Johnny Cash was the Last Cowboy

Johny Cash was the last Cowboy
and Hunter S. Thompson was the first... something
by Boats

Johnny Cash was the last cowboy. There will never really be another cowboy. In the same way that the samurai, hoplite, cavalry, and crusader lifestyles have rolled back into their positions as historical anecdotes, the Tao of Cowboy is a lost condition of mind.
What remains of each of these ancient, yet timeless, traditions is an aura; a mystique-steeped, glamorous spruced-up version of the truth that fit well on the shoulders of fictional protagonists. The reason that these mantles are so readily draped on fictional heroes is because they are guises that are disfigured enough by the haze of history to be digestible as pre-packaged virtue identifiers. Like fine wines certain social functions have become, through proper temporal distance, aged to the point of palatability through media. As certain extinct niches of human existence float through the fingers of historians and writers, they become corroded enough by the acid of their desire for a cohesive historical narrative that they become glamorized versions of themselves.
One such conversion that has happened recently in our history of narratives as is the creation of the Noble Savage. I don’t believe I’m overstepping my boundaries when I say that at one time Native Americans did not enjoy a favorable depiction in the majority of mediated forms. The wanted posters in most American History texts that advertise rewards for the various body parts of “savages” goes along way toward proving this point for me. However, if one were to look toward recent portrayals of Native American’s a pattern of a specific brand of stoic grace can be detected? Exoticism aside, Native Americans, particularly those with a strong warrior tradition, have been collectively selected as a group of individuals who possess the virtues of wisdom, heroic pride, prudence, strong ties to the environment, and unabashed courage in the face of danger. This characterization is different that stereotyping, which by its nature claims that a majority of the selected group possess the behavior or aspect. These heroic characterizations, such as the courage of an Indian Brave, or the prescience of mind of a Samurai, or the sublime stubbornness of the American Cowboy, are indicators of what our culture has divined are the contributed ideals of the specific era and place which gave them birth. That is to say, John Wayne’s grimace is what we as a people have decided is an aspect of what cowboy’s were trying to say. Through this process the contributions of the past are distilled into bit-sized morsels, which are fed to the eager contemporary mass of humanity. Every person seeking a niche of some kind. And because many of these socio-political pockets are born and die before we have a chance to personally observe them, our species has developed a means of hegemonicly reducing and dissemination the nuggets of wisdom gained from some of the past niches, typically those of violent or at least dramatic nature.
There is no judgment to be made about this process. It is simply part of the system by which our culture both sustains itself and adapts. Just like a biological entity, a culture obeys at least some fundamental sliver of Darwinism. The power and simplicity of the evolutionary theory is difficult to overlook. Any analysis of the long term development of, well, of just about anything is assisted by an understanding of Darwinian logic. Animals, cultures, styles of dress, shades of skin, rituals, behaviors, sexual positions, all of these observe the truth of “survival of the fittest” within their given environment. For example, the trend of wearing rayon shirts can be measured and mapped throughout time and geography and the result is a measurement that demonstrates the virility of the idea. All this by way of saying the process of mystification which seems to take place in the storing and presentation of certain social positions is natural and not a product of anything more malignant that a universal tendency for certain things to prevail and others to die out.
Characters in fiction are typically constructed out of a smattering of definable, if dynamic, qualities. This is beneficial to both the readers’ digestion and to the narrative process. It is very difficult to express an artistic idea using truly realistic human subjects. There are exceptions, and when it’s done properly the results are often masterful representations of ideas that are ultimately indescribable by any other means. The reasons for this are part of an entirely different topic.
It is a rare occasion when the soundbite-saturated, hero-making literary process is pre-empted. There is no reliable restorative process for accurately portraying the truth of a lifestyle phenomenon once it has faded into the past. On the other hand accurate sociological data on currently existing lifestyles is a commonly accepted possibility. After all, there are entire fields of research founded on this principal. This data is notoriously subjective and held up to endless scrutiny, but none the less it seems to be a valuable tool or at least a relatively interesting facet of social occupation. Like early rocketry, nobody is really sure how far we can stretch this stuff, but one the whole we seem to be willing to spend human time and energy testing the limits of subjective research.
