Tuesday, September 23, 2008
The death of David Foster Wallace has meant that I have been reading obits of David Foster Wallace, and revisiting some things that I hadn't seen the first time through. GJA twigged me to "The Broom of the System" when it came out, but Wallace* was a prolific guy, so there is quite a bit (including "Infinite Jest") that has gotten by me. This profile of John McCain, which ran in Rolling Stone in 2000, was new to me. In view of what has now become apparent about McCain I'd have to say that Wallace now appears naive. A lot of people were fooled, and Wallace at least gets to why that would be. Some people have suggested that McCain has changed, and ask what Wallace would have made of him today, but McCain didn’t change. People don’t change, not like that. Eight years ago he looked better than Bush because Bush was so completely out of his depth. Although I’m less inclined to believe that military experience is much of a qualification for national office than some are**, at least McCain had actual military experience; Bush was the worst kind of shirker***, and then he was technically a deserter and that told us something about his character. Although I am not so inclined to believe that being a senator is a strong selling point for a Presidential candidate, McCain had Washington experience, and that had to count for more than being a partial owner of the Texas Rangers. Although neither man actually went out and made their own money, at least McCain married his.
There was also the sense back then that McCain was running his own campaign, and that Bush was merely an anointed catspaw****. That’s changed– but it has changed because McCain has allowed it to. He’d have gone along eight years ago too, but it wasn’t his turn. Because he is hot-tempered (and spoiled) he came off as a straight talker because he mouthed off. That wasn’t honesty– it was a tantrum.
On his best day McCain is a mediocrity. He got caught in a financial scandal, and has based his career on that road to Damascus moment and his POW experience. McCain-Feingold is really his only legislative achievement, and it is mostly unconstitutional. He is unpopular in his party because he is kind of a jerk. Look at the toadying lickspitles he is friends with. Lindsey Graham, a tower of pudding. Joe Lieberman, a hissing and a byword. Across the aisle there’s John Kerry, a brother in arms who McCain has betrayed every single time it was convenient to John McCain to do so. Kerry’s judgment is implicated by his inclination to tap McCain for VP, but it says worse things about McCain that he denied being asked, and that he did nothing to halt the shameful swiftboat attacks made on Kerry. John McCain isn’t interested in anyone else, and is a servant to his own ambition. Always has been, probably. The one time in his life that he can point to as evidence to the contrary is the time in the Hanoi Hilton, and Wallace picks up on that, and writes movingly about it. When was the second time? Was it when he came home and found his shattered wife, then divorced her? Was it when he met the woman who was to become his second wife, and realized that with her money he could become anything? (Anything except an admiral.)
Was even that one time so noble? I believe that he was in horrible pain, to be sure. Probably he thought he was going to die; probably he wished he could die-- but could he have accepted the offer of early release? Wallace thinks that almost anyone would have, and that McCain did something heroic by thinking outside himself, but I'm not so sure. How do you go home like that? How does the son of an admiral go home and say, "I couldn't take it any more?" It's not just his family-- although it is not difficult to imagine him in his cell thinking, "I've fucked up everything else in my life. I wouldn't even be here if I hadn't fucked up. This is the final exam, Johnny boy. Get this right." If he had done anything else he couldn't have faced the shame of seeing his father, and he wouldn't have been able to face the shame of seeing his classmates and fellow officers-- his whole life was the Navy. Look at his mother, even today. Do you think for a minute that John McCain wanted to come home and tell his mother that he'd failed again? Watching her at the convention you couldn't help but imagine that she was thinking, "I hope this works out. It will make up for his leaving the Navy without achieving flag rank." How hard was it, really, to get being a POW right? Pain would have been nothing compared to having to live with the shame. So sure he suffered, but there doesn't seem to me to be anything extraordinary about it-- in his mind probably there really wasn't a choice. Maybe it seemed more remarkable to David Foster Wallace, whose brain chemistry betrayed him, and who proved to be unable to deal with existential pain. For a guy like McCain, what he went through was five years of being at the dentist. Hell, being a plebe was designed to make what McCain went through tolerable, and the notion of giving up unimaginable.
