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

  UP, SIMBA!

  ALSO BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

  THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM

  GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR

  INFINITE JEST

  A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN

  BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

  UP, SIMBA!

  7 DAYS ON THE TRAIL

  OF AN

  ANTICANDIDATE

  Copyright © 2000 by David Foster Wallace.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. For information address iPublish.com, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  Sections of Up, Simba! were originally published in another form in Rolling Stone.

  The “iPublish.com” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-4469-3141-0

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  Contents

  NOTE FROM THE ELECTRONIC EDITOR

  INTRODUCTION TO THE ELECTRONIC EDITION, MANDATED AND OVERSEEN BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY OR IPUBLISH.COM OR WHATEVER THE ACTUAL VECTOR HERE MIGHT BE

  WHO CARES

  GLOSSARY OF RELEVANT CAMPAIGN TRAIL VOCAB, MOSTLY COURTESY OF JIM C. AND THE NETWORK NEWS TECHS

  SUBSTANTIALLY FARTHER BEHIND THE SCENES THAN YOU’RE APT TO WANT TO BE

  WHO EVEN CARES WHO CARES

  NEGATIVITY

  SUCK IT UP

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTE FROM THE ELECTRONIC EDITOR:

  There are a couple of places in the following text when the author indicates that a graphic is to follow, usually by writing something like “_____ is reproduced here.” In the eBook formats that are text-only you will, of course, not be seeing the graphic. I tried to explain that to the author, but, well, he doesn’t so much get this eBook thing. So bear with him, and rest assured that, in this case, the words are more important than the pictures. Also, this particular author, as you probably know if you’ve read any of his other work, is fond of footnotes. He has used them only sparingly in this piece, and we’ve made them into hyperlinks (with his permission, though, again, I’m not positive that he understood what I meant by “hyperlink”). Please do click on the asterisks when you get to them, if only because I’ve spent quite a bit of time reassuring the author, who is, you could say, particularly concerned with syntax, that the footnotes will indeed be in there.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE ELECTRONIC EDITION, MANDATED AND OVERSEEN BY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY OR IPUBLISH.COM OR WHATEVER THE ACTUAL VECTOR HERE MIGHT BE

  Dear Person Reading This:

  This is the part where I’m supposed to say what the following document is and where it came from.

  From what I understand, this past fall the powers that be at Rolling Stone magazine decided they wanted to get four writers who were not political journalists to do articles on the four big presidential candidates and their day-to-day campaigns in the early primaries. Luckily my own resumé’s got ‘NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST’ right at the very top, and Rolling Stone magazine called, and pitched the idea, and furthermore said I could pick whichever candidate I wanted (which of course was flattering, although in retrospect they probably told the other three writers the same thing—magazines are always very flattering and carte blancheish when they’re trying to get you to do something). The only one I could see even trying to write about was U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), whom I’d seen a tape of on Charlie Rose in 1999 and had decided was either incredibly honest and forthright and cool or else just insane. There were other reasons for wanting to write about McCain and party politics, too, all of which are explored in considerable detail in the document itself and so I don’t see any reason to inflict them on you here.

  The Electronic Editor (actual title, like on his office letterhead and everything) says I should insert here that I, the author, am not a Republican, and that actually I ended up voting for U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley (D-NJ) in the Illinois primary. I don’t personally see how my own politics are anybody’s business, but I’m guessing the point of the insertion is to make clear that there were no partisan GOP motives or neoconservative agendas behind the article even though parts of it might appear to be almost droolingly pro-McCain.

  What else to tell you. At first I was supposed to follow McCain around in New Hampshire as he campaigned for 1 Feb.’s big primary there. Then, around Christmastime, Rolling Stone decided they wanted to abort the assignment because Bush2 was way ahead in the polls and outspending McCain ten to one and they thought McCain was going to get flattened in New Hampshire and that his campaign would be over by the time anything could come out in Rolling Stone and that they’d look like idiots. Then on 1 Feb., when the early NH returns had McCain ahead, the magazine suddenly turned around and called again and said the article was a Go again but that now they wanted me to fly to out to NH and start that night, which—because I happen to have dogs with professionally diagnosed emotional problems that require special care, and it always takes me several days to recruit, interview, reference-check, select, instruct, and field-test a dogsitter—was simply out of the question. Some of this is probably not too germane, but the point is that I ended up flying out the following week and riding with the McCain2000 traveling press corps from 7 to 13 February, which in retrospect was probably the most interesting and complicated week of the whole GOP race.

  Especially the complicated part. For it turned out that the more interesting a campaign-related person or occurrence or intrigue or strategy or happenstance was, the more time and page-space it took to make sense of it, or, if it made no sense, to describe what it was and explain why it didn’t make sense but was interesting anyway if viewed in a certain context that then itself had to be described, and so on. With the end result being that the actual document delivered per contract to Rolling Stone magazine turned to be longer and more complicated than they’d asked for. Umm, quite a bit longer, actually. In fact the article’s editor pointed out that running the whole thing would take up most of Rolling Stone’s text-space and might even cut into the percentage of the magazine reserved for advertisements, which obviously would not do. * And so at least half the article got cut out, plus some of the more complicated stuff got way compressed and simplified, which was especially disappointing because, as previously mentioned, the most complicated stuff also tended to be the most interesting.

