[If] you accept what Thompson is doing, [Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72] works. That is, this heavily personalized writing-on-the-run, riddled here and there by the clear eye of hindsight, does convey an honest picture of a political writer picking his way through all the hoopla, propaganda, tedium, and exhaustion of a campaign.
For the straight political writer, survival is sought both physically and professionally throughout an election year; keeping the body functioning and the soul unsold. For the advocacy journalist such as Thompson, whose soul straightforwardly was on the barrelhead for George McGovern from the start, the odyssey is much less detached, but for that very reason more colorful and entertaining. A lot of it seems repetitious and irrelevant after a while, and more Hunter Thompson than you want at a stretch. But when was the last time you read in the establishment press that Edmund Muskie in Wisconsin "talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop"?… This is the stuff with which boredom is chased on cold, boozy nights on the press bus, but seldom passed on to readers of The New York Times. The so-called objective reporter has to live with and master his schizophrenia; the advocator can wing it, and Thompson on the campaign trail, as anywhere else, seldom hits the ground.
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