David Foster Wallace and Democracy

by David Masciotra

This year has included many prominent reevaluations of David Foster Wallace’s reputation and legacy, tied to the 30th anniversary and reissue of Infinite Jest. Back in 2024, David Masciotra wrote a Sidebar about the DFW beatification-turned-backlash and what was lost when Wallace was meme-ified, including an understanding of the origins of Trump’s success.

David Masciotra is the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy and I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters. He and his wife live in Indiana where he teaches at Indiana University Northwest. You can read more from David on Substack.

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David Foster Wallace said that life as a famous writer is comparable to working as a TV weatherman in a mid-sized city. You’re only recognized when you are “in the right place at the right time.” Despite the relative obscurity of even successful writers, especially those most regarded for literary fiction, Wallace continues to generate conversation sixteen years after his death. In the immediate aftermath of his suicide, the literary press, his most enthusiastic and loyal readers, and many journalists beatified him. His college commencement speech, a brilliant call for empathy later published as a booklet, This is Water, served as evidence of blessed intercession. Thus, those mourning from afar nominated the late author of the contemporary masterpiece, Infinite Jest, for sainthood. Hollywood cooperated, releasing an interesting, even moving, but also cartoonish film, The End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel as a deeply troubled and disheveled Wallace whose one-note sadness erases all of the humor in his work, and the charm that his friends claimed made him so endearing.

The Bible warns that “all craftsmen who make idols will be humiliated.” American culture, perhaps in an effort to stave off potential embarrassment, often creates idols only to later destroy them. The MeToo movement performed this service in the case of David Foster Wallace. His ex-girlfriend, Mary Karr, made serious allegations of abusive and menacing behavior, claiming that Wallace once threw a coffee table at her, and subsequent to their breakup, stalked her and threatened her boyfriend. Graduate students claimed that he slept with them in accusations studded with phrases like “power dynamics.” The New Republic ran a review of a memoir in which the author claimed that Wallace made degrading remarks to her when they dated. They titled the review “Infinite Jerk.” Transition complete: the saint had horns and a long red tail.

Debate over whether Wallace was a virtuosic bully, a genius with a heart of gold, or some other superhuman typology, has eclipsed consideration of his work — a vast, endlessly rereadable and relevant bibliography including three novels, three short story collections, and volumes of essays in genres ranging from film criticism to literary journalism.

Inspection of the Wallace library offers a surprising conclusion in an era when American democracy is under vicious assault from the forces of fascism, while a largely apathetic public cannot coalesce with the discipline and aggression necessary to vanquish the authoritarian threat. David Foster Wallace was among the most prophetic political writers of his time.

This is true despite (or perhaps because) Wallace almost never wrote about politics directly, and even when he did address a political topic, such as the John McCain presidential campaign of 2000, he did so diagonally, never overtly dissecting public policy, electoral consequences, or ideological disputes. In “Up, Simba!,” the journalistic correspondence that he wrote after spending two weeks shadowing the McCain campaign, he cautioned readers, “My own résumé happens to have ‘NOT A POLITICAL JOURNALIST’ right there at the top [emphasis his].”

Roland Barthes argued in his essay, “The Death of the Author,” that to evaluate literature according to the identity or intention of the writer is to “impose a limitation on the text” (I almost called Barthes’ essay “famous,” but if Wallace was right about a famous author, an essay by Barthes does not even rise to the status of weatherman, but a scarecrow in a desolate, rural outpost hard to find on atlases and maps). A text is a “tissue of quotations . . . drawn from innumerable centers of culture,” Barthes wrote before asserting that its meaning is independent of the author. It is not the “origin” that is important, but the “destination.”

To understand why Wallace was a prophetic political writer, it is important to first realize that America’s current psychotic episode is not political in its inception, but in its manifestation. Look only to what dominates public debate for evidence that cultural neuroses are more prevalent than arguments over policy or public administration. At a recent hate rally, Donald Trump received uproarious applause when he announced that T Shirts with his joyless mugshot at the center have outsold apparel featuring the mugshot of Elvis Presley. His personality cult threatens the end of democratic governance, while proving the veracity of Trump’s own, infamous assertion that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Liberals focus on the preservation of democracy, but must manage the various temper tantrums from the left flank, which protests everything from the Academy Awards to campus speakers, without any coherent policy agenda beyond slogans demanding an end to capitalism, colonialism, and the “carceral state.”

