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"Scam" ads the norm Trail Mix: Hillary haters spam cyberspace Gunning for the center Democrats make Hillary legit The blundering pundit Don Giuliani Campaign video: |
David Foster Wallace: Ain't McCain grand?
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April 4, 2000 | I don't really know. I was wasn't there and someone of my age, 39, grew up precisely at that time 5 when we began to actually question the motives, the actions, the deeds and the (in sum) point of the oh-so-sacred activities -- the songs, the protests, the sit-ins, the riots, man -- of the 1960s; and I even went to Berkeley where you were indoctrinated into the utter righteousness of the guys who were on the very real front lines of a battle with cops and sometimes worse (National Guard troops!) with shields and bayonets and tear gas and actual guns 6; but I seem to remember that amid all the protest over, the clamor about, the hatred for the war one thing that a lot of people felt strongly about (beyond the dislike of Nixon, or Johnson, the debate of whether or not there were dominos dropping in Southeast Asia, whether the protests at home might be the catalyst for something bigger, something new, politically, that might change everything and really, for the first time, put power into the hand of the people) was the feeling, again I would think felt by just about everyone against the war, that amid their comforts, their stability, the opportunities open to them to do whatever they wanted, be what they wanted, in the most luxurious place in the most luxurious country in the most luxurious time in the history of the world, that there was something somehow off in the fact there was concurrently going on the expenditure of extraordinary sums, vast sums, lots of money, on steel, on rubber, on circuitry, on computers, on radar, fuel dials, switches, rotors, cams, pistons, stabilizers, all sorts of complicated stuff like that, all in the service of "delivery" -- as the word of the time went, as some Pentagon apparatchik might have put it -- of bombs up the asses of Vietnamese civilians. You could oppose the Vietnam War for a lot of reasons, in other words, but it's hard to imagine that anyone didn't feel a little bit sorry for the sons of bitches on the ground up whose asses this grand old American armament was going -- the city folk and the villagers, the farmers and shop workers, the old and the young, the married and the unmarried, it didn't matter -- those who, think of the worst, those most fucked-over by American society and then multiply it one-hundred-fold in this backward place, maybe, at the worse, were living in filth, raising their kids in filth, a subsistence existence in a Third World country, caught (from our perspective at least) by the grip of social and geopolitical forces they probably had no inkling of, much less considered with any thoroughness. And if like me you basically believe that people everywhere always are and have been the same, that the human psyche, crafted and evolved over millions of years, just isn't going to change much over a few millennia -- that you can get an insight into the behavior in Rome, into the Han Dynasty, the Golden Horde, the Jews, the Muslims, the Germans -- if you basically think of them as Americans: dumb Southerners, arrogant Northeasterners, vacuous Angelenos, whatever, most of them selfish, greedy, solipsistic by nature despite occasional internal urges and less frequent external and acted-upon ones toward fairness or equality or unselfishness; if, in other words, you figure that your typical Vietnamese crowd could be just as ugly in its xenophobia, nationalistic urges and its ability to be led into less than honorable behavior by demagogues as any American -- you can turn it around and put yourself in their shoes and you really, in the end, can't really blame the individual participants in a crowd in that country and at that time for feeling, against whatever best instincts they might have been possessed of, nothing really magnanimous toward (you wouldn't, that is, have expected them to roll out the red carpet or have a testimonial dinner for, invite into their house or introduce to their daughters, say) the guy who'd just been trying to stick a bomb up the asses of them and their kids, even if the guy in question had a devil-may-care grin, was known for being something of a hellion and quite a ladies man to boot, indeed, to the point of being not really straight arrow enough to have followed in the footsteps of his dad and grandpop and made anything close to admiral but kinda likeable just the same, not to mention the fact that he'd taken the effort and the time and the consideration of sailing and flying the 12,000 miles or so necessary across the Pacific Ocean to do so, even if, in the event, he'd been hit by anti-aircraft fire, been ejected from his plane, breaking a few limbs in the process, and fallen into a lake and been captured.
So when the writer talks up how the candidate was, how he followed a "Code" and didn't accept an early release from his five years as a POW because of adherence to this "Code," and thereby should be supported by "Young People" for president, you don't think, Wow, what a great and principled writer, standing up for heroism and "The Code," you don't think that at all, you think, instead, it seems weird, this many years on, to sort of morally erase the situation of the Vietnamese from the theory, and to sort of forget what remains one of the few generally conceded ideas of the war, that just about everyone got a bit fucked in the pursuit of it, as befitting something with such suspicious origins; twisted, surreal operations; leavings that still catch one or another of us in moral flypaper to this day; and the ability still to put into sharp relief the odd concept, like, if I may cite just one example, "The Code" the writer talks about, which seems something puny in this context; aren't those odd little fillips of military procedure designed mostly to occupy the mind of the poor saps out there doing the shooting, giving them odd, quirky abstract concepts to bite into in their unholy position? Because, for instance, given the future candidate's injuries -- three broken limbs and a knife wound in the groin, all untreated medically -- it's hard to believe that "The Code" actually applied to him; I mean, is that how it worked, really, that if there are five POWs together, then the earliest captured has to be released first, even if one is injured, with three medically untreated broken limbs and a knife wound in the groin? And also, how do you refuse to let someone release you from POW camp? What if they just toss you out the door? Do you come back in?
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