"Political Fictions" by Joan Didion
This cool, devastating look at America's empty political spectacles takes apart everything from Reagan's delusions to Clinton's impeachment.
By Charles Taylor
Oct. 24, 2001 | A few weeks back, on the season premiere of "The Practice," the writers took their cue from the headlines. The story, about a politician's adulterous affair and the cover-up that follows a murder, was the show's version of the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy case. We've gotten used to seeing current events transmuted into TV drama. What was strange about this episode was that it seemed more real than the real-life drama it was riffing on. In the wake of Sept. 11, it's as if all of our recent political life can only be talked about as entertainment.
The opening sections of Joan Didion's new collection of essays, "Political Fictions," veer close to a similar irrelevancy. Didion began doing reported political essays for the New York Review of Books in 1988, when the magazine's editor, Robert Silvers, asked her to cover the presidential election. The book is dedicated to Silvers and to Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, who, she says, "lived through my discovering what he already knew."
That dedication is a key to what, in the beginning at least, feels off about "Political Fictions." In the introduction, Didion writes about her discoveries that "half of the nation's citizens had only a vassal relationship to the government under which they lived, that the democracy we spoke of spreading throughout the world was now in our country only an ideality, had come to be seen, against the higher priority of keeping the process in the hands of those who already held it, as facts without application." She's writing about many things here: about the influence of big money on political campaigns, about the fact that a large segment of the population does not vote.
You see echoes of that everywhere today. You could see it two weeks ago in Texas Republican congressman Tom DeLay's craven attempt to stop airport security from being federalized, a stand, as he presented it, against that familiar conservative bogeyman Big Government." (Apparently, untrained, uninterested and underpaid "security" workers are fine with DeLay as long as it doesn't add to the federal bureaucracy.) Decrying the holdup of the proposal, Rep. Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., asked how senators and congressmen could now go back home and face their constituents -- but you had to wonder when he or any of his colleagues were actually going to "face" the citizens back home. Sure, there would be angry letters and phone calls, most of them answered with form letters assuring writers that their elected official was sensitive to their concerns. But was Gephardt or any politician going to go into coffee shops or shopping malls -- or, more to the point, airports -- and bear the brunt of people's anger one on one? It's disingenuous at best to talk this way when you are operating in a system that effectively shields you from the people you represent.
Of course, that distance needn't keep politicians from serving the people who elected them. Interactions with voters are not as important as whether a politician's record reflects an awareness of his or her constituents' desires. Didion knows this. "This notion of voting as a consumer transaction," she writes, "might seem a spiritless social contract, although not -- if it actually delivered on the deal -- an intrinsically unworkable one."
The problem is that for all the astuteness of Didion's analysis, the opening sections of "Political Fictions" give off a disjunctive air of naiveté. Didion at times seems to be unwilling or unable to acknowledge the pragmatism of politics, even if she's not exactly breathing the ether that Saint Nader and his disciples are wafting around in. But she does buy into the notion that the combination of insularity and big money has succeeded in rendering party differences moot. (That notion has been most eloquently refuted by historians Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz in an article for Dissent earlier this year in which, by simply explicating the two major parties' positions, they made the idea seem so much nonsense.)
