Up, Simba!: 7 Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate

by David Foster Wallace

  Maybe they really can coexist. Humanity and politics, shrewdness and decency. But it gets complicated. In Spartanburg’s Q&A, after two China questions and one on taxing Internet commerce, as most of the lobby’s pencils are still at the glass making fun of the local heads, a totally demographically average thirty-something middle-class soccer mom in rust-colored slacks and those round, overlarge glasses totally average thirty-something soccer moms always wear gets picked and stands and somebody brings her the mike. It turns out her name is Donna Duren, of right here in Spartanburg SC, and she says she has a 14-year-old son named Chris, in whom Mr. and Mrs. Duren have been trying to inculcate family values and respect for authority and a non-cynical idealism about America and its duly elected leaders. They want him to find heroes he can believe in, she says. Donna Duren’s whole story takes a while, but nobody’s bored, and even on the four-faced monitor you can sense a change in the THM’s theater’s voltage, and the national pencils come away from the front’s glass and start moving in and elbowing people aside (which they’re really good at) to get close to the monitor’s screens. Mrs. Duren says that Chris—clearly a sensitive kid—was “made very very upset” by the M. Lewinsky scandal and the R-rated revelations and the appalling behavior of Clinton and Starr and Tripp and pretty much everybody on all sides during the impeachment thing, and Chris had a lot of very upsetting and uncomfortable questions that Mr. and Mrs. D. struggled to answer, and that basically it was a really hard time but they got through it. And then last year, at more or less a trough in terms of idealism and respect for elected authority, she says, Chris had discovered John McCain and McCain2000.com, and got interested in the campaign, and the parents had apparently read him some G-rated parts of Faith of My Fathers, and the upshot is that young Chris finally found a public hero he could believe in: John S. McCain III. It’s impossible to know what McCain’s face is doing during this story because the monitors are taking CNN’s feed and Randy van R. of CNN’s lens is staying hard and steady on Donna Duren, who appears so iconically prototypical and so thoroughly exudes the special quiet dignity of an average American who knows she’s average and just wants a decent, non-cynical life for herself and her family that she can say things like “family values” and “hero” without anybody rolling their eyes. But then last night, Mrs. D. says, as they were all watching some wholesome nonviolent TV in the family room, the phone suddenly rang upstairs, and Chris went up and got it, and Mrs. D. says a little while later he came back down into the family room crying and just terribly upset and told them the phone call had been a man who started talking to him about the 2000 campaign and asked Chris if he knew that John McCain was a liar and a cheater and that anybody who’d vote for John McCain was either stupid or un-American or both. That caller had been a push-poller for Bush2000, Mrs. Duren says, knuckles on her mike-hand white and voice almost breaking, distraught in a totally average and moving parental way, and she says she just wanted Senator McCain to know about it, about what happened to Chris, and wanted to know whether anything can be done to keep people like this from calling innocent young kids and plunging them into disillusionment and confusion about whether they’re stupid for trying to have heroes they believe in.

  At which point (0853 EST) two things happen out here in the Fine Arts lobby. The first is that the national pencils disperse in a radial pattern, each dialing his cellphone, and the network field producers all come barreling out of the theater doors pulling their cellphone antennas out with their teeth, and everybody tries to find an empty 4-ft2 to Waltz in while they call the gist of this riveting Negativity-related development in to networks and editors and try to raise their counterparts in the Bush2000 press corps to see if they can get a React from the Shrub on Mrs. Duren’s story, at the end of which story the second thing happens, which is that CNN’s Randy van R. finally pans to McCain and you can see McCain’s facial expression, which is pained and pale and looks actually more distraught even than Mrs. Duren’s face had looked. And what McCain does, after looking silently at the floor a second, is: apologize. He doesn’t lash out at Bush2 or at push-polling or appear to try to capitalize politically in any way. He looks sad and compassionate and regretful and says that the only reason he got into this race in the first place was to try to help inspire young Americans to feel better about devoting themselves to something, and that a story like what Mrs. Duren took the trouble to come down here to the THM this morning and tell him is just about the worst thing he could hear, and that if it’s OK with Mrs. D. he’d like to call her son—he asks his name again, and Randy van R. pans smoothly back to Donna Duren as she says “Chris” and then pans back to McCain—Chris and apologize personally on the phone and tell Chris that yes there are unfortunately some bad people out there and he’s sorry Chris had to hear stuff like what he heard but that it’s never a mistake to believe in something, that politics is still worthwhile as a Process to get involved in, and he really does look upset, McCain does, and almost as what seems like an afterthought he says that maybe one thing Donna Duren and other concerned parents and citizens can do is call the Bush2000 campaign and tell them to stop this push-polling, that Governor Bush is a good man with a family of his own and it’s difficult to believe he’d ever endorse his campaign doing things like this if he knew about it, and that he (McCain) will be calling Governor Bush again personally for the umpteenth time to ask him to stop the Negativity, and McCain’s eyes look . . . wet, as in teary, which maybe is just a trick of the TV lights but is nevertheless disturbing, the whole thing is disturbing, because McCain seems upset in a way that’s a little too, well, almost dramatic. He takes a couple more THM questions, then stops abruptly and says he’s sorry but he’s just so upset about the Chris Duren thing that he’s having a hard time concentrating on anything else, and he asks the THM crowd’s forgiveness, and thanks them, and forgets his Message-Discipline and doesn’t finish with he’ll always. Tell them. The truth but they applaud like mad anyway, and the four-faced monitor’s feed is cut as Randy and Jim C. et al. go shoulder-held to join the scrum as McCain starts to exit.

