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Up, Simba! (2000)

by David Foster Wallace(Favorite Author)

4.27 of 5 Votes: 5

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English

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review 1: Rolling Stone puts a reporter on the bus of what first is a marginal candidate for president who becomes the front runner and tells him to write what he sees. Sound familiar? The magazine did the same in 1971 when Hunter S. Thompson covered the George McGovern campaign, and Thompson did a far better, more insightful job.That's not to say David Foster Wallace failed. He did okay with his observations of life on the road, with behind the looks at John McCain and other reporters, with the "Twelve Monkeys," and the campaign handlers ways of dealing with the Shrub (Bush). But I kept comparing this piece, which was originally a version in Rolling Stone, with Hunter's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail," which is a masterpiece.
review 2: In 2000, John McCain was... more beloved to both major parties in the U.S. and couldn't get the nomination from either. It was possible that if he ran against both candidates that he'd win, but of course that didn't happen. David Foster Wallace was embedded with McCain's campaign, doomed to lose out to George W. Bush, and shrewdly observed how McCain made messages out of himself, how the staff tried to manipulate those messages, and how the country refused to see the candidate as a complex human being. Here is long-form journalism that shreds us for our addiction to seeing a candidate as just a hero, or just a salesman, or just a moralist or con-man. It's some of the boldest political writing I've ever read.It actually benefits from being too short to play as memoir or biography. At its length, it avoids the gangly leap into final judgment about what McCain really was and instead played crucible for the complex person he could be, and all the things voters wanted him to be or were afraid he really was. Throughout is the staggering theme of people around the country refusing to believe McCain was a person, but rather a simplified idea, and his campaign playing into it because there's no other way to get elected. Even if you have no exposure to his politics, Wallace writes accessibly on how McCain challenged funding models for politics, taxes and toxicity of discourse, despite also taking you into how those messages could be both honest and manipulative. Wallace savagely challenges simplified definitions of McCain. People who viewed him as heroic for his time as a POW (including staying in the prison an additional two years after he was permitted release to make sure other prisoners were not left behind) ignored his obvious reduction of his past into a commercial message for votes. Opponents who viewed him as not religious enough ignored his biographies, and those who found him too conservative ignored all his conflicts with Bush. And in every camp, the people who wanted to believe he might be honest about campaign finance reform and toxic discourse couldn’t because it sounded too good to be true, and because the intentions of a stranger are unknowable, and our culture of salesmanship has led us to distrust. One of the last sections of the essay addresses how the more you get to know someone like McCain, the more you need your cynicism and have to fear that same cynicism, because it blinds while it protects. And, as Wallace points out, a generation's disillusion with a political system was helping incumbents.This was my first exposure to Wallace. His insistence on being more than critical about his subject, but critical about how people observed and reduced him. It's meaty and complex while sympathizing with the dangerous desire for simplicity. Read it, for God's sake read it, especially if you're the sort who judged McCain's entire character based on a sound byte and a photo of him playing video poker. less

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