OPINION: Two minds converge at the bailout

Oct 05, 2008 (The Akron Beacon Journal - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- JMLCA | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- James Madison and David Foster Wallace make an odd couple. One is a founding father, former president, indispensable to the crafting of the Constitution. The other is a gargantuanly gifted writer, capable of penetrating stream of consciousness, closely observed and broadly revealing, exuberant and lucid, funny and serious, a virtuoso as a storyteller and a reporter.

Both are dead, Madison long ago, Wallace in September at age 46, his wife returning home to find that he hanged himself. His family explained that he couldn't find relief from a crushing depression.

Each came to mind this past week as Congress scrambled to fashion a rescue package in a deepening credit crisis. By Friday afternoon, both the Senate and the House had approved the necessary legislation, the Treasury gaining $700 billion and wide authority to deal with toxic securities as part of seeking to rebuild trust in financial markets.

In vastly different yet surprisingly complementary ways, Madison and Wallace were students of American life. Madison, in particular, would have been familiar with the crackup in the House at the start of the week (if not the investment tools, derivatives, credit-default swaps and the like). Partisan passions overflowed. Factions reigned, wrecking the first attempt to win passage of the rescue package.

Madison carried few illusions about the dark nature of man, famously writing: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." He expected the inevitable clash of opinions to result in the players dividing into parties, "inflamed . . . with mutual animosity . . . more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good." He described "pure democracy" as ever a spectacle of "turbulence and contention."

The challenge in designing a government became, in part, how to guard against the rule of the mob, how to channel and control the unflattering impulses driving factions.

Madison distinguished between a democracy and a republic. He favored the latter because it served "to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country."

That seems almost laughable in light of Nancy Pelosi scolding Republicans moments before a critical vote and Republicans then claiming such hurt feelings. Add the reality of Washington leaving largely unaddressed the pressing challenges of health care, energy and a budget far out of balance. More, John McCain and Barack Obama are competing to declare more loudly and vehemently: The capital is broken!

The thing is, the Madisonian way prevailed, messy and ultimately pork-laden as the process was. Polls found overwhelming public opposition to the financial bailout. Yet there was the Senate, by design a step farther removed from the clamor, picking up the pieces of the package at midweek and pushing forward with passage.

At that point, the House had little choice. The factions retreated. The country gained what it needed, even in the hothouse of an election year.

What does any of this have to do with David Foster Wallace?

In May 2005, Wallace delivered what may be the most widely read commencement address of this decade, or any other (thanks to the Web). He spoke to the graduating class at Kenyon College in Gambier. He had a way of looking anew at the seemingly banal. In this instance, he examined the cliche that a liberal arts education is about teaching you how to think.

Wallace asserted: The objective isn't so much the capacity to think as it is "the choice of what to think about."

Madison would have appreciated Wallace noting that the "default setting" in each of our lives is to be "deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self." At one point, Wallace tugged: "Think about it. There is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of."

Most of us proceed through a typical day on the default setting. That traffic jam afflicts me. So does the long line at the grocery store and many other mundane annoyances. Wallace then counseled to consider raising the level of your thinking game.

That man in the gas-guzzling SUV? He may be seeking psychological comfort after having survived a horrible accident. That woman shouting at her kids in the parking lot? She may have spent the past three nights caring for a husband dying of cancer.

Wallace shared that a critical element in his learning how to think was grasping the need "to be a little less arrogant, to have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties." He added that learning how to think "really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. . . . being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience."

Who has time for such stuff? Wallace argued that he is talking about nothing less than freedom -- from "the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

We constantly hear about the knowledge economy, about the need to update and upgrade our skills, collectively and individually. All of it is true. Yet Wallace reminded that education has a more fundamental value, supplying the tools to get outside ourselves, to gain "simple awareness."

Wallace cautioned against dismissing his words as so much Dr. Laura. He had in mind a way to pursue better choices. Madison would understand.

Douglas is the Beacon Journal editorial page editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3514, or e-mailed at mdouglas@thebeaconjournal.com.

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