Do Not Go ‘Gentle’: A DFW Primary Primer

By Pat Tomaino

The Republican candidates lumbered through their first debate Thursday, officially beginning the same mad go-around that David Foster Wallace — our subject on the radio this week — chronicled in his Rolling Stone essay “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub.” If you’re paying attention already, that piece (and Wallace’s fiction masterpiece Infinite Jest) can help you handicap the field and keep your sanity/democracy(?).

If you want at friend in politics…

DFW seemed to think that the presidency is important. It affects the economy and the compassion we express in what’s left of the welfare state. Candidates and presidents also tell us about ourselves and the big, sad feeling that sometimes pokes through American life.

So, he wrote about the 2000 GOP primary — “The Trail” — in sardonic but reverent detail. Wallace’s Weasel was the windscreen covering the countless boom mics catching the good, the bad, and the (viciously) ugly of the South Carolina primary the writer covered for two weeks in February. The Monkeys were elite reporters, descended from Washington to interpret the carnage. And the Shrub: George W. Bush, the man poised to become president.

Leader, salesman or both?

John McCain, South Carolina, 2000.

John McCain doesn’t appear in the title. In history, he’s the loser. In Wallace’s essay, though, McCain is the main subject, the political puzzle DFW is trying hard to work out. Was John McCain a real leader or merely a salesman? Was he both?

Wallace’s essential McCain was the young POW who refused to leave his buddies at the Hanoi Hilton. The war hero. (Also, the old high-roader who got kneecapped by the Shrub on the way to losing the SC primary—in many circles, a mark of further distinction.)

This may have been the stuff of leadership. But, still, DFW couldn’t quite figure out John McCain. The writer couldn’t remember a real leader — someone who seemed to try to get Americans to do hard things for the common good — since JFK:

It’s not that Kennedy was a better human being than the seven presidents we’ve had since: we know he lied about his WWII record, and had spooky Mob ties, and screwed around more in the White House than poor old Clinton could ever dream of. But JFK had that special leader-type magic, and when he said things like “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” nobody rolled their eyes or saw it as just a clever line.

Since Kennedy, Wallace wrote, Americans have preferred salesmen, like Reagan, for the Oval Office:

A great salesman is usually charismatic and likable, and he can often get us to do things (buy things, agree to things) that we might not go for on our own, and to feel good about it. Plus a lot of salesmen are basically decent people with plenty about them to admire. But even a truly great salesman isn’t a leader. This is because a salesman’s ultimate, overriding motivation is self-interest — if you buy what he’s selling, the salesman profits.

The best salesmen bamboozle the electorate; they can convince Americans that they are leaders. Usually, though, at least a few people spot the con: “…in the 80s, most younger Americans, who could smell a marketer a mile away, knew that what Reagan really was was a great salesman.”

Buyer beware

Even so, it’s hard to know what you’re getting on The Trail. Campaigns are mostly snow jobs, and every candidate seems to play along. Typically, if people elect a real leader, they won’t know until after the president takes office.

What did Wallace make of Barack Obama, for example, during his campaign? Christopher Farley of The Wall Street Journal interviewed the author in May 2008, as Obama prepared to claim the Democratic nomination:

WSJ: You write that John McCain, in 2000, had become “the great populist hope of American politics.” What parallels do you see between McCain in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2008? Mr. Wallace: There are some similarities — the ability to attract new voters, Independents; the ability to raise serious money in a grassroots way via the Web. But there are also lots of differences, many too obvious to need pointing out. Obama is an orator, for one thing — a rhetorician of the old school. To me, that seems more classically populist than McCain, who’s not a good speechmaker and whose great strengths are Q&As and small-group press confabs. But there’s a bigger [reason]. The truth — as I see it — is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it’s very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.

A promising appraisal. But who knows what Wallace would think now, seven years after the author killed himself and the country elected Obama — a moving speaker, our black, liberal president…with his army of Wall Street advisors, drone warriors, and mega-bundlers?

Meet President Gentle

The McCain/Obama puzzle amounts to this: can you tell when a cynical politician is nothing more than a cynical politician?

There are some clues in Infinite Jest, where David Foster Wallace presents the dystopian Johnny Gentle, germaphobic, post-post-populist president of the new North American super-state. Gentle is the worst case scenario: equal parts Super PAC and Rat Pack, a bizarro Sinatra obsessed with civic hygiene, more “Chairman of the Board” than Commander-in-Chief.

The promise of a good time.

“This is the projected face of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner. This is Johnny Gentle, né Joyner, lounge singer turned teenybopper throb turned B-movie mainstay, for two long-past decades known unkindly as the ‘Cleanest Man in Entertainment’…”

In bites from his second inaugural and the minds of his viewing public, Mr. Gentle seems America’s first pure snake oil president, a semi-radical departure from his predecessors — each of them lesser sales guys. Hacks.

The past has indeed been “torched,” the brush clear-cut for a new kind of pol, who drops the pretense. President Gentle will tell you straight-up: all he’s offering are good times, and they’re selling like hotcakes.

Make America grate again

Sound familiar? David Foster Wallace will, in a few quotations below, finish introducing President G. Along the way, see if you can find him in this mystical, political listicle of #GOPDebate moments.

It’s hard to say what would have offended Wallace more deeply, listicles or Donald Trump, but this is for a good cause. As we said on the radio this week, 2015 already has a spooky resemblance to DFW’s big book. Maybe Johnny Gentle is up on that stage, or somewhere in the Democratic field. And, if he is, we should know. If the Republic depended on it, could we spot and reject the pure sales(wo)man? Or would we be too busy reaching for our wallets?