McCain hasn’t changed. He’s the admiral’s son, the guy who came home from the war and reckoned that he was entitled to a wife who was younger and prettier– and richer. He’s the guy who took the free vacations, and hung around with Charles Keating because that’s what you get to do when you are a senator. He is disrespectful to his current wife because he is disrespectful to all women– they exist as objects to him, as do reporters and staff. The fact that reporters and staff put up with it reflects on their personal self-esteem issues-- something that Wallace gets right*****. It is hardly a credential-- it just means he is a jerk. If the fawning press could get over it we would be in a better position to see it for what it is.
I suspect a lot of people say that they “used to like” McCain because they are unwilling to admit that they were wrong about him. It’s okay– he is a type, and that type has an appeal. Everybody gets fooled sometimes, and McCain has fooled a lot of people. But don’t kid yourself. He has always been prepared to do whatever it takes to get what he wants. He is the same man he has always been.
Every four years I dig out something to read about a past election. Sometimes it is one of Teddy White's "Making of the President" series, a lot of the time because of how old I am it is something about the various Nixon campaigns. This year, because I spent some time with my Uncle Fred, the only other Norman Mailer fan I know, it was Mailer's account of the Kennedy convention, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket". This piece, by Michael Chabon, "Obama & the Conquest of Denver" is Maileresque, and is a bit more clear-eyed than Wallace's McCain article from eight years ago. Perhaps what is appealing about the Wallace article is that it is trying so hard to avoid being cynical. For me, I like EGA's recent quip: "I'm also probably going to go ring bells and talk tomorons swing voters with my friend Susan's beau. (How could anyone possibly not know whom they're voting for? Don't these people watch TV?)". Every single thing about McCain's campaign has been so blatantly cynical and dishonest that it is difficult to understand how anyone could believe him. Even if you agree with him on something -- assuming you can get his position on something to settle down long enough to agree with him-- how can you be confident that he means it? Once in his life he did the right thing, and on that basis he expects people to look past the rest? I don't get it. Are people that stupid? I suppose I know the answer, but I wish I didn't.
There is a great W.C. Fields bit in which he is asked how he got the name "Honest John". It is terrific mostly because it is the only filmed version of his famous pool table routine, and if you haven't seen it you should. Fields plays pool, and is brilliant, and as he chalks his cue, and does this and that he tells a long anecdote about how once in a bar a guy took out his glass eye and then later Fields found it and returned it. "And ever since that day," he says, "I've been known as Honest John." People say they want a candidate that is "like them", but they don't mean it. The Obama family has one car and one house. They went to fancy schools, but they went to them on their own records. They were nobody's legacies. Obama is his own invention, and American in a way, as he has pointed out, that can only happen in America. Families like the McCains are everywhere. There is nothing unique about being a military brat. There is nothing about going into the service because your father did and his father did that isn't something that they do in France or China, or Saudi Arabia or in any other country that has a military, which is all of them. Most of us don't go into the military, and as a result some of us fetishize it somewhat. Some of that may be liberal guilt. Because of my age I joke that people my age went into the military for one of two reasons: either they got a bad lottery number, or the judge gave them a choice. That's not completely true, of course-- I know a number of capable, qualified people who served honorably, and are today honorable individuals. None of them make a fetish out of anything but hard work, and now that I think of it, none of them married beer heiresses, so I guess that makes them just like us. Or more like us than Honest John McCain.
I'm not saying that this race should be about character-- what both Chabon and Wallace demonstrate pretty conclusively is that we can't really know anything about the true character of either of these men. Part of what I am saying is that the people who seem inclined to vote on "character" also seem to be backing the wrong horse, but what I really want to say is that character is the wrong question. If that is really the best that the the McCain people have then what they have essentially demonstrated is that they have no ideas-- none at all. This should come as no shock. Bush and Cheney had ideas, but they were all bad. McCain's idea is that it is his turn to be President, and if being like Bush is the way to get there, then he is completely prepared to throw any idea he ever had-- and it is not like there were ever a lot-- right over the side to get there.
* Perhaps the best way to remember him is to use footnotes.