The polarity of the culture wars rarely, if ever, addresses substantive issues, like health care, childcare, the state of public education, the cost of living, or the formulation of a foreign policy that balances international order with human rights. Aristotle explained that “politics” involves “matters related” to the community, dealing with the question of how to give the “good life” to as many people within the community as possible. By any Aristotelian standard, the culture wars loiter around politics without ever entering the building. Their proximity differs from the political alienation of the majority of the American people, who, multiple studies show, cannot identify all three branches of government, a single justice on the Supreme Court, or more than one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Constitution. If Americans know nothing about their government — if most could not even pass an elementary school civics exam — how can they offer a credible condemnation of it, not to mention articulate a cogent political philosophy?

And yet they try. Pew Research Center reports that only 20 percent of Americans “trust the government in Washington, DC,” and that more broadly, the electorate’s “view of politics and elected officials is unrelentingly negative.” Everyone is angry, but few comprehend what they are angry about. It is a bizarre situation that no one working under the discipline of history or political science could quite explain. A diagnosis of the convulsive cultural freakout storming the United States came from a novelist and creative journalist who cataloged the eccentricities of American life, full of odd joy and mysterious sadness, and pregnant with the belief that the country was suffering under a crisis of cynical indifference and deficit of shame. Enter David Foster Wallace.

In Wallace’s essay on the McCain campaign, Wallace sought to address those who, rather than activate a conscience of citizenship and engage with their democratic responsibility, “find it easier to roll their eyes and not give a shit.” He descended deeper into the intellectual malady by dissecting why language similar to the terms in the above sentence — “conscience,” “citizenship,” “responsibility” — provokes eye rolling, mockery, and ridicule.

“We’re beyond not believing the bullshit,” Wallace wrote when describing how the average American reacts to moral appeals to communal virtue, “Mostly we don’t even hear it now, dismissing at the same deep level, below attention, where we also block out billboards and Muzak.”

Writing in 2000, Wallace worried that it was becoming increasingly challenging to find a venue or even vocabulary “to think about whether anything past well-spun self-interest might be real, was ever real, and if so then what happened?” Most damning, pop culture and mass media were in something of an unofficial, uncoordinated conspiracy to honor cynicism, and disassemble anything resembling belief. Addressing his own rhetorical question, he presented another: “These, for the most part, are not lines of thinking that our culture has encouraged young voters to pursue. Why do you suppose that is?”

It is revelatory to interpret Wallace’s entire body of work as an investigative attempt to answer that second question.

In 2007, in an introductory essay to that year’s volume of Best American Essays anthology, Wallace wrote, “We are in a state of three-alarm emergency — ‘we’ basically meaning America as a polity and culture.” His explanation of the emergency signifies why the tools of literature are best for inspection of American culture’s failure to serve its democracy. It also displays a form of conservatism that, despite his stated liberal politics and condemnation of then-Republican national security policies, separates him from most analysts of the left:

There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place — not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the passage of the Military Commissions Act — if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grow-up way. “We” meaning as a polity and culture. The premise does not entail specific blame; or rather the problems here are too entangled and systemic for good old-fashioned finger-pointing. It is, for one example, simplistic and wrong to blame the for-profit media for somehow failing to make clear to us the moral and practical hazards of trashing the Geneva Conventions. The for-profit media is exquisitely attuned to what we want and the amount of detail we’ll sit still for. And a ninety-second news piece on the question of whether and how the Geneva Conventions ought to apply in an era of asymmetrical warfare is not going to explain anything; the relevant questions are too numerous and complicated…

After enumerating those questions involving military codes, political ideology, the history of American foreign policy in the 20th century, the steady corruption and radicalization of the Republican Party by “evangelical Protestantism and corporatist laissez-faire,” Wallace reaches a crescendo, “It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this — about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.’”

