An old interview has surfaced between Russian journalist Ostap Karmodi and the now-deceased American author David Foster Wallace. It took place in 2006. Wallace committed suicide exactly two years after this interview. I think the following excerpt is interesting because it talks about things to come in the next decade (2006-2015) and we are about halfway along that path and can make some judgments about Wallace’s predictions. Of course, Wallace didn’t know that the economy was going to collapse. As it happened, it collapsed only a few days after he killed himself.
Ostap Karmodi: Do you feel we’re living in an age of consumerism or is that just a media concept that doesn’t have any real meaning?
David Foster Wallace: This question, as you know, is very complicated. I can give answers that are somewhat simple and I can really talk only about America, because it’s really the only society that I know. America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse. For many years everybody knew that business was business and people needed to make money, but people were also a little embarrassed or ashamed of that. It was regarded as somewhat crass. Some of this contradiction comes out of England and old conflicts between the bourgeoisie and nobility. Sometime – I’m not sure whether it was the 1990s or 1980s in America – half of that conflict really sort of disappeared, and there’s now a celebration of commercialism and consumerism and marketing that is not really balanced by any kind of shame or embarrassment or reticence or sense that in fact consumerism and commercialism were really only a very small part of human life. I think that many peoples’ daily lives probably aren’t completely consumer-driven here in America, but they’re certainly much more so than they were twenty or thirty years ago.
OK: Do you think it’s a natural trend that will stop by itself at some point?
DFW: Where’s it’s going, I’m not entirely sure. In America, and I imagine in large parts of Western Europe, there’s a certain problem which is that corporations have gotten more and more power, both culturally and politically. Here in America it now takes large amounts of money to run for various kinds of democratic office. Corporations have a great deal more money than private citizens, corporations make these donations that then result in laws that favor corporations even more, and you get a sort of cycle. And corporations are very strange, they’re composed of people, they have the legal status of a person, but they don’t have a conscience or soul the way people do. You end up with this increasing distortion of American values where everything becomes about money and selling and buying and display. We’ve reached a point with the current president and the current administration where corporations have so much influence and so much control and are doing so much damage that’s obvious to everybody that there may be a backlash, a kind of spasmodic reaction against it. The next ten years here in America are going to be very interesting probably for the whole world to watch.
OK: Interesting optimistically speaking, or interesting as in watching a volcano erupt?
DFW: Well, those are the two possibilities. Either American voters will figure out that there need to be some counterbalances to corporate and capitalist forces, and that balance can be achieved through political process. Or we may very well end up here with a form of fascism. Many people in America throw the term “fascism” around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state. We could be entering a period much like the period Russia went through [for] much of the twentieth century, with a great deal of repression and hollowness and artificiality of the culture.
I find it interesting that Bill Moyers had much the same things to say in a recent interview with Amy Goodman:
BILL MOYERS: I think this country is in a very precarious state at the moment. I think, as I say, the escalating, accumulating power of organized wealth is snuffing out everything public, whether it’s public broadcasting, public schools, public unions, public parks, public highways. Everything public has been under assault since the late 1970s, the early years of the Reagan administration, because there is a philosophy that’s been extant in America for a long time that anything public is less desirable than private.
And I think we’re at a very critical moment in the equilibrium. No society, no human being, can survive without balance, without equilibrium. Nothing in excess, the ancient Greeks said. And Madison, one of the great founders, one of the great framers of our Constitution, built equilibrium into our system. We don’t have equilibrium now. The power of money trumps the power of democracy today, and I’m very worried about it. I said to—and if we don’t address this, if we don’t get a handle on what we were talking about—money in politics—and find a way to thwart it, tame it, we’re in —democracy should be a break on unbridled greed and power, because capitalism, capital, like a fire, can turn from a servant, a good servant, into an evil master. And democracy is the brake on my passions and my appetites and your greed and your wealth. And we have to get that equilibrium back.
The main thing that changed between the time of the Wallace interview and the recent Moyers interview is the Citizens United Supreme Court case which just gutted all efforts to restrain corporate influence over our elections. Unless we can fix that ruling, I think we’re screwed.
What do you think?
