President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

About to take off on a flight and pretty sad I can't participate on this DFW threadjack. Not the Wallace fanboy some are, but the man was a literal genius who had almost too much going on in his head at all times. I'd wager, if anything, weed helped him chill out. It was trying to get off shitty prescription drugs he'd been dependent on for years that in the end pushed him to kill himsef.

 

I'll repeat it: potheads don't commit suicide. People aren't killing themselves because they get high, or because the pot is having some bizarre effect on their emotional stability. Potheads don't kill themselves.

 

Apparently he called Sally Yates a pussycat. (trump, not yf)

 

Yes. Finding the right medication is both critical and difficult for those dealing with mental illness/depression.

The side effects of certain drugs can be bothersome, and it's not easy to switch from one drug to another.

But, self medicating with marijuana while also trying to find the right drugs to use is suicidal, quite literally. You can't find the right mix when you're adding something like marijuana to the equation.

None of which is to say the guy wasn't a genius. But, he had his demons, and if he were alive today, we might be discussing him in regards to the #MeToo movement, as opposed to praising his latest work.

People are complicated. No reason to try to define them by any one trait.

 

Well, you are complicated on the issue of pot. You have this issue with pot that you've never really explained here or if you have I missed it. I enjoy everything else you write about but you've never been more wrong about anything -- every single time -- when it comes to pot.

Nobody who ever smoked pot killed themselves because they smoked pot even if they were cuckoo birds trying to find the right mix of psych meds. The pot had nothing to do with DFW's suicide. The pot didn't make him want to end his life because he struggled to find the right mix of meds that may have allowed him to live a somewhat normal life, which may never have happened anyway.

 

And, Michael Schmidt is a great reporter, btw. This has been apparent from when he was reporting on sports, through his time reporting from Iraq, and since he's been back stateside, reporting on national security and politics.

I get the feeling that some of the people criticizing him just noticed his byline for the first time last week.

And, some of the details of his "soft" interview with Trump have gotten lost among the criticism. Firstly, covering Trump on a daily basis isn't even his job. Secondly, he was able to get the interview by tagging along to Mar-a-Lago as guest (of Christopher Ruddy of Newsmax), and buttonholing the president, when he found an opportunity -- which in itself is incredible, and absurd.

This wasn't a pre-arranged interview. Trump's staff didn't even know about it until after it was published, but Schmidt knew that Trump actually likes to talk to reporters, and that if he could catch him in an unguarded moment, he might be able to get him talking.

But, this also meant that Trump could wander off, ending the interview at any moment, and it wouldn't be some case of an interview subject storming off.

Schmidt got out of Trump what he could, and there's no evidence he traded the tone of his coverage for access.

 

I agree. One thing I find fascinating about this week is that if there's one thing Trump knows well, it's publicity. He had to know blasting Wolff's book would send it straight to the top of the best seller lists, but he couldn't help himself. It's almost as if his need to be the center of attention is so dominant even his own self-interest finishes a badly beaten second.

 

I think the key is if he didn't want to or didn't think he would. If it's the latter, potential collusion makes sense. Seems like an awful lot of smoke there that we largely know about because the president and his inner circle pursued contact and have tried to do damage control like bumbling morons. But then again I tend to believe his administration is a monument to sub-human behavior so I could have blinders on.

 

"The TV loves me!"

 

Remember we were suppose to get a press conference on the whole issue.

 

Read this, about his efforts to find the right drugs/therapies.

Adding marijuana to the mix would make it impossible.

Because Wallace was secure, he began to talk about going off Nardil, the antidepressant he had taken for nearly two decades. The drug had a long list of side effects, including the potential of very high blood pressure. "It had been a fixture of my morbid fear about Dave — that he would not last all that long, with the wear and tear on his heart," Franzen says. "I worried that I was going to lose him in his early 50s." Costello said that Wallace complained the drug made him feel "filtered." "He said, 'I don't want to be on this stuff for the rest of my life.' He wanted to be more a member of the human race."

In June of 2007, Wallace and Green were at an Indian restaurant with David's parents in Claremont. David suddenly felt very sick — intense stomach pains. They stayed with him for days. When he went to doctors, he was told that something he'd eaten might have interacted with the Nardil. They suggested he try going off the drug and seeing if another approach might work.

"So at that point," says his sister Amy, with an edge in her voice, it was determined, 'Oh, well, gosh, we've made so much pharmaceutical progress in the last two decades that I'm sure we can find something that can knock out that pesky depression without all these side effects.' They had no idea that it was the only thing that was keeping him alive."

