01/24/2026
"I Worry about the health of Dr. Hunter Thompson. I think I am supposed to do that."
A Political Disease
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I worry about the health of Dr. Hunter Thompson. I think I am supposed to do that. He is the most creatively crazy and vulnerable of the New Journalists, seemingly, and scattered throughout his dispatches are alarming reports on his health. Nor are his sicknesses imaginary. In this, his latest book, he gives the opinion of a physician: "He'd never seen anybody with as bad a case of anxiety as I had. He said I was right on the verge of a complete mental, physical, and emotional collapse."
Why would he tell us this? What could this be but a cry for help? And what can we do to help him? It isn't as though he doesn't try to help himself. He isn't like George Orwell, for instance, who is said to have been fairly listless in fighting disease. Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does.
Again: what can we do to help him? I do not know him, except from his books, which are brilliant and honorable and valuable. The evidence in those argues that reality is killing him, because it is so ugly and cheap. He imagines in "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" that reality, and hence his health, might be improved if nobler men held office in this country and addressed themselves truthfully to the problems of our time.
There is plenty of news in this newest Fear and Loathing book. Thompson suggests, for instance, that the person who created the poisonous statement, "I stand behind Tom Eagleton 1,000 percent," was not McGovern. It may have been Eagleton who did that, telling reporters what McGovern supposedly said. And Thompson detests Eagleton as much as he adores [football player] Duane Thomas. He calls the Senator "an opportunistic liar," "a hack," and "another one of those cheap hustlers," among other things.
Insults of that sort, isolated in a review, convey the idea of journalism at least as contemptible as the man attacked. But in the context of such a long and passionate book, such lapses seem almost beautiful. Curiously, they are so frenzied, so grotesque, that they can do no harm to Eagleton. I am extremely grateful for the New Journalism, as many responsible people are not. And what I think about it now is that it is the literary equivalent of Cubism: All rules are broken; we are shown pictures such as no mature, well-trained artist ever painted before, and in the crazy new pictures we somehow see luminous new aspects of beloved old truths….
The New Journalists are Populists screaming in pain.
They believe that it is easy and natural for Americans to be brotherly and just. That illusion, if it is an illusion, is the standard for well-being in the New Journalists' minds. Any deviation from that standard is perceived as a wound or a sickness. So the present atmosphere in America seems to them to be like the famous torture described by Orwell of tying the victim's hands and enclosing his head in a cage. And then a hungry rat is put into the cage.
As for those who wish to know more about Thompson and his ideals, his frazzled nervous system, his self-destructiveness, and all that—he is unabridgeable. He is that rare sort of American author who must be read. He makes exciting, moving collages of carefully selected junk. They must be experienced. They can't be paraphrased.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "A Political Disease" (originally published in Harper's, Vol. 247, No. 1478, July, 1973), in his Wampeters Foma & Granfalloons (copyright © 1974 by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