There seem to be certain parallels between the two ventures. Rocketry, or what would ultimately become Space Exploration, is a probing of the physically unknown while Sociology is the probing of the culturally unknown. Also, both are marked by certain milestones. The Space Program has Sputnik, Apollo 11, the Mir, and while it’s a lot harder to make these calls, Sociology fittingly has people like, Charley Rose, Michael Moore, and my most firm selection Hunter S. Thompson. Obviously, I mentioned all journalists, but that is only logical seeing as they are the most visible sociologist. I do not disregard the accomplishments of every-day field observers or less-mediated sociologists, in the same way that I don’t disregard the accomplishments of all the forgotten missions which preceded Sputnik. There are simply certain examples which stand as milestones. Thompson was one of these.
He encased experiences in conscious observation and left them, like a little time capsules, embedded in his writing. Full accounts of historical experiences are impossible. Only in fiction can you be presented with a complete description of a situation, because by definition the description is the situation. This is not an aspect of reality. Instead, the best that a recorder of reality can hope to do is create a single impression that stems from an event. One single angle is how one receives reality so the only way to approach a likeness of reality is by presenting it in the same fashion.
This concept is what has been labeled “Gonzo journalism” or in a similar form “active journalism”. The essential difference between the two is that active journalism comes with a definable position while Gonzo journalism is packaged with the complexities of human observation, in all of its idiosyncratic glory.
Writing in the Gonzo fashion is a difficult skill and very few even attempt it. The very idea of approaching a story without either neutrality or bias is difficult to wrap one’s mind around. What are the methods of creating a reasonably true story while avoiding any form of narrative or specific punch-line? In the case of Hunter Thompson the evidence suggests that there is no formula other than hard work, experience, genius, and good timing. Then again, those ingredients could make anything happen. They are the quintessential elements of human progress (if such a thing exists).
Therefore, Hunter Thompson possessed the virtues that are at the core of human progress. Here I am, days after his death attempting to distill this man’s existence into one of those morsel-ettes that I was talking about. In doing so I’m neglecting the path of Gonzo journalism and instead creating a neat package that can be boiled down into a sentence or two. This is a piss-poor eulogy which stews in its own neglect for the memory of its subject. Like the grave of a soldier who died defending his homeland sunk firmly into foreign soil, this essay is a generic monument that contradicts the purpose of its homage. Yet, that very short-coming is also a testament to the difficulty of what Thompson did.
In a final pitifully defensive paragraph I’d like to finalize this piece as “active journalism” and not Gonzo, by making claim to a thesis. The speed of this “hero distillation” has rapidly increased. It seems to have taken about 30 years to decide what was virtuous about being a Hippy. There was about twenty years before there was an ideology assigned to the 70’s drug culture. The Punk movement took less time. Already skateboarding has become an iconic categorization, symbolizing something about motive rebellion. And as each of these cultural waves, some may call them fads, is tagged and catalogued, the virtues which are their backbone seem to become more and more tenuous and less and less descriptive. My description of Thompson is such. It’s entirely vague and non-characteristic. A decisive person can be said to be “like a samurai”, yet I doubt that describing someone as “Thompson-like” could signify anything about their essence. The conclusion that I draw from all of this is that we are searching with greater and greater efficiency for consumable heroes. Large populations that value personal identity require a large pool of prospective identities for people to choose from. This requirement for models by the steadily growing masses has led us to things like creating our own disposable celebrities through television shows created with no other purpose in mind. No one wants American Idol to exist so that they we can all find new music to listen to. We use it as a star factory. It refines an average person into an “idol” in record time and by the time you say “no-hit wonder” you’ve got a new face to recognize with a set of vague notions attached to it. Each reality show contestant is one more person that represents an aspect of the masses. Just as the pantheon of gods and goddesses were symbols of facets of human tendencies, so to the modern celebrity is a portrayer of contemporary human nature. As diversity is accepted as a value in our society, the number of celebrities will increase. Where older cultures accepted a small number of cultural icons’s, usually in the form of myth or legend, modern society produces these signifying individuals on a mass scale, and typically with less specifically definable merits. The aforementioned requirement of vintage is all but forgotten. Historians often differenciate between wine-making cultures and ale-producing ones. In terms of icons we have become the latter. That is why, while I greatly admire Hunter S. Thompson and I would aspire to attain some of his characteristics, I can’t define those characteristics in anything but broad strokes. I’d like to have Socrates’ ability to think logically, but I’m not sure exactly what I would want to emulate from Thompson.