Wallace wrote, in the same essay, that Americans were failing to function as “intelligent free agents,” meaning as the kinds of citizens who can consistently demonstrate the intellectual and emotional fitness for participation in democratic society. The political philosophy that Wallace stakes for himself with these concerns and questions is similar to what Norman Mailer once christened “left conservatism.” The American right has a tendency to ignore the importance of systems on society, presenting the world as if it is nothing more than isolated individuals making decisions according to their own values, whims, and familial backgrounds, whereas the left in its turn often erases the nuances of individuality, rendering every personal choice as if it takes place within the shadow cast by multinational corporations, the military-industrial complex, the legacy media, and United States government and law. Writing from the left, with an interest in reviving democratic liberalism in everyday life, Wallace focused on personal decisions and interests, most especially of those like him: Generation X (and younger) Americans with elite educational training in the liberal arts. His work is a study of the absence of, to use a phrase that would undoubtedly invite the derision he referenced in the McCain correspondence, “civic virtue.”

“Left conservatism” relies upon the intellectual methods of conservatism in service of liberal political priorities. The literary and journalistic Wallace bears resemblance to another writer obsessed with civic virtue and the democratic impulse: Walt Whitman. Writing after the Civil War in the essay, “Democratic Vistas,” the American bard worried for the future of his beloved country. “Genuine belief seems to have left us,” Whitman sighed before surveying a country where fixation on material gain risked creating a “thoroughly-appointed body with no soul.”

Whitman’s answer was to perfect a poem paying tribute to the beauty and glory of democracy, Leaves of Grass, and honor the exemplary sacrifices of Union soldiers who died to save their country in the poetry collection, Drum-Taps. During a more cynical age of pop culture and mass media, with increasingly fragmented attention spans, Wallace did not write paeans to democracy, but instead probing accounts of America’s cultural failure to maintain its democracy.

Born and raised in central Illinois in 1962, Wallace’s career did not begin with Infinite Jest, but the gargantuan novel, published in 1996, was his introduction to most of the world, and it was paramount in the creation of the rabid devotion that would subsequently surround his work. At over one thousand pages, with an endnote section as long as most novellas, Infinite Jest offers a rollicking, imaginative, and equally tragic and hilarious tour of American culture, the struggle for meaning, and weighty topics ranging from the influence of mass media on national identity to addiction and disability. The story does not entirely cohere, and at its length, it certainly could benefit from a bit of manicuring. Despite its flaws, it is still easy to understand why it received such attention, setting off a literary phenomenon that is, possibly, the last of its kind in American culture: A craze from the mainstream press and academic culture alike surrounding a work of literary fiction from a then-unknown writer without the aid of a film or television adaptation. Infinite Jest is, arguably, the last novel that mattered in terms of interacting with the wider society, generating conversation, and exerting an influential pull on writers and readers of various genres, ambitions, and backgrounds.

Set in an unspecified future period, it depicts three groups of people: The Incandenza family, most of whom are associated with an elite tennis academy, the recovering addicts at a drug and alcohol recovery house, and a separatist terrorist organization opposed to the recent fusion of Canada, the US, and Mexico into a North American superstate (Organization of North American Nations). All of the major characters have a connection to The Entertainment, a film with such mind blowing (and numbing) capacity to entertain that it transforms any viewer into a catatonic, drooling, mental invalid who lives only to continue life as a passive spectator. The terrorists aspire to possess The Entertainment, hoping that its deployment as a weapon can further their geopolitical mission.