  The point here is that what you’ve just now purchased the ability to download or have emailed to you or whatever (it’s been explained to me several times but I still don’t understand it) is the original uncut document, the as it were Director’s Cut, verbally complete and unoccluded by any lush photos of puffy-lipped girls with their Diesels half-unzipped, etc.

  There are only a couple changes. All typos and atrocious factual boners have now (hopefully) been fixed, for one thing. There were also certain places where the original article talked about the fact that it was appearing in Rolling Stone magazine and that whoever was reading it was sitting there actually holding a copy of Rolling Stone, etc., and most of these got changed because it just seemed too weird to keep telling you you were reading this in an actual 10" x 12" magazine when you now quite clearly are not. (Again, this was the Electronic Editor’s suggestion.) You will note, though, that the author is usually still referred to in the document as ‘Rolling Stone’ or ‘RS.’ I’m sorry if this looks weird to you, but I have declined to change it. Part of the reason is that I was absurdly proud of
my Rolling Stone Press Badge and liked it that most of the pencils and campaign staff referred to me as ‘the guy from Rolling Stone.’ I will confess that I even borrowed a friend’s battered old black motorcycle-jacket to wear on the Trail so I’d better project the kind of edgy, vaguely dangerous vibe I imagined an RS reporter ought to give off. (You have to understand that I hadn’t read Rolling Stone in quite some time.) Plus, journalistically, my covering the campaign for this particular organ turned out to have a big effect on what I got to see and how various people conducted themselves when I was around. For example, it was the main reason why the McCain2000 High Command pretty much refused to have anything to do with me * but why the network techs were so friendly and forthcoming and let me hang around with them (the sound techs, in particular, were Rolling Stone fans from way back). Finally, the document itself is sort of rhetorically directed at voters of a particular age-range and attitude, and I’m figuring that the occasional Rolling Stone reference might help keep the reasons for some of this rhetoric clear.

  There is of course another weird thing, which is that we all now know certain facts that the time-specific document itself did not—like that McCain lost the SC primary on 19 Feb., came back a couple days later and won in MI and AZ, then seemed rather mysteriously to self-destruct, the Shrub beating him in ND and Virginia and then totally smearing him on Super Tuesday, right after which McCain ‘suspended’ his campaign and then later issued that excruciating gun-to-the-temple ‘endorsement’ of the Shrub—and now by the time this document is even downloadable the GOP convention will probably be underway and the big issue may be whether Bush can persuade McCain to be the ticket’s VP (not a chance in hell), etc. But so in case you’re thinking it’s rather quixotic of the author (or crazy of Little, Brown/iPublish) to believe that there might still be anything of real interest in an article about the early primaries, let us here note two things. The first is that some of psychopolitical strategies behind the Shrub’s coup de grâce on Super Tuesday were basically the same as the tactics the network news techs saw Bush2000 using in South Carolina four weeks earlier (which latter tactics get talked about at length in the section of the document called NEGATIVITY). And because, at least as far as I’ve seen, there hasn’t ever been much interesting or accurate stuff in the political media on just what exactly happened to McCain’s campaign all of a sudden in early March, the techs’ masterful analysis of the SC Psy-Ops appears to me still to have real teeth. (N.B.: There may in fact now be a retrospective postscript to or FN in the document [the Electronic Editor won’t like it, so it’ll be there only if it seems 100% necessary and the E.E. can be won over] making the SC–Super T. parallels a little more explicit.)

  The other thing I’d note is simply what the article’s about, which turned out to be not so much the campaign of one impressive guy, but rather what McCain’s candidacy and the brief weird excitement it generated might reveal about how millennial politics and all its packaging and marketing and strategy and media and Spin and general sepsis makes us U.S. voters feel, inside, and whether anyone running for anything can even be ‘real’ anymore—whether what we actually want is something real or something else. Whether it works on your screen or palm or not, for me the whole thing ended up relevant in ways far beyond any one man or magazine. If you don’t agree, I imagine you’ll have only to hit a button to make it go away.

  —Guy from RS

  30 June 2000

  WHO CARES

  OK so now yes more press attention for John S. McCain III, USN, POW, USC, GOP, 2000.com. The Rocky of Politics. The McCain Mutiny. The Real McCain. The Straight Talk Express. Internet fundraiser. Media darling. Navy flier. Middle name Sidney. Son and grandson of admirals. And a serious hard-ass—a way-Right Republican senator from one of the most politically troglodytic states in the nation. A man who opposes Roe v. Wade, gun-control, and funding for PBS; who supports the death penalty and defense buildups and constitutional amendments outlawing flag-burning and making school prayer OK. Who voted to convict at Clinton’s impeachment trial, twice. And who, starting sometime last fall, has become the great populist hope of American politics. Who wants your vote but won’t whore himself to get it, and wants you to vote for him because he won’t whore. An anticandidate. Who cares.

