As I write, Raoul Duke is standing blindfolded in front of an Iranian firing squad, haggling over the bribe he is offering. For Doonesbury's sake, I hope those atavistic waterheads grease the twisted little bugger; he hasn't been funny for months now. We would all be better off without him. Like Hunter S. Thompson's journalistic style, Uncle Duke has grown predictable….

Perhaps that is a harsher way to put it than Thompson's work deserves. Many people I respect consider Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas an American classic. Certainly parts of it are very funny in a deranged sort of way, mostly the parts that would fit into a George Carlin monologue under the aegis of "How stoned were you?"… I shall not masquerade as a grave literary moralist and deny that Thompson can make me laugh, nor that he knows more about Americans and the national condition than many of his sterner and more responsible colleagues in the press. (p. 342)

Just about the only way of taking him seriously is as an updated Western humorist, a teller of tall tales and outrageous whoppers, Rolling Stone's own Mike Fink. But that is not all of it. My own laughter at Thompson's carryingson is usually uneasy, since it proceeds from what is most self-indulgent and unattractive about my generation's response to the Vietnam era, and the more Gonzo journalism one reads, the fewer the laughs.

For one things, the man repeats himself shamelessly [in The Great Shark Hunt], in the process killing off words in the fashion of any Hollywood promo man. (pp. 342-43)

America is the world, and the world began about 1959, so far as the eldest members of our tribe can determine. All the rest is myth and legend, a continuous present of two-dimensional parables in which fact and value yield to the imperatives of adolescent self-dramatization. Thus the assassination of John F. Kennedy is Noah's flood and modern history commenced at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 when twisted, atavistic fascist demiurges seized control of that world…. Despite the ministrations of St. George McGovern and Jimmy the Apostle (Thompson was an early adept), and despite Watergate, the forces of darkness remain in control.

I do not wish to be understood as making light of those sad events; quite the opposite. But I'll take Mike Royko on Chicago—or better, Dreiser, Wright, Bellow, Farrell or Mark Smith—every time over Chicken Little. Political melodrama of the Thompson variety proceeds from a particularly perverse sentimentality; the man predicts cataclysm when he is not even expecting rain. The real harmfulness of such bogus melodrama, as George Orwell pointed out, is that persons who take it seriously are usually converted to the opposite persuasion at the first hard knock of reality. (p. 343)