There is an obvious connection between Wallace’s futuristic depiction of North America as a masturbatory stream of delusions, whims, and narcissistic impulses, and the work of Neil Postman, the cultural critic who warned, in a book of the same name, that American citizens are “amusing ourselves to death.” The superstate’s name is an abbreviation of onanism, and all of the characters suffer with some addiction where the ego becomes central. The tennis players strive for excellence and achievement with little regard for anything else, the recovering addicts struggle to shut off a desire that had previously enslaved them, and the terrorists, like their real-life counterparts, are indifferent to the pain and death that will result from the accomplishment of their violent agenda. Their ultimate hope is to transform citizens into half-moles, half-zombies who exist only to acquire pleasure through sophisticated entertainment. Wallace imagines a society of images from the fever-enhanced nightmares of Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic who diagnosed the United States as a nation addicted to instant gratification in his unlikely bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism.

“We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future,” Lasch wrote in his bill of indictment of a people more and more withdrawn from their own communities and from the means of engagement necessary to guard the welfare of democratic liberalism.

In the near future of Infinite Jest, the “U.S. of modern A,” is a nominal community where “the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus is . . . the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing [a] flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.” Freedom under these conditions, rather than representative of a political philosophy or battle cry of the oppressed, is the whimper of a child. As one character notes, “Your freedom is the freedom-from . . . How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?”

Lasch wrote that the prostitute “best exemplifies the qualities indispensable to success in American society.” Consumerism has so conquered America in Infinite Jest that it is little more than a banality. Most chapters of the novel take place, not in a numerical calendar year, but in the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” So called because corporations are able to buy full calendar years, ensuring that every mention of the date will function as an advertisement for their products. Thus the Depend adult undergarment company presides over the year in which the book takes place. In Infinite Jest, the adult undergarment rules, commercially and figuratively, as the childish nature of freedom has reduced everyone to an infantile state — blabbering, bawling, perhaps even shitting themselves in the quest to experience heightened convenience and orgasmic pleasure.

The response from the intellectual class is to drown itself in detached irony, demonstrating superiority through the constant display of disengaged disapproval — a joke, smirk, and shrug. Wallace previewed the United States of Donald Trump’s authoritarian movement not only with consideration of entertainment’s ability to trump (sorry) civic virtue, but also the freefall of a culture without shared democratic values. A grotesque parallelism of Trump’s 2016 election was his capacity to take advantage of his years in reality television to entertain while the mainstream media recklessly chased dollars by using Trump as a ratings and advertisement revenue source, rather than as a textbook example of the dangers of demagoguery. Editors across the country breathe secret sighs of relief when Trump’s name can be printed on magazine covers. Like Trump, magazines and newspapers also exist to sell themselves.

A character in Infinite Jest, while giving a recent history of the US, explains that President Johnny Gentle, a former lounge singer and television personality, was able to gain political power, and turn the country vaguely authoritarian and buffoonish, by using entertainment skills on the campaign trail, and promising efficiency in juxtaposition to two mainstream parties facing accusations of corruption and incompetence. Gentle is an oppressive joke, promising, for example, to clean up the environment by shooting all garbage into space, but much of the public laughs along. “The U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage,” a character observes when considering President Gentle.

In the absence of “genuine belief,” to use Whitman’s phrase again, political culture becomes dull and gray. Fascism, especially if coupled with the methods of entertainment, offers the relief of passion so ferocious it blinds and hypnotizes supporters into waging war on their own society. The “panicked rage” does not target concepts, like poverty, environmental degradation, or health care inequities, but fellow citizens and newly arrived immigrants, especially those with detectable characteristics of difference from what the enraged (wrongly) perceive as the norm. Currently, in the United States, that means Latino immigrants, gay and transgender Americans, Blacks, and, if the chauvinists of the JD Vance variety prevail, independent-minded women without children. When paired with a political program, the paranoia and panic manifests in an assault on the rights of the targets. In the past seven years, American women have lost their bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom in twenty-two states, Latino immigrants have suffered the trauma of forced family separation, and schools and libraries have faced off against the largest book ban campaign in the history of the country. All of these destructive policies are peripheral to an attempt, from a then-incumbent president and his political party, to steal an election through the courts, Congress, and when all other methods failed, the incitement of violence.

