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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? | page 1, 2, 3 But first a step back. The writer isn't alone -- everyone thinks the candidate's a hero, no one talks about the Vietnamese up whose asses the candidate was trying to shove a bomb that night -- but the writer was writing in a special place, The Magazine, which has an interesting history, having been at one point a striking repository for interesting journalism, a lot of interesting political journalism. With a couple of other outlets, notably the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine, which became New York, which is kind of a shell now but used to be a central repository for what came to be called "The New Journalism," the magazine did a lot of writing like this, nothing more radical and controversial, at that time, than publishing the work of Hunter S. Thompson, the political reporter. Hunter S. Thomson -- fuck-up, hellion, honest-to-god agent provocateur, imp and menace (he was also a liar and really not liked by many people) -- did two things: Dogged Nixon through the 1972 elections and Watergate, and then latched on to Jimmy Carter four years later. His sympathetic coverage in 1976 of someone who to the then-still-potent grail of the youth vote (this was still just the third presidential election after 18-year-olds got the vote) might otherwise had seem a genteel Southern cracker at best may have played a role both in Carter's capturing the Democratic nomination and then, a few months later, by a very narrow margin 8, the presidency. In an issue dated June 3, 1976, the magazine published a cover story: "Jimmy Carter & the Great Leap of Faith: An Endorsement, with Fear and Loathing, by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson." The riotous, 25,000-plus-word-long piece, amusing to this day, amid page after page of Thompson's fencing with Secret Servicemen, with political aides, with Ted Kennedy, amid casual libels still potent today 9, presents a powerful portrait of Carter, based, as the author says in a rare burst both of self-disclosure and seeming honesty 10 on some two years of personal and professional experience watching the candidate. Thompson knew delegate counts, electoral history and campaign strategies; he was a reporter, doing the actual behind-the-scenes work of the beat man, talking to players, hearing what was up. As a by-product of all of this, in early 1974, he got wind of the campaign of a Southern Democratic governor not very well known to the rest of the country, and followed him for the next two years, culminating in the classic of political journalism that was called "Jimmy Carter & the Great Leap of Faith" and had a drawing of Carter with a Confederate flag wrapped over his shoulder on the cover and was called inside "Third-Rate Romance, Low-Rent Rendezvous" and was illustrated with a line drawing of Carter as a Cheshire cat, by all of which I mean to indicate -- this would go without saying to those who grew up reading Thompson, but would not to those who didn't -- that Thompson in typical fashion spent a great deal more of the article detailing Carter's faults than he does, at the end of a very long article, offering up, grudgingly, the almost careless opinion that he thought Carter might not be a bad president.
Compared to this, the writer's article is two-day-old beer. (C'mon, you think, we've read this all before, the haggard, sleep-deprived journos, the monotony of life on the campaign trail, the hierarchy of the big-name reporters above the little-known ones, the jovial camaraderie that nonetheless develops ...) And sometimes the writer comes off as a bit incredulous, as in one priceless, very long section in which the writer tells us that the networks news technicians -- the sound and audio guys -- know more about the campaign, and have a more sophisticated analysis of the campaign, than the news people 11, this variation on the old dependable of the common-sense-dispensing cabbie or barber having gone out with the fedora but in the writer's hands and in the writer's breathless, long-sentenced style continuing on here for a couple of columns, all in the service of detailing a purportedly sophisticated analysis of what the candidate should have done in South Carolina once his opponent 12 went negative on him, which "extraordinarily nuanced and sophisticated" assessment on the part of the tech guys' being: If the candidate goes negative on his opponent in return, he'll look bad. I'm not a famous author like the magazine writer but I think a lot of what the news tech guys were saying they'd heard from the political reporters they follow around all day. But basically the writer was writing for dumb people -- yeah, the tech guys really know what's up, not like those TV people, stupid journalists! -- and trying to get them to agree with him about how honest and sincere the candidate is, and how, perhaps, America's Young People, understandably detached from the current political scene, might want to give him a chance, and how things have gotten so bad -- yeah, Christ, time was when heroes could just be heroes! -- that you can't even tell whether to accept the seeming heroism of the candidate at face value, because he's running for president and in varying degrees has to use sleazy techniques to forcefully represent himself as a non-sleazy politician, all to the end of trying to get the Young People he writes about to vote for the candidate, even speculating darkly that there are evil forces at work mitigating against just this eventuality and at one point he even asks a very important, very portentously phrased question 13, the real answer to which being something entirely different from the one he envisioned, to wit, that it's possible that Young People don't vote, don't care about the process, feel apathetic (if indeed they do, because among many other journalistic failings of the article there's actually no hard evidence in it that this is the case), not because evil people don't want them to vote for the candidate but because they can sense in the mad homogenization of the media; in the pompousness of famous writers; in the contempt for their intelligence virtually palpable in an article that barely mentions the candidate's positions on things like abortion and gun control among about 5,000 questionable Republican positions on things affecting the magazine's readers; and in the intellectual vapidity that deems these issues (which are the things that matter, right, what the candidate stands for) less important that the image on which he based his campaign; that they can, in sum, sense in all of these issues what role in an arguably important event -- a presidential election -- has been taken by both the magazine and the writer 14. And one other thing as well 15.
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