The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

by David Foster Wallace

No more Phil Mypockets or Mike Hunt or Seymour Booty.

We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges, but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality.

‘What do we do to stop the decline?’ ‘I have no idea what we do. As citizens we cede more and more of our autonomy, but if we the government take away the citizens’ freedom to cede their autonomy we’re now taking away their autonomy. It’s a paradox.

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. Like Rome—conqueror of its own people.’

‘You’re talking like a civics class.’ ‘Which you never had, I’m betting. What are you, twenty-eight?

‘I think it’s no accident that civics isn’t taught anymore or that a young man like yourself bridles at the word duty.’

‘No, but I think whatever led to it becoming actually fashionable to protest a war opened the door to what’s going to bring us down as a country. The end of the democratic experiment.’ ‘Did I tell you he was a conservative?’

‘You know what I think? I think the Constitution and Federalist Papers of this country were an incredible moral and imaginative achievement. For really the first time in a modern nation, those in power set up a system where the citizens’ power over their own government was to be a matter of substance and not mere symbolism.

The fact that it was a utopia which for two hundred years actually worked makes it beyond priceless—it’s literally a miracle.

made it very nearly work

These Founding Fathers were geniuses of civic virtue. They were heroes. Most of their effort went into restraining the power of government.’

‘They believed in rationality—they believed that persons of privilege, literacy, education, and moral sophistication would be able to emulate them, to make judicious and self-disciplined decisions for the good of the nation and not just to advance their own interests.’ ‘It’s certainly an imaginative and ingenious rationalization of racism and male chauvinism, that’s for sure.’

They assumed their descendants would be like them—rational, honorable, civic-minded. Men with at least as much concern for the common good as for personal advantage.’

‘And instead we get the dickless or crooked leaders we’ve got today.’ ‘We elect what we deserve.’

and yet their naive belief in the civic virtue of the common people.’

‘With the curious thing being that we hate it for appearing to usurp the very civic functions we’ve ceded to it.’

something queer is going on in terms of civics and selfishness in this country,

‘I think Americans in 1980 are crazy. Have gone crazy. Regressed somehow.’

We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?’

‘But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The workers’ obligations are to the executives, and the executives’ obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO’s obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board’s obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders-slash-customers they’ve been fucking over in their own name. It’s like a fugue of evaded responsibility.’

‘Corporations aren’t citizens or neighbors or parents. They can’t vote or serve in combat. They don’t learn the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t have souls. They’re revenue machines.

‘Nothing like cozying up on a rainy evening with a Betamax and a good film.’

‘It’s like they expect the government to be the parent that takes away the dangerous toy, and until it does they’ll go right on playing with it. A toy dangerous to others.’ ‘They don’t think of themselves as responsible.’

‘I think what’s changed somehow is they don’t think of themselves as personally responsible.

‘Doesn’t the term corporation itself come from body, like “made into a body”? These were artificial people being created.

and it was some corporation’s sharpy counsel that persuaded the Court that corporations fit the Fourteenth’s criteria.’

and he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen’s sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his.

DeWitt’s saying if you think the corporations are evil and it’s the government’s job to make them moral, you’re deflecting your own responsibility to civics.

‘De Tocqueville’s thrust is that it’s in the democratic citizen’s nature to be like a leaf that doesn’t believe in the tree it’s part of.’

‘Lady gets stabbed over off the river, houses up and down the block hear her screaming, nobody even sets foot outside.’ ‘Not get involved.’ ‘Something’s happened to people.’

‘Say what we’re in now is some transition in the economy and society between the age of industrial democracy and the stage that comes after, where what industrial democracy was about was production and the economy depended on constantly increasing production and the democracy’s big tension was between industry’s needs for policies that abetted production and citizens’ needs to both benefit from all the production and still have their basic rights and interests protected from industry’s simpleminded emphasis on production and profits.’

the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’

smell Rousseau at the root here, the same way you were talking about de Tocqueville before.’ ‘As usual DeWitt’s way ahead of me. It probably does start with Rousseau and the Magna Carta and the French Revolution. This emphasis on man as the individual and on the rights and entitlements of the individual instead of the responsibilities of the individual.

‘The first time was 7 Up with its Sgt. Pepper psychedelia and kids in sideburns and saying “the Uncola.”’

It starts talking about the customer’s psyche being in bondage to conformity and the way to break out of the conformity is not to do certain things but to buy certain things.

‘I think Stuart’s tracing the move from the production-model of American democracy to something more like a consumption-model, where corporate production depends on a team approach whereas being a customer is a solo venture. That we’re turning into consuming citizens instead of producing citizens.’

‘Just wait sixteen quarters till ’84. Just wait for the tidal wave of ads and PR that promote this or that corporate product as the way to escape the gray 1984 totalitarianisms of the Orwellian present.’ ‘How does buying one kind of typewriter instead of another help subvert government control?’ ‘It won’t be government in a couple years, don’t you see?’

‘There won’t be typewriters, either. Everyone’ll have keyboards cabled into some sort of central VAX, and things won’t even have to be on ...

but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out—use

It’ll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion.

His obvious decency and his political impotence have been conjoined in the voter’s psyche.’

How are you going to lower marginal rates and increase defense spending?’ ‘Even a child could see the contradiction in that.’

‘You’re saying the next president will be able to continue to define himself as an Outsider and Renegade when he’s actually in the White House?’

There was also the period when my mother was so upset when Richard Nixon got reelected so easily,

My father said the city in-services were mostly just tedious, which was a word he used a fair amount, tedious.

The fact is that there are probably just certain kinds of people who are drawn to a career in the IRS.

with the ability to concentrate for long periods of time, and, even more important, the ability to choose what one concentrates on versus ignoring, an ability which smoking marijuana would all but destroy.

In fact, I remember I would often think, or say to myself, quietly but very clearly, ‘I am in this room.’ It’s difficult to explain this. At the time, I called it ‘doubling,’ but

but if you really focused your attention there were also a lot of the little embedded strings and clots which painters tend to leave when they’re paid by the job and not the hour and thus have motivation to hurry. If you really look at something, you can almost always tell what type of wage structure the person who made it was on.

For myself, I tend to do my most important thinking in incidental, accidental, almost daydreamy ways. Making a sandwich, taking a shower, sitting in a wrought-iron chair in the Lakehurst mall food court waiting for someone who’s late, riding the CTA train and staring at both the passing scene and my own faint reflection superimposed on it in the window—and suddenly you find you’re thinking about things that end up being important. It’s almost the opposite of awareness, if you think about it. I think this experience of accidental thinking is common, if perhaps not universal, although it’s not something that you can ever really talk to anyone else about because it ends up being so abstract and hard to explain.