Fear and Loathing on the McCain Trail '00

I just spent the afternoon with David Foster Wallace, reading his account of the 2000 McCain presidential campaign "Up, Simba" compiled in a new edition titled "McCain's Promise" published in 2006. The parallels between his text and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail are too numerous to recount here. The foreword of my text by Jacob Weisberg makes the comparison tacitly and implicitly, but it would take a willful ignorance not to see that the two authors are doing many of the same things.

Each fashions themselves as something of an outsider, preferring the fringe identity of quasi-ethnography to straight political reporting. Wallace makes a point to insist on his resume in all-caps that he is NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST, and Thompson shows a proclivity for crashing political gatherings and press junkets while pooh-poohing the general press corps. Wallace's animosity toward politics seems to come from a more general cynicism, as the question of the genuine nature of contemporary politicians proves to be the major focus of his lengthy essay. Thompson, on the other hand, seems to genuinely believe in the redemptive qualities of McGovern, if only because he views Nixon as a flesh-eating monster (or, at least, that's the image Ralph Steadman is compelled to depict visually in the book as a result of Thompson's prose).

Both approach the writing process in a similar post-modern, rambling way. The back of my Thompson edition features praise from Kurt Vonnegut: "the literary equivalent of Cubism: all rules are broken." Wallace, in true Faulknerian fashion, explores the many uses available for the comma. However, when both authors become cogent, their texts become poignant looks at post-modern politics. The melancholy present throughout Wallace's text appears to be a consequence of the unraveling of politics and morality just beginning to rear its head in Thompson's work, which lacks the cynical perspective proffered by the fallout of Watergate, the American exit from Vietnam, and-well, let's just say all the Reagan years. In this way, it's easy to read Wallace as a kind of spiritual successor to Thompson. The chaos remains intact in Wallace's work, but it's gloomy undertones and final assertion that the voter must look inward to see just how far the salesman perception has ruined the political process causes the text to end on a note that is even less hopeful than the election of Nixon in Thompson's (if that's even possible).

I love both works, if only because they provide not just a commentary on what a political journalist should and can be in the modern era of American politics, but also because they insist upon driving home the notion that politicians, voters and journalists are all human beings, fallible and susceptible to emotional responses. Sometimes we forget that.

Movie review of "That Evening Sun" and some thoughts on The Watchmen graphic novel in the coming days.