**Recall that Gore volunteered, and served as an enlisted man. Military service was different for McCain-- although he also was, technically, a volunteer, he was a Service Academy legacy. It seems unlikely that McCain ever considered *not* going into the military. Gore went because it seemed to him the right thing to do. Clinton didn't because it didn't to him. Clinton was, technically, correct, which got him into hot water. Being technically correct often did that to Clinton.
***Bush? Pulled strings, Texas Air Guard, and when he found he didn't care for it, he ducked out.
**** Wallace would have loved the opportunity to use this word.
***** Last footnote. Read the article. Wallace was good, even when he was wrong. I'm sorry he is dead, because I enjoyed reading him. I enjoy a lot of his contemporaries more, even though I hate them all because I am not one of them, but Wallace was unique and valuable. It is a shame that he didn't leave us with more.
There was also the sense back then that McCain was running his own campaign, and that Bush was merely an anointed catspaw****. That’s changed– but it has changed because McCain has allowed it to. He’d have gone along eight years ago too, but it wasn’t his turn. Because he is hot-tempered (and spoiled) he came off as a straight talker because he mouthed off. That wasn’t honesty– it was a tantrum.
On his best day McCain is a mediocrity. He got caught in a financial scandal, and has based his career on that road to Damascus moment and his POW experience. McCain-Feingold is really his only legislative achievement, and it is mostly unconstitutional. He is unpopular in his party because he is kind of a jerk. Look at the toadying lickspitles he is friends with. Lindsey Graham, a tower of pudding. Joe Lieberman, a hissing and a byword. Across the aisle there’s John Kerry, a brother in arms who McCain has betrayed every single time it was convenient to John McCain to do so. Kerry’s judgment is implicated by his inclination to tap McCain for VP, but it says worse things about McCain that he denied being asked, and that he did nothing to halt the shameful swiftboat attacks made on Kerry. John McCain isn’t interested in anyone else, and is a servant to his own ambition. Always has been, probably. The one time in his life that he can point to as evidence to the contrary is the time in the Hanoi Hilton, and Wallace picks up on that, and writes movingly about it. When was the second time? Was it when he came home and found his shattered wife, then divorced her? Was it when he met the woman who was to become his second wife, and realized that with her money he could become anything? (Anything except an admiral.)
Was even that one time so noble? I believe that he was in horrible pain, to be sure. Probably he thought he was going to die; probably he wished he could die-- but could he have accepted the offer of early release? Wallace thinks that almost anyone would have, and that McCain did something heroic by thinking outside himself, but I'm not so sure. How do you go home like that? How does the son of an admiral go home and say, "I couldn't take it any more?" It's not just his family-- although it is not difficult to imagine him in his cell thinking, "I've fucked up everything else in my life. I wouldn't even be here if I hadn't fucked up. This is the final exam, Johnny boy. Get this right." If he had done anything else he couldn't have faced the shame of seeing his father, and he wouldn't have been able to face the shame of seeing his classmates and fellow officers-- his whole life was the Navy. Look at his mother, even today. Do you think for a minute that John McCain wanted to come home and tell his mother that he'd failed again? Watching her at the convention you couldn't help but imagine that she was thinking, "I hope this works out. It will make up for his leaving the Navy without achieving flag rank." How hard was it, really, to get being a POW right? Pain would have been nothing compared to having to live with the shame. So sure he suffered, but there doesn't seem to me to be anything extraordinary about it-- in his mind probably there really wasn't a choice. Maybe it seemed more remarkable to David Foster Wallace, whose brain chemistry betrayed him, and who proved to be unable to deal with existential pain. For a guy like McCain, what he went through was five years of being at the dentist. Hell, being a plebe was designed to make what McCain went through tolerable, and the notion of giving up unimaginable.
McCain hasn’t changed. He’s the admiral’s son, the guy who came home from the war and reckoned that he was entitled to a wife who was younger and prettier– and richer. He’s the guy who took the free vacations, and hung around with Charles Keating because that’s what you get to do when you are a senator. He is disrespectful to his current wife because he is disrespectful to all women– they exist as objects to him, as do reporters and staff. The fact that reporters and staff put up with it reflects on their personal self-esteem issues-- something that Wallace gets right*****. It is hardly a credential-- it just means he is a jerk. If the fawning press could get over it we would be in a better position to see it for what it is.
