Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I’m reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer. To supplement my reading, I’ve been trying to catch up on some of Wallace’s long form narrative non-fiction, of which there’s a fair amount (though not enough for my tastes). I just wrapped up “Host,” a profile of conservative talk radio host John Ziegler he did for the Atlantic in 2005. In the process, I came across this little nugget, which itself is a relatively minor and un-followed-up-upon detail:

As of spring ‘04, though, the most frequent and concussive ads on KFI [Ziegler's L.A. radio station] are for mortgage and home-refi companies—Green Light Financial, HMS Capital, Home Field Financial, Benchmark Lending. Over and over. Pacific Home Financial, U.S. Mortgage Capital, Crestline Funding, Advantix Lending. Reverse mortgages, negative amortization, adjustable rates, APR, FICO … where did all these firms come from? What were these guys doing five years ago? Why is KFI’s audience seen as so especially ripe and ready for refi? Betterloans.com, lendingtree.com, Union Bank of California, on and on and on.

Yikes. 2004? Mortgage brokers? Is anyone else pulling their collar?

On an almost related note, I had never read anything of Wallace’s before he committed suicide last year, so my reaction to his death was the same sort of “What a terribly sad turn of events” shrug that most people have when a famous artist with whom they’re not remotely familiar, to borrow DFW’s phrase, eliminates their map for keeps. Now that I’m waist deep in Infinite Jest, I’m feeling a little sadder, for the same reason most people get sad when they realize that an artist with whom they’re becoming familiar won’t be writing anything else, ever.

I’m saddened for another reason, though, which I didn’t come to grips with until I finished this “Host” story. Isn’t the current economic crisis we’re in begging for a DFW byline or two?

This isn’t to say that there aren’t great writers tackling the story. I read everything Michael Lewis has to say about the crisis; all sorts of bloggers and commentators—political, economic, and otherwise—post and pontificate every day about the crisis. Matt Taibbi has skyrocketed to the top echelon of my favorite writers, largely on the back of his rabid and passionate denunciations of the Wall Street plutocrats who brought down the economy. We need a guy like Taibbi, who will write in Rolling Stone that Goldman Sachs is “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Hell, I’m apt to agree with him.

But I think we need a writer like Wallace, too, and the Ziegler profile is proof. I personally think Ziegler is slime. (This interview he did with Nate Silver provides quite a bit of supporting evidence for that claim.) And nothing I read about his career trajectory in Wallace’s piece led me to change my opinion. What DFW did, though, was humanize the guy. He gave readers a look into the man’s past, exploring the motivation behind some of his more noxious attitudes, delving into the life of a talk radio host. In short, Wallace humanized the guy. Now Ziegler is just a lousy human, and not the monster I originally thought he was.

This may sound like a distinction without a difference, but I think it’s a pretty big deal. We talk about demonization, but in a lot of cases, I feel like our opponents, our critics, those that disagree with us, those we just don’t like, come ready-made as demons. I’ll only speak for myself (although I don’t think I’m really just speaking for myself), but there are plenty of people who I just dismiss out of hand because I find them to be despicable. The demons are already there; the hard work is in humanizing people. It’s like that needlepoint sampler quote attributed to Plato: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Hokey, but true!

Wallace does this all the time in Infinite Jest, taking all manner of drug addicts, burglars, vandals, alcoholics, murders, violent psychopaths, physically deformed freaks, and slackers, and presenting them as people that we could very well know, and in some cases, be. I’ve got an OK idea of where DFW would come down on the whole financial crisis (or maybe not; the guy was several orders of magnitude smarter than me, so who knows), but I’m also fairly certain that he would portray the crisis’s actors not as giant vampire squids, but as what they really are: humans.

I’ll have a lot more on Wallace and IJ once I actually finish it. So stay tuned.