  Facts. The 1996 presidential election had the lowest Young Voter turnout in U.S. history. The 2000 GOP primary in New Hampshire had the highest. And the experts agree that McCain drew most of them. He drew first-time and never-before voters; he drew Democrats and Independents, Libertarians and soft socialists and college kids and soccer moms and weird furtive guys whose affiliations sounded more like terrorist cells than parties, and won by 18 points, and nearly wiped the smirk off Bush2’s face. McCain has spurned soft money and bundled money and still raised millions, much of it on the Internet and a lot from people who’ve never given to a campaign before. On 7 Feb. ’00 he’s on the cover of all three major newsweeklies at once, and the Shrub is on the run. The next big vote is South Carolina, heart of the true knuckle-dragging Christian Right, where Dixie’s flag flutters proud over the Statehouse and the favorite sport is video poker and the state GOP is getting sued over its habit of not even opening polls in black areas on primary day; and when McCain’s chartered plane lands here at 0300h. on the night of his New Hampshire win, a good 500 South Carolina college students are waiting to greet him, cheering and waving signs and dancing and holding a weird kind of GOP Rave. Think about this: 500 kids at 3 A.M. out of their minds with enthusiasm for . . . a politician. “It was as if,” Time said, “[McCain] were on the cover of Rolling Stone,” giving the Rave all kinds of attention.

  And of course attention breeds attention, as any marketer can tell you. And so now more attention, from the aforementioned Ur-liberal Rolling Stone itself, whose editors send the least professional pencil they can find to spend a week on the campaign with McCain and Time and the Times and CNN and MSNBC and MTV and all the rest of this country’s great digital engine of public fuss. Does John McCain deserve all this? Is the attention real attention, or just hype? Is there a difference? Can it help him get elected? Should it?

  A better question: Do you even give a shit whether McCain can or ought to win. Since you’re digitally cutting-edge enough to buy something you can read only on your PC or Rocket-e or PDA or whatever, the chances are good that you are an American between say 18 and 40, which demographically would make you a Young Voter. And no generation of Young Voters has ever cared less about politics and politicians than yours. There’s hard demographic and voter-pattern data backing this up . . . assuming you give a shit about data. In fact, even if you’ve already paid your $4.95 Download Fee or whatever, the chances are probably only about fifty-fifty that you’ll read this whole document once you’ve seen what it’s really about—such is the enormous shuddering yawn that the Political Process tends to evoke in us, especially now, in this post-Watergate-post-Iran-Contra-post-Whitewater-post-Lewinsky era, an era when politicians’ statements of principle or vision are understood as self-serving ad copy and judged not for their truth or ability to inspire but for their tactical shrewdness, their marketability. And no generation has been marketed and Spun and pitched to as ingeniously and relentlessly as today’s demographic Young. So when Senator John McCain says, in Michigan or SC, “I run for president not to Be Somebody, but to Do Something,” it’s hard to hear it as anything more than a marketing angle, especially when he says it as he’s going around surrounded by cameras and reporters and cheering crowds . . . in other words, Being Somebody.

  And when Senator John McCain also says—constantly, thumping it hard at the start and end of every speech and THM—that his goal as president will be “to inspire young Americans to devote themselves to causes greater than their own self-interest,” it’s hard not to hear it as just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become the most powerful, important, and talked-about human
being on earth, which is of course their real “cause,” a cause to which they appear to be so deeply devoted that they can swallow and spew whole mountains of noble-sounding bullshit and convince even themselves they mean it. Cynical as that may sound, polls show it’s how most of us feel. And it’s beyond not believing the bullshit; mostly we don’t even hear it, dismiss it at the same deep level, below attention, where we also block out billboards and Muzak.

  One of the things that makes John McCain’s “causes greater than self-interest” line harder to dismiss, though, is that this guy also sometimes says things that are manifestly true but which no other mainstream candidate will say. Such as that special-interest money, billions of it, controls Washington and that all this “reforming politics” and “cleaning up Washington” stuff that every candidate talks about will remain impossible until certain well-known campaign-finance scams like soft money and bundles are outlawed. All Congress’s talk about health-care reform and a Patients’ Bill of Rights, for example, McCain has said publicly is total bullshit because the GOP is in the pocket of HMO lobbies and the Democrats are funded and controlled by trial lawyers’ lobbies, and it is in these backers’ self-interest to see that the current insane U.S. health-care system stays just the way it is.

  But health-care reform is politics, and so’s marginal tax rates, and defense procurement, and Social Security, and politics is boring—complex, abstract, dry, the province of policy wonks and Rush Limbaugh and nerdy little guys on PBS, and basically who cares.

  But there’s something underneath politics here, something riveting and unSpinnable and true. It has to do with McCain’s military background and Vietnam combat and the five-plus years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison, mostly in solitary, in a box-sized cell, getting tortured and starved. And with the unbelievable honor and balls he showed there. It’s very easy to gloss over the POW thing, partly because we’ve all heard so much about it and partly because it’s so off-the-charts dramatic, like something in a movie instead of a man’s real life. But it’s worth considering for a minute, carefully, because it’s what makes McCain’s “causes greater than self-interest” thing easier to hear.