Wallace would have to taper off the old drug and then taper on to a new one. "He knew it was going to be rough," says Franzen. "But he was feeling like he could finally afford a year to do the job. He figured that he was going to go on to something else, at least temporarily. He was a perfectionist, you know? He wanted to be perfect, and taking Nardil was not perfect."

That summer, David began to phase out the Nardil. His doctors began prescribing other medications, none of which seemed to help. "They could find nothing," his mother says softly. "Nothing." In September, David asked Amy to forgo her annual fall-break visit. He wasn't up to it. By October, his symptoms had become bad enough to send him to the hospital. His parents didn't know what to do. "I started worrying about that," Sally says, "but then it seemed OK." He began to drop weight. By that fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he had just stepped out of an Amherst classroom.

When Amy talked to him on the phone, "sometimes he was his old self," she says. "The worst question you could ask David in the last year was 'how are you?' And it's almost impossible to have a conversation with someone you don't see regularly without that question." Wallace was very honest with her. He'd answer, "I'm not all right. I'm trying to be, but I'm not all right."

Despite his struggle, Wallace managed to keep teaching. He was dedicated to his students: He would write six pages of comments to a short story, joke with his class, fight them to try harder. During office hours, if there was a grammar question he couldn't answer, he'd phone his mother. "He would call me and say, 'Mom, I've got this student right here. Explain to me one more time why this is wrong.' You could hear the student sort of laughing in the background. 'Here's David Foster Wallace calling his mother.' "

In early May, at the end of the school year, he sat down with some graduating seniors from his fiction class at a nearby cafe. Wallace answered their jittery writer's-future questions. "He got choked up at the end," recalls Bennett Sims, one of his students. "He started to tell us how much he would miss us, and he began to cry. And because I had never seen Dave cry, I thought he was just joking. Then, awfully, he sniffled and said, 'Go ahead and laugh — here I am crying — but I really am going to miss all of you.' "

His parents were scheduled to visit the next month. In June, when Sally spoke with her son, he said, "I can't wait, it'll be wonderful, we'll have big fun." The next day, he called and said, "Mom, I have two favors to ask you. Would you please not come?" She said OK. Then Wallace asked, "Would your feelings not be hurt?"

No medications had worked; the depression wouldn't lift. "After this year of absolute hell for David," Sally says, "they decided to go back to the Nardil." The doctors also administered 12 courses of electroconvulsive therapy, waiting for Wallace's medication to become effective. "Twelve," Sally repeats. "Such brutal treatments," Jim says. "It was clear then things were bad."

Wallace had always been terrified of shock therapy. "It scares the shit out of me," he told me in 1996. "My brain's what I've got. But I could see that at a certain point, you might beg for it."

In late June, Franzen, who was in Berlin, grew worried. "I actually woke up one night," he says. "Our communications had a rhythm, and I thought, 'It's been too long since I heard from Dave.' " When Franzen called, Karen said to come immediately: David had tried to kill himself.

Franzen spent a week with Wallace in July. David had dropped 70 pounds in a year. "He was thinner than I'd ever seen him. There was a look in his eyes: terrified, terribly sad, and far away. Still, he was fun to be with, even at 10 percent strength." Franzen would sit with Wallace in the living room and play with the dogs, or step outside with David while he smoked a cigarette. "We argued about stuff. He was doing his usual line about, 'A dog's mouth is practically a disinfectant, it's so clean. Not like human saliva, dog saliva is marvelously germ-resistant.'" Before he left, Wallace thanked him for coming. "I felt grateful that he allowed me to be there," Franzen says.

Six weeks later, Wallace asked his parents to come to California. The Nardil wasn't working. It can happen with an antidepressant; a patient goes off, returns, and the medication has lost its efficacy. Wallace couldn't sleep. He was afraid to leave the house. He asked, "What if I meet one of my students?" "He didn't want anyone to see him the way he was," his father says. "It was just awful to see. If a student saw him, they would have put their arms around him and hugged him, I'm sure."

His parents stayed for 10 days. "He was just desperate," his mother says. "He was afraid it wasn't ever going to work. He was suffering. We just kept holding him, saying if he could just hang on, it would straighten. He was very brave for a very long time."

Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire, talked. Sally cooked David's favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods — pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. "We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive," his mother recalls. "But my feeling is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn't take it."

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace : Rolling Stone

 

Yeah. If we've learned anything over the last 40 years, it's that Donald Trump is the model for consistency of thought and behavior.