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'Political Fictions' by Joan Didion

Didion eloquently plays politics as it lays

Sunday, September 23, 2001

By John Freeman

	Political Fictions By Joan Didion Knopf $25.00

We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote 23 years ago in “The White Album,” her classic meditation on the 1960s.

Throughout her singular career, Didion has teased out the meanings of these stories, from the lure of conspiracy (“Democracy”) to the mythic grandeur of American cities (“After Henry”).

In her provocative new collection of essays, she sets her sights on the fable that affects us all -- the narrative of American politics -- and produces a brilliantly damning portrait of a system created and used only by insiders.

Didion’s work has always come swaddled in a chilly dread, and this one is no different. The book begins with a piece on elections, which she considers the most flagrant farce in the theater of politics.

“Insider Baseball” captures how campaigns resemble movie sets as they migrate from location to location, corralling new extras. While other journalists dutifully recast the cheery images candidates present them -- Dukakis throwing a baseball, for example -- Didion depicts the ennui of Californians huddled before the camera.

“The crowd was listless, restless. There were gray thunderclouds overhead. A little rain fell. ‘We welcome you to Silicon Valley,’ an official had said by way of greeting the candidate, but this was not in fact Silicon Valley: this was San Jose, and a part of San Jose particularly untouched by technological prosperity, a neighborhood in which the lowering of two-toned Impalas remained a central activity.”

One cause for this disconnect between the media and the public, Didion believes, is the myth of the Reagan Democrat, that fickle centrist voter who can turn the tide in an election. Since the early 1980s, Didion posits, this constituency became the target of all campaigns, “a narrowing of focus with predictable results, not the least significant of which was that presidential elections would come to be conducted almost exclusively in code.”

A code understood only by insiders, who translate it to viewers of pundit shows.

The Washington portrayed in “Political Fictions” is an occult world, where voters have been reduced to ciphers, groups of people who must be told what to think. Didion argues that the public has been cut out of the loop of democracy by a “national political class” composed of major donors, party operatives and the media. Together, this group controls the political process, from the dissemination of its “message” to its inevitable spin.

Since many of the essays were conceived as book reviews and opinion pieces for The New York Review of Books, there are gaps here. Didion’s comments on books by Dinesh D’Souza and Newt Gingrich and the Starr Report illuminate how the right wing constructed its platform, but an examination of the appeal of third-party candidates, such as Ross Perot and Ralph Nader, would have given them more context.

Still, in spite of the book’s lack of connective tissue, its vision remains compellingly urgent.

While this collection does not offer remedies for this situation, its diagnosis is tart, real and vital. In “Clinton Agonistes,” Didion reveals why the media couldn’t fathom the public’s desire to forgive the president:

“[The national political class] did not know Americans at large. They occasionally heard from one, in a focus group or during a Q&A after a lecture date, but their attention, since it was focused on the political process, which had come to represent the concerns not of the country at large but of the organized pressure groups that increasingly controlled it, remained remote.”

In this fascinating, ornery book, Didion closes that gap, if only a little.

John Freeman is a free-lance writer living in New York.