DFW and Jann Wenner and John McCain
I’m as happy to nihil nisi as the next guy, but a new story in the latest Rolling Stone reminds me about a previous time the magazine took a deep look at John McCain. The piece was written by the late David Foster Wallace.
It was a classic example of “celebrity-on-celebrity” journalism, in which a bad magazine calls up one celebrity to write—or, more frequently, just interview—another celebrity. Rolling Stone once let Carrie Fisher interview Madonna and the result was somewhat horrifying. (”She will answer any question because she is genuinely interested in her own reply,” Fisher wrote, creating new dimensions of solipsism between interviewer and interviewee.) But mags love this arrangement: The magazine gets exponentially more PR out of the deal, and readers, of course get the square root of the substance.
Wallace’s 2000 McCain piece, it should be noted in fairness, may be the worst thing Wallace ever wrote, but also in fairness it should be noted that even in the context of celebrity-on-celebrity journalism it is not only one of the most superficial and hackneyed accretions of blowjobby pontification ever published, it is an insidious piece of propaganda urging “Young Voters,” as DFW calls them, to support a right-wing nut job. Over many pages, Wallace nattered on about McCain’s heroism, and how Young Folks were just gonna go crazy for him once they overcame their cynicism, and—my favorite part—how, like the wise old cabbies and barbers of old, the cameramen for all the big TV networks knew so much more about politics than the on-air commentators:
Leaving aside their coolness and esprit de corps, be advised that Rolling Stone’s single luckiest journalistic accident this week was his bumbling into hanging around with these camera and sound guys. This is because network-news techs—who all have worked countless campaigns, and who have neither the raging egos of journalists nor the self-interested agenda of the McCain2000 staff to muddy their perspective—turn out to be way more acute and sensible political analysts than anybody you’ll read or see on TV, and their assessment of to-day’s Negativity developments is so extraordinarily nuanced and sophisticated that only a small portion of it can be ripped off and summarized here.
DFW could do no wrong at the time, and I took no little flak for my essay on the piece in Salon.
Now comes Tim Dickinson’s contrarian look at McCain’s personal mythology, “Make Believe Maverick,” an effective and persuasive portrait of a first-class scumbag.
Questions: Why did Rolling Stone ever run DFW’s tongue-bath? Which writer, do you think, got more money? Which one got edited harder? Why didn’t Wallace do the reporting back then about McCain’s crummy service record or his despicable behavior toward his first wife?
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I recently read McCain’s Promise and loved it from a writing POV, but I can’t really disagree with your assessement of the piece in Salon all those years ago.
Granted, Wallace says in his intro that what’s in McCain’s Promise that “Up Simba” is what he submitted to RS originally, and the last section of the piece gets extremely critical of McCain and people’s reactions to him. It’s a nice bit of ass-covering.
Speaking of tongue baths, though, there’s a disarmingly weird preface by Jacob Weisberg at the beginnning of the book set in 2007 where he seems oh so beguiled at McCain’s admitting his campaign isn’t going well. While Mike Murphy splutters and contorts his face in reaction, why is my boss being so damn honest?. It never occurs to Weisberg that this is part of the act, it has been part of the act, and it will always be part of the act.
Thanks for this wake-up. I loved DFW and have tried my damndest a few times in recent weeks to force-feed myself the overwrought love letter in question. Sometimes all that’s needed is someone calling bullshit on assumptions, even the “McCain was so much better back in 2000″ that I’ve tried to quash with my dad and others was stuck inside my skull somehow. You don’t have to look too far beneath the surface to see past this maverick shit, but like many good long-running ad campaigns it’s difficult to completely shake its message off.
Slightly off-topic, I am sooooooo relieved that America (or at least enough of it) seems to come to the determination that John McCain is a terrible candidate. I thought this very early on, but worried that he’d put one over on America (see: Bush, George W.). Apparently he so terrible that the reality of it is simply impossible to hide.
My 89 year old grandmother moves faster than McCain does, and she uses a walker.
That Dickinson essay is the most searing indictment I have read of any candidate including the current President. I’m currently reading through the Flashman series and this guy seems to be accorded all the honours and respect for contemptuous behaviour as his fictional counterpart.