Remembering David Foster Wallace

My favorite contemporary author - David Foster Wallace - hanged himself almost two weeks ago. I'm still coming to terms with his death, because I am devastated by the notion that I will never read new words from him. The New Yorker's Deborah Treisman nailed it:

"He was one of the few satirists able to avoid meanness; he was moral without being judgmental. He took on the absurdities of modern life in an attempt to understand or to parse them, not to mock them ... Gleefully compacted as his language could be, it was designed to be unwrapped—and there was always a gift inside for those who took the trouble."

The relevance of his death to a political blog is that DFW wrote what I consider to be the definitive piece about John McCain, and he did it 8 years ago in Rolling Stone. It's long but definitely worth the read. He begins by suggesting what most pundits of the time believed, which is that McCain somehow transcended modern political cynicism, and that the cliches didn't sound so cliche coming from him, because he actually lived the words other politicians spoke: honor, code, duty, etc. (Forgive him for sounding like Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men.) So far, nothing extraordinary about DFW. Except, by the end of the piece, you get this story of how McCain wants to call a young supporter who felt betrayed by the political process due to Bush's push-polling:

"McCain's campaign wants to publicize McCain keeping his promise and calling a traumatized kid, but also to publicize the fact that McCain is calling him "privately" and not exploiting Chris Duren for crass political purposes ... Does the shrewd calculation of appeal here imply that McCain doesn't really care about Chris and want to buck him up and restore the kid's faith in the Political Process? Not necessarily. But what it does mean is that McCain2000 wants to have it both ways, rather like modern corporations who give to charity and then try to reap PR benefits by hyping their altruism in their ads. Does stuff like this mean the gifts and phone call aren't "good"? The answer depends on how gray-area-tolerant you are about sincerity vs. marketing, or sincerity plus marketing, or leadership plus the packaging and selling of same. Nobody else can tell you how to see it or convince you you shouldn't yawn and turn away in disgust. Maybe McCain deserves the disgust; maybe he's really just another salesman."

To have written this in 2000 is remarkable, because most commentators were still suckling at the Straight Talk Express teat. But DFW had a novelist's eye, and I think he realized that the Straight Talk veneer was merely a different brand of cynical politicization, not something different in kind. I will miss this writer deeply.

-Education Dude