Her American Fictions
Caldwell, Christopher
Her American Fictions The essays of Joan Didion BY CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Her politics are leftish, and her hottest tirades are reserved for Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and both George Bushes....
...How democratic sentiments get transmitted to republican institutions is always complicated and never pretty...
...Didion is absolutely right about that...
...On the other hand, she doesn't allow a single chapter to pass without a philippic against focus groups, which mimic the opinion of the electorate...
...Not even when the bumper stickers of the John Birch Society were common road sightings," she writes of the American political atmosphere in 1998, "had we been so insistently reminded that this was not a democracy but a republic, or a 'representative form of government.'" Em...
...In 1988, Michael Dukakis staged daily baseball-tosses on various airport tarmacs—not because he felt like throwing a ball around, but because his campaign could trust a news-hungry press corps to collude in the lie Dukakis was somehow a regular guy...
...She objects even to the Washington Post's call for censure so the public could have "a clear record and a clear statement of the standard of con-duct—the expectations—that this president has violated by the lying to escape being held to account that is a hallmark of his career...
...Insiders in Washington, she notes, "talk about 'programs,' and 'policy,' and how to 'implement' them or it, about 'tradeoffs' and constituencies and positioning the candidate and distancing the candidate, about the 'story5 and how it will 'play.'" (Jargon, yes, but how does it differ from that of the average small business-owner in Missoula, Montana...
...Later she notes that, while campaigning for president in New York, former California governor Jerry Brown "camped one night at a homeless shelter and other nights at my husband's and my apartment...
...Just as Didion the novelist can give the biography of a character by cataloguing the contents of her purse, Did-ion the political essayist damns Newt Gingrich beyond rescue simply by listing the megalomaniacal business-meatball chapter headings of his books and videos: There were "Seven key aspects" and "Nine vision-level principles" of "Personal Strength," Pillar Two of American Civilization...
...But the novelist Joan Didion voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964—"ardently," by her own account—and swears that "had Gold-water remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election thereafter...
...The impeachment crisis happened because the number of Americans nursing exactly such pent-up grievances as Didion's over Clinton's inability to tell the truth had grown extraordinarily vast and diverse...
...So what part of the demos does Didion tap into for a control sample...
...Vietnam...
...The distortion, however, goes beyond showbiz and propaganda...
...For her, there is an establishment of politicians, journalists, and various money men and hangers-on that is willing both to bamboozle the American citizenry and, effectively, to rig elections to keep power...
...Journalists use fairness, Didion claims, as a synonym for "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured...
...Didion despised him during the 1992 primaries as one who exuded "the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent," right down to "the narrowing of the eyes, as in a wildlife documentary...
...Finally, take Didion's larger point that there is at present a historic political "disconnect" between Americans and their representatives, who, during the Clinton impeachment, showed a "casual contempt for the electorate at large...
...Didion's impatience with the anti-Clintonites of 1998 may have to do with her unusual idea that the contemporary American "values agenda" is being pushed by Northeastern elites...
...While Didion is way out on a limb here, her prose—euphonious and scalpel-sharp—is still as elegant as it was when everyone began to rave about it four decades ago, even if her tricks are now sufficiently familiar that her fans will see them coming a mile off...
...He was "Ken" even to Geraldo Rivera...
...He said this in another American city, New York, that had a week before in Washington Heights come close to the flashpoint at which cities burn...
...On the one hand, she despises suggestions during the impeachment drama that Congress "isolate itself from the opinion of the electorate...
...Her mania for listing, for instance...
...This may be bragging, or it may be "full disclosure"—but what it's not is a sounding of the vox populi...
...When he comes off a plane with too many Caucasians for Didion's taste and describes himself and his entourage as "America," she explodes: "He said this in a summer during which one American city, Los Angeles, had already burned...
...What's Goldwateresque about Did-ion is a pleasantly riling populist paranoia, an anachronistic belief that America is run by credentialed East Coast pointy-heads who are venal, snooty, and wholly ignorant of the life of the country...
...But since it turned out to be vast and diverse enough to include at least part of official and media Washington, Didion made an about-face...
...The Yalu River campaign...
...And it's here, in seeking to explain how, that Didion stops proving and starts asserting...
...The Republican pols and Washington journalists who sought Bill Clinton's impeachment (decidedly including The Weekly Standard, which she singles out for excoriation) "were not talking about Americans at large...
...Doubtless, this shift has changed all of American politics, but three episodes appear to Did-ion as milestones: Bill Clinton's campaign as a "New Democrat," Republican efforts to impeach him, and the bipartisan embrace of George Bush's inchoate "compassionate conservatism" in the last election...
...There were "Five core principles" of "Quality as Defined by Deming" (Pillar Five...
...But, then, during an attack on George Bush's "compassionate conservatism," Didion shifts gears, and her zeal to demonstrate that the values agenda is wrong gets in the way of her showing that it's an elite con job: In a country already so increasingly steeped in evangelical teaching that a significant number of its citizens had come to believe that "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last ten thousand years" (forty-seven percent of Americans surveyed by Gallup in 1991 said they believed in such a fell swoop, or "recent special creation"), those who wrote and spoke were arguing about how the nation's political system could best revive those religious values allegedly destroyed (in an interestingly similar fell swoop) during the 1960s...
...What's more, like Thomas Carlyle and Gore Vidal, she has a gift for torquing up a political drama until it drives the reader into hysterics...
