Did America Become Too Illogical for DFW?

So David Foster Wallace has killed himself at the young age of 46. And as terrible as this news is, I get the feeling his death (and life) will fly under the radar for so many Americans. I don’t intend to sound pretentious here, but I’ll bet the majority of people—even many who call themselves big readers—have not heard of Wallace.

He was an intellectual, renowned only within the literary world. Since he was never arrested for a DUI, never dated Paris Hilton, never acted in one of the Ocean’s movies, and never “accidentally” flashed his snatch for the paparazzi, most Americans did not know or care to know who he was.

But there’s a reason why we should care, and why today’s college students, as the next generation of America’s leaders, should care deeply.

Wallace was a hilarious, brilliant, brutally honest novelist and essayist, as well as one of the most astute social commentators alive. I’m not just deeply saddened by his suicide; I’m shaken to my core by the very real possibility that an appalling farce playing out in the American media may have led him to the height of depression and, ultimately to his death.

I was reading various obituaries and tribute articles in the New York Times, and I decided to check out the readers comments’ section. After a long list of sad notes about his great work (one reader noted glumly, “Infinite Jest was my Catcher in the Rye“), an early entry of the 139 comments said, “Perhaps it was the image of Sarah Palin, the embodiment of entertainment in politics, that drove Wallace to this sad end.”

Now, my initial reaction—as I expect many of yours will be—was one of skepticism, and even disgust. What an absurd suggestion! And moreover, how disrespectful to his friends and family. This was a man who was suffering from very real depression (his father has said as much in the past few weeks), and to put his death on something as unrelated as John McCain’s choice of VP is downright foolish. Right?

But then I kept reading, and found fourteen more comments that mentioned Sarah Palin. The comment that really opened up my eyes said: “I immediately thought of Palin… She seems a pretty blatant extension of the ‘three-alarm emergency’ that he wrote about last year.” Indeed, in his introduction to the America’s Best Essays 2007 anthology, Wallace wrote, “There is just no way that 2004’s reelection [of Bush] could have taken place… if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent and grown-up way.”

Wallace—like his contemporary George Saunders, who presents a similar fear of where this country’s headed in his book of essays The Braindead Megaphone—often wrote about the dangers of allowing the media to dominate our hearts and minds. Like so many socially conscious writers before him, he warned of the increasing entertainment factor of the news: sensationalized headlines, fawning portrayals of celebrities and politicians, or advertisements for Fox that declare things like, “THIS is compelling news!”

Obviously as someone writing a blog post about the possibility that Sarah Palin caused a famous writer to kill himself, I’m going to look rather liberal. But let’s forget her politics for a moment and agree on a few “self-evident truths.”

First, let’s agree that this woman was chosen as an obvious ploy by McCain. Her selection rushed her to the forefront of the media, and she has stayed there ever since (yet another inane article about her was actually placed on the Times Web site above the Wallace obit). She appeals to the GOP sector concerned with “god, guns, and gays” (she likes only the first two), and her Brady Bunch family circus attracted a sick, obsessed scrutiny at the RNC, at every event since, and, presumably, will do so in the White House, if they reach it.

After watching the crazed, breathless news coverage of two different pregnancy scandals, Trooper-gate, the “Screw Polar Bears, Let’s Drill For Oil” fiasco, the library-censorship debacle, and finally the “Bridge to Nowhere” story, it has become clear that this woman is a constant fountain of absurdity. With every bizarre new secret that unfolds, it becomes more terrifying that she could very well be running the country in two years.

James Carville said a few weeks ago, “Look at this like a levee, and there’s a lot of water building up behind the levee for Governor Palin as we keep finding things out … Right now, the levee is leaking.”

It would seem possible (among many other deep problems, obviously) that the levee burst for Wallace, whose literary heart, full of so much hope for our country, simply could not accept America’s current illogical fascination with this person, who is by all accounts a complete symbol of anti-intellectualism and propaganda.

~ by DBR on September 26, 2008.