I suspect a lot of people say that they “used to like” McCain because they are unwilling to admit that they were wrong about him. It’s okay– he is a type, and that type has an appeal. Everybody gets fooled sometimes, and McCain has fooled a lot of people. But don’t kid yourself. He has always been prepared to do whatever it takes to get what he wants. He is the same man he has always been.
Every four years I dig out something to read about a past election. Sometimes it is one of Teddy White's "Making of the President" series, a lot of the time because of how old I am it is something about the various Nixon campaigns. This year, because I spent some time with my Uncle Fred, the only other Norman Mailer fan I know, it was Mailer's account of the Kennedy convention, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket". This piece, by Michael Chabon, "Obama & the Conquest of Denver" is Maileresque, and is a bit more clear-eyed than Wallace's McCain article from eight years ago. Perhaps what is appealing about the Wallace article is that it is trying so hard to avoid being cynical. For me, I like EGA's recent quip: "I'm also probably going to go ring bells and talk to
There is a great W.C. Fields bit in which he is asked how he got the name "Honest John". It is terrific mostly because it is the only filmed version of his famous pool table routine, and if you haven't seen it you should. Fields plays pool, and is brilliant, and as he chalks his cue, and does this and that he tells a long anecdote about how once in a bar a guy took out his glass eye and then later Fields found it and returned it. "And ever since that day," he says, "I've been known as Honest John." People say they want a candidate that is "like them", but they don't mean it. The Obama family has one car and one house. They went to fancy schools, but they went to them on their own records. They were nobody's legacies. Obama is his own invention, and American in a way, as he has pointed out, that can only happen in America. Families like the McCains are everywhere. There is nothing unique about being a military brat. There is nothing about going into the service because your father did and his father did that isn't something that they do in France or China, or Saudi Arabia or in any other country that has a military, which is all of them. Most of us don't go into the military, and as a result some of us fetishize it somewhat. Some of that may be liberal guilt. Because of my age I joke that people my age went into the military for one of two reasons: either they got a bad lottery number, or the judge gave them a choice. That's not completely true, of course-- I know a number of capable, qualified people who served honorably, and are today honorable individuals. None of them make a fetish out of anything but hard work, and now that I think of it, none of them married beer heiresses, so I guess that makes them just like us. Or more like us than Honest John McCain.
I'm not saying that this race should be about character-- what both Chabon and Wallace demonstrate pretty conclusively is that we can't really know anything about the true character of either of these men. Part of what I am saying is that the people who seem inclined to vote on "character" also seem to be backing the wrong horse, but what I really want to say is that character is the wrong question. If that is really the best that the the McCain people have then what they have essentially demonstrated is that they have no ideas-- none at all. This should come as no shock. Bush and Cheney had ideas, but they were all bad. McCain's idea is that it is his turn to be President, and if being like Bush is the way to get there, then he is completely prepared to throw any idea he ever had-- and it is not like there were ever a lot-- right over the side to get there.
* Perhaps the best way to remember him is to use footnotes.
**Recall that Gore volunteered, and served as an enlisted man. Military service was different for McCain-- although he also was, technically, a volunteer, he was a Service Academy legacy. It seems unlikely that McCain ever considered *not* going into the military. Gore went because it seemed to him the right thing to do. Clinton didn't because it didn't to him. Clinton was, technically, correct, which got him into hot water. Being technically correct often did that to Clinton.
***Bush? Pulled strings, Texas Air Guard, and when he found he didn't care for it, he ducked out.
**** Wallace would have loved the opportunity to use this word.
***** Last footnote. Read the article. Wallace was good, even when he was wrong. I'm sorry he is dead, because I enjoyed reading him. I enjoy a lot of his contemporaries more, even though I hate them all because I am not one of them, but Wallace was unique and valuable. It is a shame that he didn't leave us with more.
// posted by Bill @ 8:10 AM 
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