  And now none of this is simple at all, especially McCain’s almost exaggerated-seeming distress about Chris Duren, which really did seem a little much, and a small set of very disturbing and possibly cynical interconnected thoughts and questions start whirling around in the journalistic head. Like the fact that Donna Duren’s story was a far, far more devastating indictment of the Shrub’s campaign tactics than anything McCain himself could say, and is it possible that McCain, on the theater’s stage, wasn’t aware of this? Is it possible that he didn’t see all the TV field producers shouldering their way through the aisles’ crowds with their cellphones and know instantly that Mrs. Duren’s story and his reaction were going to get big network play and make Bush2000 look bad? Is it possible that some part of McCain could realize this—that what happened to Chris Duren is very much to McCain’s political advantage—and yet he’s still such a decent, uncalculating guy that all he feels is horror and regret that a kid was disillusioned? Was it human compassion that made him apologize first instead of criticizing Bush2000, or is McCain just maybe shrewd enough to know that Mrs. D.’s story had already nailed Bush to the wall and that by apologizing and looking distraught McCain could help underscore the difference between his own human decency and Bush’s uncaring Negativity? Is it possible that he really had tears in his eyes? Is it—ulp—possible that he somehow made himself get tears in his eyes because he knew what a decent, caring, non-Negative guy it would make him look like? And come to think of it hey, why would a push-poller even be interested in trying to push-poll someone who’s too young to vote? Does Chris Duren maybe have a really deep-sounding phone voice or something? But wouldn’t you think a push-poller’d ask somebody’s age before launching into his spiel? And how come nobody asked this question, not even the jaded 12M out in the lobby? What could they have been thinking?

  Bullshit 1 is empty except for Jay, who’s grabbing an OTC way back in the ERPP,
and through the port windows you can see all the techs and heads and talent in a king-size scrum around Mrs. Donna Duren in the gravel courtyard, and there’s the additional cynical thought that doubtless some enterprising network crew is even now pulling up in front of poor Chris Duren’s junior high (which unfortunately tonight on TV turns out to be just what happened). The bus idles empty for a very long time—the post-event scrums and standups last longer than the whole THM did—and then when the BS1 regulars finally do pile in they’re all extremely busy trying to type and phone and file, and all the techs have to get their SX and DVS Digital Editors out (the CBS machine’s being held steady on their cameraman’s little stepladder in the aisle because all the tables and the ERPP are full) and help their producers find and time the clip of Mrs. Duren’s story and McCain’s response so they can feed it right away, and the Twelve Monkeys have as more or less one body stormed the Straight Talk Express, which is just up ahead on I-85 and riding very low in the stern from all the weight in McCain’s rear salon. The point is that none of the usual media pros are available for RS to interface with and help deconstruct the Chris Duren Incident and help try to figure out what to be cynical about and what not to and which of the many disturbing questions the whole Incident provokes are paranoid or irrelevant and which ones might be humanly and/or journalistically valid . . . such as was McCain really serious about calling Chris Duren? How was he going to get the Durens’ phone number when Mrs. D. was scrummed solid the whole time he and the staff were leaving? Do they plan to just look in the phonebook or something? And where were Mike Murphy and John Weaver through that whole thing, who can usually be seen Cell-Waltzing in the back at every THM but today were nowhere in sight? And is Murphy maybe even now in the Express’s salon in his red chair next to McCain, leaning in toward the candidate’s ear and whispering very calmly and coolly about the political advantages of what just happened and various tasteful but effective ways they can capitalize on it and use it to escape the tactical box that Bush2’s going Negative put them in in the first place? What’s McCain’s reaction if that’s what Murphy’s doing—like, is he listening, or is he still too upset to listen, or is he somehow both? Is it just possible that McCain—maybe not even consciously—played up his reaction to Mrs. Duren’s story and framed his distress to give himself a plausible, good-looking excuse to get out of the Negative spiral that’s been hurting him so badly in the polls that Jim and Frank say he may well lose SC if things keep on this way? Is it too cynical even to consider such a thing?

