyle but his worldview: outrage at injustice, skepticism about fear-mongering politicians and their corporate masters, and an undying idealism about what could be. Thompson had an uncanny ability to cut to the heart of the matter, such as this dark assessment of the "foul nature of life" in the 21st century, published in 2003:

"It would be easy to say that we owe it all to the Bush family from Texas, but that would be too simplistic. They are only errand boys for the vengeful, bloodthirsty cartel of raving Jesus-freaks and super-rich money mongers who have ruled this country for at least the last 20 years, and arguably for the past 200. They take orders well, and they don't ask too many questions.

"The real power in America is held by the fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War."

The fat is in the fire, my friends. The hog is out of the tunnel. So long, Raoul Duke, and here's hoping the "huge bats" aren't menacing you anymore. Mahalo.

--GEOFF SCHUMACHER