David Foster Wallace’s writing implies that our country’s subversive and dangerous turn is not the consequence of a traditional political movement as much as a symptom of cultural crisis. In an interview not long before his death, Wallace identified himself as a “scared American” when referring to political conditions under the George W. Bush administration during the post-9/11 wars. His novels inspire fear for precisely the same reason that they are genuinely funny. They take place in a ridiculous culture bereft of belief in civic virtue, continually auctioning itself off in the name profit and pleasure. It is an absurd thing to destroy yourself.

Infinite Jest offers an imaginary universe for readers to enter that eerily resembles their own, while his journalism colors the gaps of perception with real world, real life examples of the cultural decay eating away at democracy and community. Most of his best essays are compiled in the collection, Consider the Lobster. The book opens with Wallace’s brilliant, disturbing, and endlessly amusing tour of the AVN Awards — the Academy Awards of porn. “Big Red Son,” as it is called, is full of unforgettable moments of hilarity, such as when Wallace recalls standing at a urinal between two porn stars, and fighting off the urge to look over at their penises. Wallace writes that the “motives behind this urge [are] so complex as to cause anuresis (which in turn ups the trauma).”

While Wallace provides plenty of laughs in the correspondence, the power of his perspective derives from his exploration of how the adult entertainment industry degrades everyone involved, most especially the young women, and how it functions as a more authentic, certainly more vulgar version of what transpires throughout American culture. As he writes in its opening paragraphs when describing how mainstream arts and entertainment appear to operate according to no higher calling than maximization of profit, “Worse, there seems to be this enormous unspoken conspiracy where we all pretend that there’s still joy. That we think it’s funny when Bob Dole does a Visa ad and Gorbachev shills for Pizza Hut. That the whole mainstream celebrity culture is rushing to cash in and all the while congratulating itself on pretending not to cash in.”

The AVN Awards, for all their grotesquerie and defilement of women, are an “alternative,” Wallace suggests, because the pornographic world makes no attempt to present itself as anything other than a crude cash machine. There is no pretense of high-minded ideals or public service; only genitals and orifices, dollars and wallets.

The promotors and pundits of political media claim to care for the truth and preservation of democratic values, but in ways different, and much more insidious than porno stars, are equally fucked. Wallace’s correspondence from right wing talk radio, a 2005 essay with the simple name, “Talk,” gives readers a report and commentary on the days he spent shadowing a rising star in reactionary media in Los Angeles. John Ziegler, who would later become a “Never Trump” Republican, makes racist jokes on air, and offers the reckless and slanderous opinions prevalent on Fox News and throughout the post-Limbaugh talk radio ecosystem. Denigration of women, hatred of Muslims, and jokes about Black men are how Ziegler garners attention in an, even then, overly saturated media market. The station manager, when pressed by Wallace, uses the euphemism “stimulating” to describe Ziegler’s style. What she actually means, Wallace notes, is “entertaining,” because, in his words, “Ziegler is not a journalist — he is an entertainer. Or maybe it’s better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved.”

Wallace is hardly oblivious to the structural reasons why creatures such as Ziegler roam the Serengeti plain that political culture has become. He writes cogently about the overturning of the Fairness Doctrine, and the intellectual arson of media conglomeration. Despite his understanding of systemic failure, his focus remained on how America’s enablement of an entertainment ethos to dominate its society, resulting in runaway consumerism and abounding cynicism, created the conditions necessary for systemic failure to occur, and perhaps more importantly, for it go unpunished and uncorrected.

In the McCain essay, he sketches the American electorate on a hamster wheel of apathy and assault. As potential voters continue to move according to apathetic indifference, cynicism, and irony, leadership makes the cage smaller and smaller. Directing a “PSA” to young voters, he writes:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