  Because at the following day’s first Press-Avail, John S. McCain III issues a plausible, good-looking, highly emotional statement to the whole scrummed corps. This is on the warm, pretty morning of 11 February outside the Embassy Suites (or maybe Hampton Inn) in Charleston, right after Baggage Call. McCain informs the press that the case of young Chris Duren has caused him such distress that after a great deal of late-night soul-searching he’s now ordered his staff to cease all Negativity and to pull all the McCain2000 response ads in South Carolina regardless of whether the Shrub pulls his own Negative ads or not.

  And, framed as it now is in the distressed context of the Chris Duren Incident, McCain’s decision now in no way makes him look wimpy or appeasing, but rather like a truly decent, honorable, high-road guy who doesn’t want young people’s political idealism fucked with in any way if he can help it. It’s a stirring and high-impact statement, and a masterful -Avail, and everybody in the scrum seems impressed and in some cases deeply and personally moved, and nobody (including Rolling Stone) ventures to point out aloud that, however unfortunate the phone call was for the Durens, it turned out to be just fortunate as hell for John S. McCain and McCain2000 in terms of this week’s tactical battle, that actually the whole thing couldn’t have worked out better for McCain2000 if it had been . . . well, like scripted, if like say Mrs. Donna Duren had been a trained actress or gifted amateur who’d been somehow secretly approached and rehearsed and paid and planted in that crowd of over 300 random unscreened questioners where her raised hand in that sea of average voters’ hands was seen and chosen and she got to tell a moving story that made all five networks last night and damaged Bush2 badly and now has released McCain from this week’s tactical box. Any way you look at it (and there’s a nice long DT during which to look at it), yesterday’s Incident and THM were an almost incredible stroke of political luck for McCain, or else maybe a stroke of something else that no one—not the Twelve Monkeys, not Alison Mitchell or the marvelously cynical Australian Globe lady or even the totally sharp and unsentimental and astute Jim C.—ever once broaches or mentions out loud, which might be understandable, since maybe even considering whether it was just even possible would be so painful it would break your heart and make it hard to go on, which is what the press and staff and Straight Talk caravan and McCain himself have to do all day, and the next, and the next—go on.

  SUCK IT UP

  Another paradox: it is just about impossible to talk about the really important stuff in politics without using terms that have become such awful clichés they make your eyes glaze over and are hard to even hear. One such term is “leader,” which all the big candidates use all the time—as in e.g. “providing leadership,” “a proven leader,” “a new leader for a new century,” etc.—and have reduced to such a platitude that it’s hard to try to think about what “leader” really means and whether indeed what today’s Young Voters want is a leader. The weird thing is that the word “leader” itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t cliché or boring at all; in fact he’s sort of the opposite of cliché and boring.

  Obviously, a real leader isn’t just somebody who has ideas you agree with, nor is it just somebody you happen to believe is a good guy. Think about it. A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with “inspire” being used here in a serious and non-cliché way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own. It’s a mysterious quality, hard to define, but we always know it when we see it, even as kids. You can probably remember seeing it in certain really great coaches, or teachers, or some extremely cool older kid you “looked up to” (interesting phrase) and wanted to be just like. Some of us remember seeing the quality as kids in a minister or rabbi, or a scoutmaster, or a parent, or a friend’s parent, or a supervisor in a summer job. And yes, all these are “authority figures,” but it’s a special kind of authority. If you’ve ever spent time in the military, you know how incredibly easy it is to tell which of your superiors are real leaders and which aren’t, and how little rank has to do with it. A leader’s real “authority” is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn’t ever get to on your own.

  In other words—and you have to suck it up and just ignore the clichés here for a second, because these aren’t just words, and there’s important stuff in back of them—in other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own. Lincoln was, by all available evidence, a real leader, and Churchill, and Gandhi, and King. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and de Gaulle, and certainly Marshall and maybe Eisenhower. (Of course Hitler was a real leader too, a very powerful one, so you have to watch out; all it is is a weird kind of power.)

  Probably the last real leader we had as U.S. president was JFK, 40 years ago. 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 weird 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. Instead, a lot of them felt inspired. And the decade that followed, however fucked up it was in other ways, saw millions of Young Voters devote themselves to social and political causes that had nothing to do with getting a good job or owning nice stuff or finding the best parties; and the 60s were, by most accounts, a generally cleaner and happier time than now.