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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 1) David Foster Wallace, author of "The Broom of the System," "Infinite Jest" and, more recently, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," a collection of journalism, acclaimed ("one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything," as Michiko Kakutani put it in the NYT) and impossibly scruffy and hip, now the class author of choice for upscale general-interest magazines, known, perhaps most superficially, for his involuted, amusing style, with lots of long, breathless sentences, twisting and turning up hill and down dale where his whirling mind (as we're supposed to understand) takes him; oddities like funny grammatical constructions, which constructions are illustrated here in this phrase; and the turning of conventional reporting on its head by the use of many devices, most famous among them many lengthy and discursive footnotes. This article is a parody of that technique, just as this sentence, with its deflating, post-modernist self-referentiality, is. 2) Rolling Stone, founded 1967, owned then as now by Jann Wenner, talent, impresario, genius but now, increasingly, vulgarian, star-fucking, too-rich pratt, circulation 1.2 million and change, a signal magazine, perhaps the signal American magazine of the mid part of the second half of the 20th century, having hitched its cart to pop culture's wild ride during this time, and producing, along the way, arguably the era's most riotous, honest, scintillating and irreverent melange of journalism in its widest sense -- profiles, reporting, criticism, nonsense, most notoriously and justifiably, perhaps, for the writings of one Hunter S. Thompson, on whom more in a bit.
3) John McCain, born Aug. 29, 1936, Panama Canal Zone, son and grandson of admirals, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, 1958, member of U.S. Navy 1958-81, a prisoner of war from 1967-1973, recipient of Silver Star and Bronze Star among other things, a beer distributor from 1981 to 1982, married to Cindy McCain, no less than seven kids, now a senator from Arizona, and recently a candidate, as noted above, for the Republican presidential nomination and as such the subject of the magazine article at hand. 4) As the article notes, the then Navy pilot was shot down over Hanoi, ejected himself from his plane, breaking three limbs in the process, fell into a lake in a park in the middle of the city, was dragged out by bystanders and beaten up on top of the injuries he already had, including being bayoneted in the groin; was imprisoned without medical care, then offered release (because he was an admiral's son), which was refused, Wallace writes, because of "The Code" -- something about prisoners having to be released in the order they were captured. Because he did this voluntarily, Wallace writes, McCain has "the moral authority to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us ... to believe he means them. It feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he's capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self interest." 5) The punk era, 1976, say, to 1979 or 80, call it the disco age if you want but historically punk's attitudinal dyspepsia really did mark the moment, such that Rolling Stone at the time had a great deal of trouble, didn't really know how to deal -- were the Ramones a joke? Nazis? Racists? -- and didn't they -- didn't someone say -- that Rod Stewart, Peter Townsend, heck even Mick, were just old and in the way and hey, that's just a little out of line, man, Mick was king of the world when you were a twinkle in your momma's eye. 6) "James Rector was shot right up there, on the roof on the corner of Telegraph and Dwight, the helicopters came from that direction, dropping the gas low over Sproul, it even hit the student hospital!" 7) I will explain what that something else is in a minute. But first, a step back. 8) 40,828,929 for Carter to 39,148,940 for Ford. The Electoral College vote was close, too -- 297-240. A switch of a few thousand votes in just a couple of states would have given the election to Ford. 9) Humphrey -- "Here was this monster, this shameful electrified corpse -- giggling and raving and flapping his hands at the camera like he's just been elected president. He looked like three iguanas in a feeding frenzy." Nixon: "Criminally insane and also president of the United States for five years." 10) "I have known Carter for more than two years and I have probably spent more private, human time with him than any other journalist on the '76 campaign trail." 11) "Leaving aside their coolness and esprit de corps, be advised that Rolling Stone's [as Wallace calls himself in the article] single-luckiest journalistic accident this week was his bumbling into hanging around with these camera and sound guys. This is because network news techs [I elide here one of those Wallaceian interpolations, parodied often in this very article] turn out to be way more acute and sensible political analysts than anybody you'll read or see on TV." 12) George W. Bush. 13) "These for the most part are not lines of thinking that the culture we've grown up in has encouraged Young Voters to pursue. Why do you think that is?" 14) That of a tool. 15) That maybe postmodern writing has come to this, an obsession with surfaces and a disregard for history to an extent that the past with its uncomfortable complexities and harrying nature doesn't matter; that political positions don't matter; and that the historical context for one's actions doesn't matter either, and since contrarily what does resonate in a culture so defined is the surface the image the appearance, perhaps the role of the writer is merely to reflect, even encourage, even take advantage of, this state of affairs.
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