His publisher released a posthumous edition of the essay as a standalone book with the title, McCain’s Promise. The title is slightly misleading, because Wallace makes clear that he was not a McCain supporter. He voted for Bill Bradley in the Democratic primary, supporting the further left challenger to Al Gore. At various points in his correspondence, he refers to McCain’s policy positions as “scarily right wing.” The “promise” of McCain was not political, but cultural. It was the possibility of resurrecting genuine belief, because knowing that McCain underwent months of torture as a POW in a Vietnam prison, even after Vietnam authorities offered him a sweetheart deal, because of his father’s command position with the United States Navy, imbued McCain with sincerity. To Wallace, it was plausible, even probable, that McCain’s recitation of words like, “character,” “honor,” “service,” and “integrity,” had the power of belief. He suffered broken bones, knocked-out teeth, internal bleeding, near-starvation, and permanent disability, because he refused to betray his fellow servicemen. From a speaker who accepted unimaginable pain to fulfill an oath, the clichés suddenly shimmer with life. The absence and reemergence of belief was an obsession of Wallace’s that first appeared in his work with Infinite Jest. Its characters discover that the meetings at the sober house are “irony-free zones,” and a disabled character at the tennis club enjoys listening to a radio host whose stories and observations about death and disease sound real, unlike the constant humor of the rich kids who surround him, and never seem to mean anything that they say.

Literal-minded journalists miss the political implications of Wallace’s work, because he rarely addressed government, laws, or public policy, and he almost never referenced political figures by name. Laura Miller, writing in Slate after McCain’s death in 2018, praised the style of Wallace’s correspondence from the campaign, but ridiculed his analytical focus, even warning that its “limited worldview” was partially responsible for the rise of Donald Trump: “To be sincere, authentic, genuine — that is, to beat back the corporate forces of marketing and pollsters by speaking your mind — is almost sufficient as an end in itself. And perhaps it was for Wallace, who found this to be the central quandary in his life. Just how dangerous it is as a criterion in judging any politician should be abundantly clear by now.”

Miller’s conclusion is, to put it kindly, stunningly dense. Wallace wasn’t judging McCain, which he made clear by emphasizing his support for Bradley. He was evaluating the electorate in an investigation of why an extreme, sensational, made-for-Hollywood backstory is necessary to inspire faith and trust, and what in that story’s absence, might do the job. Steady erosion of belief in democracy, American institutions and society is what helped blaze a trail for Trump’s knuckle-dragging march to the White House. How, then, can those dedicated to the survival of the democratic experiment make America believe again?

Wallace explored that question with the most clarity, concentration, and force in the novel he was writing at the time of his suicide, The Pale King. He printed the pages, and organized them on an otherwise clean work desk, before he took his own life. While in mourning, his widow, poet Karen L. Green, and his editor, Michael Pietsch, organized the manuscript for publication. It focuses on the IRS, with all of its characters having some connection to the agency. Its central inquiry is into the nature of public service at a time of austerity and cultural demolition of conceptions related to the common interest. Precisely because the work of the IRS is boring for the agent, who is also a social pariah (hated by the right, undefended by the left), the novel presents it as courageous, benevolent, even heroic.

An unnamed agent offers a definitional contention of the novel, and allows Wallace to express the paradox of left-conservative politics: “Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think — of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it. I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster — depression, hyperinflation — and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly.”

The same agent identifies the contradiction of citizens “hating the government” when “the government is the people,” and laments the people’s refusal to “take personal responsibility” for ineffective policies, harmful laws, and failing institutions. Meanwhile, the “sort of disaster” that the agent predicts has taken place. After January 6th — an insurrectionist storming of the Capitol in which a violent mob threatened to murder elected officials — most of the country remained asleep. The mainstream press moved on quickly, and now treats Donald Trump as a normal candidate for office, Republican voters and officials act as if the 6th was an insignificant riot — akin to vandalism of a Starbucks — and in November of 2024, we can guarantee that, at least 35 to 40 percent of the voting-age citizenry will neglect to cast a ballot.