...She claims to believe the country at large is "referred to, in Washington and among those whose preferred locus is Washington, as 'out there.'" (I've lived here twelve years and never heard that...
...And to Washington-media protestations that Bill Clinton was an embarrassment to families sitting around the television, she counters that, for Middle America, Kenneth Starr was the real villain: "The person most people seemed not to want in their living rooms any more was 'Ken' (as he was now called by those with an interest in protecting his story...
...Partial-birth abortion law...
...Political Fictions, which collects eight essays she has written for the New York Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Gingrich's five or four or eleven steps...
...She's right to...
...It affects the way Americans are ruled...
...She is right about the impeachment gap, of course...
...They did not know Americans at large...
...Starr was called "Ken" even by those who hated him...
...Abysmal voter turnout is to be understood not as evidence of voters' apathy but as a sort of sit-down strike to protest their "vassal relationship" to the governing class...
...In its place is an old-timey, they're-all-a-buncha-bums populist rhetoric, the endpoint of which is always logical inconsistency...
...I recall having dinner, the weekend before the California primary," she writes, "at the Pebble Beach house of the chairman of a large American corporation...
...This would be an excellent point if it were limited to establishing that the last three decades have been not a period of secularization but a period of re-theologization...
...there were "Three Big Concepts" of "Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise," Pillar Three...
...This relationship, referred to throughout as "the disconnect," is for Didion the hammer that makes everything look like a nail...
...well, we are a republic...
...George H. Bush took a 1986 trip to the Middle East solely for the purpose of gathering campaign footage, playacting at looking through binoculars into "enemy territory" (which turned out—probably by an accident—to be Israel...
...A candidate bent on at once luring the former and holding the latter," Didion notes, "will predictably be less than entirely forthcoming on certain points...
...This is an oratorical, even a demagogic, power...
...Affirmative action...
...For Didion, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward typifies this kind of journalistic lapdoggery, with his books "in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent," his "cryogenic" interviews, and his unwillingness to correct or contradict his sources lest anyone accuse him of being "unfair...
...This was a year in which 944,000 American citizens and businesses filed for bankruptcy...
...He was opportunistic— or corrupt—enough to execute the brain-damaged black murderer Ricky Ray Rector and to appear at Stone Mountain Correctional Facility in Georgia with Sam Nunn and a chain gang of forty black prisoners...
...That is, she damns the Post for finding unpalatable the same truth-shading she found unpalatable in 1992...
...What role did popular sentiment play in American intervention in Kosovo...
...No piety can long escape inclusion in one or another of Mr...
...Didion throws up her hands at Clinton's decision in 1992 not to confine his appeal exclusively to destitute welfare recipients, per time-honored Democratic practice...
...Didion is exercised by not just the big frauds of policy but also the smaller frauds of campaign rhetoric and public relations that make them possible...
...This was a year in which 213,000 jobs vanished in the city of New York alone...
...At the 1988 Democratic National Convention, she claims, "the nets packed with balloons swung gently overhead, poised for that instant known as 'the money shot,' the moment, or 'window,' when everything was working and no network had cut to a commercial...
...When in November 2000, the presidential election wound up in the hands of state judges and Supreme Court justices, she found that "the events in question were in many ways not only entirely predictable but entirely familiar...
...This was a year in which . . . " Etc., etc...
...But Didion makes not a single suggestion about how that transmission could have been better carried out by Ronald Reagan, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Kenneth Starr...
...Or "Ken," as I like to call him...
...But her data is inconsistent with her claim the heartland "values voter" is a figment of the corrupt Washington elite's self-serving imagination...
...These are the grounds on which Did-ion lumps Washington journalists in with the political establishment...
...Review of Books since the 1988 election, shows why we ought to believe her...
...The more Didion rails against Washington's remoteness from "the American people," the vaguer she gets about who those people might be...
...My apologies for knowing this, but isn't "money shot" a porn-movie term...
...Her evidence here seems to consist of Sally Quinn's mid-impeachment Washington Post article about how Bill Clinton never quite fit in among the Georgetown party set, and a few transcripts of This Week that show the talking heads unanimous in their outrage...
...Brown v. Board of Education...
...Monica Lewinsky's appearance in 1998 was only a last straw, a proximate cause of Clinton's troubles...
...The Panama Canal treaties...
...And later: "On the evening of the November 1988 election and on several evenings that followed, I happened to sit at dinner next to men with considerable experience in the financial community...
...You could even call it part of the human condition...
...His advance team even requested that the Jordanian army marching band change its uniforms from white to red...
...Take Clinton...
...But the contempt is nothing new...
...Such stunts bespoke not just a personal sleaziness but a willingness to serve as front-man for a lying Democratic party, which was putting all its eggs in the basket of (racist, Didion assumes) "Reagan Democrats," while trying to hold their black base...
...The Marshall Plan...
...She writes breaking news in the past tense, uses elaborate and jarringly formal epithets, and has a taste for Biblical parallelisms, creating a Valkyrian melodrama around even the most unimportant bureaucratic and organizational struggles...
...What gets lost in this rant is that Clinton was running not to embody the problems Didion describes, but to fix them...
...For her, both parties' move to the right in the last decade— Democrats towards "middle-class" centrism, Republicans towards "values" issues—is evidence of a conscious strategy to narrow the range of discussible political issues and the range of voters along with it...
...Didion has a keen, almost neurasthenic, sensitivity to idiom—which makes her slanted reporting of other people's slang particularly untrustworthy...
Vol. 7 • September 2001 • No. 2
