Desiring Machine

Recently I watched Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. The film caught my attention with an opening scene around a minute into the opening. The back story is that on the eve of September 11th, Hunter is feeling somewhat spent as a writer. On the morning of 9/11 Hunter wakes up to file a routine sports writing story about football for ESPN. But this morning is different, what we shown is a montage of Hunter (or a lookalike) at the type writer spliced with images of the war and the smoldering towers. Narrated by Johnny Depp, Hunter’s commentary on that fateful morning is documented and presented on film. In the background is the intro to Bob Dylan’s best ever live version of All Along the Watchtower from the Biograph boxset. Over this haunting Dylan intro into Watchtower we hear Johnny Depp’s voice revivify Hunter’s spirit.

It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.
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The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now.
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It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.
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We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq…
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This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why.
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Winston Churchill once said the first casualty of war is always the truth. The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don’t say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.

The composite effect of the whole scene is awesomely dramatic for me. The music, the impeccable narration of Johnny Depp, the ghostly memory of 9/11 and haunting awareness of Hunter Thompson’s not too distance suicide just a few years later all work to deliver a stirring recollection of a moment, a momentous shared moment. The moment of 9/11 is in a very particular way memorialized here. Hunter’s instinct on the morning is prescient and painfully accurate. The feeling of the moment as expressed in the film mirrors pretty closely my own internal intuitions on the morning of 9/11. The experience of 9/11 was a mix of shock and horror, but most heavily weighing on me was the sense that this was precisely the end of an era. The “towers are gone now, … along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time”. There is not much that can or perhaps should be said about this moment. We are living after history after a moment that will always remember as having a before and after, end stop. These kinds of moments are rare, the Kennedy Assassination, Pearl Harbor and some others. Many things have been said and will be said about these moments. These kind of moments most definitely become shrouded in mystery, mystique mythology. Time has a way of cementing and reifying these kind of moments. Understandably so, because of the emotional and psychic impact. What I appreciate most about Hunter’s tuesday morning testimony is the clarity. There are no illusions about the prospects, the certainty absolute.

Read the full text of Hunter S. Thompson’s ESPN 9/11 report here. It has many gems.