“Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. No one will pay attention because no one will be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues’ monumental dullness. Whether this PR discovery is to be regretted for its corrosive effect on the democratic ideal or celebrated for its enhancement of government efficiency depends, as it seems, on which side one takes in the deeper debate over ideals vs. efficacy.”
“David Foster Wallace,” The Pale King
I am really glad that Wallace (or “Wallace”) makes some of these larger political points that he broached candidly about in interviews (cf, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself), which were fixed almost bromidically in the mid-90s optimism boom, and which by the post-McCain mid 00s landscape seemed almost tame, harmless.1
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(An unforseeable benefit of reading The Pale King is that I’ve discovered a practical convention for the capitalization (or not) of parenthetical asides within footnotes, either mid-sentence or post-sentence, note-wise.) ↩
