Journalists do not make for very good legends. They’re the ones who write sweeping encomia, who appoint figures “seminal,” or “notorious,” or “The Superlative Adjective Noun of Our Time,” not the ones who become these things themselves. Still the discursive mediators between the Truth and the People, writers make heroes, villains, and archetypes out of public figures, personae out of persons. It is unusual, then, that the late Hunter S. Thompson should have been—remains, even—both journalist and demagogue, hell, demigod to some, that The Greatest Gonzo Journalist of Our Time should even seem viable as a moniker: how can one be both a tall tale…and a journalist?

The answer is at the bottom of a concoction of bravery, drugs, cojones, resonance, and, maybe just a little bit, a biopic (if you consider Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to be that). Thompson was not the first, last, or even the most brazen, critic of tyranny, perceived or otherwise, nor was he the only chemical-fueled one. His prose style is at once furious and adequate—adequate in its vividness and its ability to disquiet—and the obscenity of that combination perhaps first propelled Thompson to notoriety. What keeps him there, though, is the protagonist of all his books and articles, Hunter S. Thompson. So to answer the question, is there, can there, will there ever be another demigod journalist: only when the right disillusioned critic channels sociopolitical commentary through autobiography through shattering every motherfucking nicety of his milieu on the floor of the feral soul.

Plenty of figures—“journalists” is too constricting a term anymore, and it has been widely touted that bloggers are Hunter’s heirs anyway—have some of the necessary elements for gonzo-hood and, indeed, have the adulation or disgust of many in the lettered community, both the sounders-off and the lay readers. Some are established and respected already. Christopher Hitchens is both firebrand and lightning rod, but he’s old (and what’s more, considers the young to be scum), a flip-flopper, and a drunk, which, frankly, isn’t all that exciting anymore. Michael Moore, though not a writer, is a pioneer in the medium of incendiary documentary and very much a protagonist in his own stories, but he’s also aging, fat, and, infinitely worse, something of a bleeding heart who would have worn the name “Hunter” ironically, had he been born with it. P. J. O’Rourke is also too old, and too right-wing. Not to say that conservative journalists cannot be controversial, relevant, trenchant, or autobiographical, but this new radical knight in shining scatological armor will have to ride in from the anarchical left, wielding indignation and change in the other. “Conservative” literally means “f change.” Woodward and Bernstein were heavily personally invested in their story and that story was much more politically momentous than anything Thompson ever scooped (and they too got a movie), but there was not nearly enough madness to their method for them to even approach cult-figure status; they might have tried giving themselves porno-flick pseudonyms.

Where does that leave us? Well, with certain problems, to be sure. The aura of celebrity tends to radiate brightest from the young and good-looking, neither of which asset proves any help at all to the slow and spirit-breaking ascension to journalistic legitimacy. This new cult-icon writer would need to bridge the difficult chasm between rabble-rousing and establishment respectability, to be noisomely and stridently against the grain while also resonating at the same pitch as some widespread dissatisfaction. The writer would have to inject his own larger-than-life self into all his articles—which would read more like gritty novellas of gross vice and injustice—and of course there would have to be an outlaw factor: some kind of drugs-and/or-prostitutes element that could allow for unapologetic hedonism followed by the rollercoaster from rehab to recidivism. No wonder there aren’t many who have stepped up and taken on the gonzo mantle!

That isn’t to say there are no candidates, though. One camp of potentials hails from the Literary Douchebag school of thought, including writers such as Tucker Max and, to an extent, Toby Young, who marry mild stylistic competence with their own mildly amusing anecdotes and filter them through a totally edgy new “asshole” way of sneering at the world. I suppose some people feel some kind of righteous endorphin rush at finally hearing someone have the balls to really stick it to all those “PC dykes” and tell it how it is, or something, but writers in this vein, thank god, will never be iconic because 1) the extent of their cause is the crusade to make it ok to brag about insulting women again, 2) their focus is, to be generous, cultural and no relevant journalist has ever ignored completely the world of politics proper, and 3) their stories don’t reach into the mythical. They drink a few beers, sleep with a few women, and tell off a few handicapped people, but they never peer into the abyss of “two bags of Grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers,” and etc. Whether Thompson’s stories veer into hyperbole or not, the drugs make the man. The Asshole Journalists do what we want to do, the Gonzo ones do what we probably anatomically can’t do.

Who else? Marty Beckerman, “America’s Sexxxiest Young Journalist” and author of Generation S.L.U.T. (Sexually Liberated Urban Teens): A Brutal Feel-Up Session with Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace, whose comically self-promotional act is probably, literally, a promotional act. Nuance doesn’t sell in this business, but Beckerman’s braggadocio is tiresome, his humor is tepid, and his feats, well, aren’t. Though I don’t think he’ll be the voice, and I really don’t think he’ll be the conscience, that strikes the foremost chord with our generation, he is only 23, so there’s more promise there. Two other candidates were, and perhaps still are, Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames, who found in newly-capitalist Russia a place as weird and perilous as Thompson’s Las Vegas, and who bludgeoned propriety with their Moscow-based eXile, a publication powered entirely by hard drugs and prostitutes. Though their publication had a relatively niche audience, both have gone on to opine on American politics and our general zeitgeist. Or maybe, we don’t even have to look beyond Wheelock Street. The Review staffers are rumored to have a Keggerator in their office, drugs are really the only explanation for the existence of the Dfp, and which of us among TDI’s fledgling editorial staff can honestly say we remember more than a few blurry snapshots of those heady first six months?

Thompson, in the panegyrical obituaries that almost universally feted him, was described, among other epithets, as the “Original Gonzo Journalist” and founder of the “Gonzo Legacy.” Both of these seem to assume that there have been, will be, or, perhaps most strikingly, should be other Gonzo journalists. Certainly the so-called objectivity of “Old” Journalism will never be attempted again with a completely straight face and we’ll probably never tire of our writers being truth-spittin’ and hard-living’, but there’s something that will prevent Gonzo from ever truly taking hold with us, and it’s not just the careerist fear that made me think twice about ending this article with my freebasing-meth-and-shitting-in-a-Salvation-Army-bucket anecdote. It’s uncertainty. The ‘60s had an enemy. The ‘70s had several. It was easy to charge into the fray behind someone whose drug use was seen as being more bound up in a greater mindset of liberation than simply for hedonism’s sake, and whose anti-Nixon screeds were fueled by desperation for the country’s welfare rather than Ivy-League-picket-line indignation. Sure, we can find enemies today, but they come off as more inept or deranged (depending on who your enemies are) than insidious and calculating. The truth is, we can’t have our own Gonzo journalist until we figure out what the hell to make of this good, evil, evangelical, God-hating, postmodern, post-postmodern, terror-filled, freedom-fighting, Date-My-Mom world.