This, readers, is a good week for your magazine reporter. First and foremost, the Atlantic has a cover story by one David Foster Wallace, whose knowing and discursive sort of meta deconstruction of his subjects so excites him (that “him” being, it should be noted, the magazine reporter, not Wallace, despite the fact that said “him” is actually me, i.e. the first person talking to you right now me, but who for journalistic conventions I must call “him,” which seems like a rather unnecessary and kind of absurd sop to tradition or whatever when you think about it) that he (again, here, me) went out and bought an actual newsstand copy of Gourmet magazine when Wallace had a discussion therein of the morality of lobster consumption, which is something he/me almost never does. (By which here I/he mean buying a newsstand copy of anything, really, but particularly Gourmet, which [while a fine magazine] isn’t really my/his cup of tea).*
Wallace’s Atlantic piece, on conservative talk show host John Ziegler and talk radio in general, isn’t his finest work, but it’s still pretty damn good. Here’s an except from one of the piece’s many footnotes, on the question of whether Ziegler is a racist:
John Ziegler does not appear to be a racist as “racist” is generally understood. What he is, is more like very, very insensitive — although Mr. Z. himself would despise that description, if only because “insensitive” is now such a PC shibboleth. Actually, though, it is in the very passion of his objection to terms like “insensitive,” “racist,” and “the N-word” that his real problem lies. Like many other post-Limbaugh hosts, John Ziegler seems unable to differentiate between (1) cowardly, hypocritical acquiescence to the tyranny of Political Correctness and (2) judicious, compassionate caution about using words that cause pain to large groups of human beings, especially when there are several less upsetting words that can be used. Even though there is plenty of stuff for reasonable people to dislike about Political Correctness as a dogma, there is also something creepy about the brutal, self-righteous glee with which Mr. Z. and other conservative hosts defy all PC conventions. If it causes you real pain to hear or see something, and I make it a point to inflict that thing on you merely because I object to your reasons for finding it painful, then there’s something wrong with my sense of proportion, or my recognition of your basic humanity, or both.
Other lessons from the piece: Katie Couric is kind of obscene, talk radio listeners don’t seen to mind the fact that hosts shift all-too-easily from “apoplectic Little Guy” to ad-reciting corporate shill, and, for God’s sake, don’t get the 30-day free trial of Enzyte.
The other highlight of the week? A new short story from George Saunders in Harper’s, which we won’t get into just now. Instead, let’s stay with Harper’s but go undercover with “Florida’s Republican shock troops.” Our tour guide is Wells Tower, a liberal who, last September, went to Orlando to “undertake a vigil for election-theft tactics from inside the Bush campaign’s grass-roots ranks.” That doesn’t go so well, but Tower did find himself in some uncomfortable positions, as when he had to defend his apparent support for Bush to a union man at a Kerry rally:
I attempt a timid declaration about Bush’s commitment to national security, drawing on the only time in my life when my foremost feelings toward our president were not suspicion and contempt; namely, when I was standing on a sidewalk in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, watching people jumping out of the north tower of the World Trade Center, and for a few hours afterward when I was back in my apartment, trying not to imagine what concatenation of incinerated things made up the sweet, chalky odor seeping in through my closed windows, and taking comfort in the sound of fighter jets shrieking overhead, and also in the certainty that George Bush was going to make a lot of people pay grievously for this day. It’s a sentiment I have never admitted to having had before this moment, and it appalls me to find myself saying these things now. Still, I’m startled by how irresistibly powerful, how despicably good it feels to stand here sanctifying my praise of the President in the lives lost that morning. “I was there,” I say, and to my own horror, I can feel a painful brine building behind my eyes. “I saw people dying.”
Finally, let’s head over to The American Prospect, where Garance Franke-Ruta writes that many bloggers are actually partisan operatives exploiting the medium to push their ideological agenda. “Using the cover of anonymity (many bloggers use pseudonyms), the cacophony of the relatively new medium, and the easily inflamed passions of the Web, these partisan political operatives are becoming experts at stirring up hornets’ nests of angry e-mails to editors, mounting campaigns to force advertisers to pull out of news shows, and, most disturbingly, spreading outright false information,” she writes. “The irony is that, at the same time this is happening, many in the mainstream media have decided it’s finally time to take bloggers seriously. But people who blog about politics and journalism aren’t just a 21st-century media story; they’re part of an ongoing political story with roots stretching back more than 40 years.” Franke-Ruta’s got all the gory details, so be sure to read the whole thing.
–Brian Montopoli
*And let me just state the obvious here, which is that I’m (and here I figure I’ll just give up on the whole he/I him/me thing, as 1) it’s getting a bit stale, 2) I prefer “I” anyway, and 3) this is, after all, a footnote) trying to do what is probably a poor (and certainly exaggerated) imitation of Wallace, who I really do like, tons, having read Infinite Jest more than once and eaten up almost everything else Wallace has done, and let me just add that if you haven’t read the title essay in A Supposedly Fun Thing … , which characterizes the cruise ship experience as a kind of pretty disturbing re-creation of the prenatal, you should, like, do so right now. Anyway, now back to your regularly scheduled journalism.
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.