Vintage Didion: Didion on politics and the press

I’m currently reading The Year of Magical Thinking, after finishing Vintage Didion. You perhaps have now noticed that I’m on a Joan Didion marathon. 

Taking a break from social media means having more time for reading (which does make me ask myself, why the hell did I spend time arguing with morons on fb or going through stupid tweets instead of reading good books and enjoying the company of intelligent, interesting people?). I’m enjoying Joan Didion’s company. 

Vintage Didion includes 3 essays from After Henry, 3 chapters from Miami, an excerpt from Salvador, an essay from Political Fictions, and a separate essay called “Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History”. They’re all good but I especially like the one from After Henry about Central Park Five, “Clinton Agonistes” from Political Fictions, and “Fixed Opinions, or the Hinge of History”. 

What I find interesting in these essays is that Joan Didion, through her eyes as an essayist, journalist, and novelist, examines the narratives created by politicians and by the press. In the essay about Central Park Five for instance, which according to wikipedia was the first mainstream media to suggest that they were wrongfully convicted, she examines the 2 contrasting narratives by mainstream news on one side, and by black-owned newspapers and black activists on the other; she also writes about the kind of story that gets attention and becomes big, the kind of news that gets ignored, the kind of language used by journalists and by politicians, and so on. In the essay about Bill Clinton, she contrasts the year 1998 with 1992, and writes about how the press (or rather, a handful of prominent journalists) shapes the news and promotes a scandal. In the last one, she writes about the mood in America after 9/11 and the language, the narrative in the news. 

I don’t fully know Didion’s political views, but she is perceptive and sceptical and critical, and she writes well about the way the press frames a story or an event. I should get hold of Political Fictions. Reading Didion’s essays, I can’t help wondering what she thinks about what’s happening today, though many of her observations all the way from the 60s are still true today, and in many cases, worse now.   

For example, in “On Morality” (Slouching Towards Bethlehem), she writes about the disturbing frequency with which the word “morality” appears everywhere, and she ends it with:  

“It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with ‘morality’. Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.” 

This is from 1965—it is still true, and it is worse. People still assign moral burdens to everything, and also talk about being on the right or wrong side of history. People still act moral and “inflict their conscience” on others, and also talk about compassion and kindness and tolerance—the kind of kindness and tolerance that involves silencing and de-platforming anyone that they see as intolerant and bigoted.  

In “The Women’s Movement” (The White Album), she voices her criticism of the feminist movement in the 70s and mocks the feminists for portraying women as mere victims. 

“That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.

[…] Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the ‘terror and revulsion’ experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too ‘tender’ for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too ‘sensitive’ for the difficulties of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the moment as a rationale for denying that reality.” 

The essay was controversial apparently but she wasn’t wrong, and what she wrote still applies now—it’s not that there’s no discrimination against women, but many feminists concentrate their energy on non-issues (such as manspreading for example) instead of real problems, and it doesn’t help anyone to see women always as victims and men always as (potential) perpetrators or abusers. In the #MeToo movement, I can think of a few cases that are a bad date or a regretful relationship that get equated with sexual assault, as though women had no agency. Again, I’m not saying that there is no misogyny, no discrimination against women (there is), and Didion clearly knows it too, but it doesn’t help to infantilise women. 

The thing is that she also mocks the creation of Women as a class, but the essay is from 1972—I wonder what she thinks about the current attacks on biological sex and the concept of womanhood. 

Reading Didion’s essays, I can just replace names in my head and her observations about certain groups of people like politicians, journalists, activists, etc. apply well for today’s equivalents. Depressingly so. Like (some) activists or political leaders not caring whether something happened because it had happened many times to others, for example. Or the press picking a story over others and framing it in a certain way. 

Interestingly, in the essay about Clinton, Didion notes: 

“The Lewinsky story had in fact first broken not in the traditional media but on the Internet […], posting on the Drudge Report.” 

She quotes James O’Shea of the Chicago Tribune: 

“The days when you can decide not to print a story because it’s not well enough sourced are long gone.” 

That was 1998. Think about now. 

The pity is that she writes about Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush (and I think she has written about Barack Obama) but not Donald Trump. I’d like to know what she thinks about Trump, and the current political trends.