Legal Writing

What Would David Foster Wallace Write About John McCain Now?

By Roy Clark

I had never met Wallace, but we happened to share a publisher, Little, Brown, and a life that involved language, writing and teaching. You could say I looked up to Wallace, or at least to his non-fiction, because his work always challenged me to think harder and to care more deeply. He also offered a strong antidote to the poison of a cynical and self-absorbed culture: To live well, he argued in so many ways, you must get ready to embrace the thing you may now despise.

His case in point was a man named John McCain, a presidential candidate he had chosen to follow and profile in 2000 for Rolling Stone magazine, a piece expanded and republished in his collection "Consider the Lobster." It is a work worth revisiting, not only to mark the passing of an important cultural voice, but to help us all make responsible decisions in the privacy of the voting booth.

I learned very little in my college logic class (my fault), but I did come to understand "the principle of contradiction," which says that something cannot BE and NOT BE at the same time. So, wonders Wallace, is it possible that John McCain is BOTH a selfless American hero AND a snake-oil politician who is selling his heroism for political gain?

Wallace builds his interpretations of McCain upon a lengthy definition of leadership, one worth considering in the current political climate:

But Wallace understood the inclination toward cynicism and its causes, especially a desire to confuse leadership with salesmanship: "There is a difference between a great leader and a great salesman ... But if you're subjected to great salesmen and sales pitches and marketing concepts for long enough -- like from your earliest Saturday-morning cartoons, let's say -- it is only a matter of time before you start believing deep down that everything is sales and marketing, and that whenever somebody seems like they care about you or about some noble idea or cause, that person is a salesman and really ultimately doesn't give a shit about you or some cause but really just wants something for himself."

There is no single opposite to the concept of "spin," but one is authenticity, and Wallace makes clear that his natural skepticism is tempered by the authentic story of McCain's experience as a prisoner of war. That narrative, I could argue, has been oversold to the American people, but not to Wallace, at least not eight years ago. He finds the details gripping, how McCain was shot down in North Vietnam, stabbed in the groin, smashed in the shoulder by a rifle butt. His leg was broken with the bone sticking out. He was thrown in a cell and had his fractures set without any painkillers. His weight would shrink to 100 pounds.

Then suddenly he was offered his freedom because his father was an admiral -- and McCain refused, adhering to a code that required prisoners there longer to be released first. The result for McCain was four more years of confinement and torture. "Maybe he was nuts," writes Wallace, "But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he is capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches now you can feel like maybe it's not just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it's maybe the truth.  Or maybe both the truth and bullshit -- the man does want your vote, after all."

Truth and bullshit. But what about the principle of contradiction? Is it possible that something or someone can be full of truth and full of bull at the same time?

Wallace's insight leads me to some questions about the values that journalists bring to the coverage of American politics. What would political journalism look like if it was built on the notion that something could be true and bull at the same time, that such ambiguity was a virtue and not a vice?

1. Journalists would not make such a fetish out of consistency. Like a prosecuting attorney, Tim Russert at times seemed like a one-trick pony, dragging out previous statements by politicians that contradicted recent ones. It is a technique destined to increase cynicism, not abate it.

2. Rather than frame politicians as prevaricating narcissists, political reporters would help the public understand that it may be "necessary" within our current system for candidates to say one thing to win a nomination and something very different to win a general election, that the ability to revise messages for different audiences is a political strength, not a sign of hypocrisy.

3. Journalists would act less like Puritanical sin detectors, and more like a soul patrol, looking into the life story of candidates for any signs of real or potential leadership.

4. Journalists would say more things that a specific audience might not like to hear. Remember, Wallace was writing about McCain for the readers of Rolling Stone: "Let's pause here one second for a quick Rolling Stone PSA ... If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote."

We'll miss that wisdom and passion from David Foster Wallace. May he rest in a peace he could never find during his short life on this earth.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on September 26, 2008 (boomark / email).