Chris Fogle, a character whose secular conversion is crucial to The Pale King, would describe apathy, refusing to vote, and making jokes while democracy crumbles as the behavior of a “wastoid.” Arguably the best story that Wallace ever wrote, Fogle’s first-person account details how he transformed from an aimless, selfish slacker, who thought he was above it all — a self-described “wastoid” — into an IRS agent. He lived with his father, an accountant who worked for the city of Chicago, in the suburbs, while visiting his mother on the weekends. She left Fogle’s father for a woman with whom she now runs a feminist bookstore in a tony, North Side neighborhood. While internally mocking his father’s discipline, intellectualism, and inability to look cool, he drifts from college to college, never obtaining sufficient credits to make the endeavor worthwhile, and showing no direction or ambition. He is without purpose; a sad reality that becomes abundantly clear to him while under the effects of a weight loss drug that, when taken in high quantities, causes a THC-like combination of clarity and haze. High, preparing to waste another day, he hears from the television a message about the upcoming soap opera, “You’re watching As the World Turns.”

Grasping the announcement’s obvious double meaning, and its application to his ill spent life, he questions his entire existence. It causes him to remember a moment he calls, “the incident.” Years earlier, his father came home unexpectedly to find him and his fellow wastoid friends taking bong hits in a pile of empty beer cans, their feet on a coffee table that was a family heirloom — the same table that the father always requested he treat with a delicate touch. After the father spends a few moments staring silently in disgust, he quotes Shelley, “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

The father would die not long after “the incident,” trying to catch an electric train, getting his arm caught in the door, and falling onto the track. He was only in a rush, because Fogle was walking slowly behind, keeping both he and his father, who were out Christmas shopping, from their scheduled boarding time. Due to his own despair, and the loss of his father, he is ready for a conversion to any cause that will give his life meaning. It is then that he enters the wrong classroom at DePaul, and witnesses a lecture from a Jesuit priest professor on tax law. In awe of the priest’s authority and refusal to make himself entertaining or likable to the students, he hangs on his every word, even feeling a personal call when the priest describes heroism in the modern world as acceptance of boredom for a higher purpose. “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is,” the priest/professor argues, “Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism.” The priest also explains that, unlike in earlier eras of human discovery, “reality is already essentially penetrated and formed, the world’s constituent’s info generated, and that now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling, and organizing that torrential flow of info.”

An emphasis on the moral dimension of attention, especially in an “age of distraction,” smoothly interlocks with Wallace’s famous commencement address, “This is Water.” In the speech at Kenyon College, Wallace told graduates that the purpose of a good education is not to tell students what to think, nor is it to condescend to tell them “how to think.” It is to help them determine “what to think about.” Attention is paramount, Wallace argues in the speech, in an increasingly mindless and destructive consumer culture, which is the “water” that the fish cannot see. Consumer culture thrives on convincing its inhabitants to focus on the frivolous and self-indulgent, while neglecting the communal and ethical.

It verges on ironic that journalists and literary critics who consider Wallace in recent years have focused largely, not on Wallace’s work and ideas, but on accusations levied against him of sexual predation. They also obsess over questions regarding why most of his admirers are straight, white men (your humble correspondent is guilty on all counts). Most overlook that Wallace’s best short story collection, Brief Interview with Hideous Men, is partially an exploration of misogyny in all its forms. The titular “hideous men,” ranging from the crude to the erudite, have all found ways to justify their misogynistic beliefs or behavior. Perhaps he was one of them. Asking that question would at least engage the author through the medium with which all of us are most familiar with him.

Critics of Wallace have dubbed the demographic of his avid readers the “lit-bro.” The Strand describes the “lit-bro” in an article with a rudimentary drawing of Wallace overhead as “loquacious, eager to impress, and probably has some anachronistic method of carrying his books, like a briefcase.”

What an idiotic formulation. It is symptomatic of the intellectual cultural crisis that Wallace spent hundreds of thousands of words attempting to decipher. Contemporary intellectual culture is ill-equipped to tackle the catastrophes facing democracy and the natural environment. Illustrative of these incapacities is the literati’s choice to convert David Foster Wallace into a Twitter meme involving bandanas and briefcases.

One of the characters in The Pale King says, “I don’t think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent — that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony.”

As simple as it sounds, David Foster Wallace’s novels, short stories, and journalism asked America to grow up.

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Originally published on September 24, 2024 at libertiesjournal.com.