Joan Didion - Vintage Didion

That “all” of us did not actually share this “ominous sense” was, again, beside the point, since neither Reed nor Podhoretz was talking about all of us. Less than fifty percent of the voting-age population in this country actually voted (for anyone) for president in 1996. The figures in the previous five presidential-year elections ranged from fifty to fifty-five percent. Only between thirty-three and thirty-eight percent voted in any midterm election since 1974. The figures for those who vote in primary elections, where the terms on which the campaign will be waged are determined, drop even further, in some cases into the single digits. Ralph Reed and John Podhoretz had been talking in 1996, as William Kristol and Mary Matalin would be talking in 1998, about that small group of citizens for whom “the spiritual health of the nation” would serve as the stalking horse for a variety of “social,” or control-and-respect, issues. They were talking, in other words, about that narrow subsection of the electorate known in American politics as most-likely-to-vote.

What the Christian Coalition and The Weekly Standard were asking the Republican Party and (by logical extension) its opponents to do in 1996 was to further narrow most-likely-to-vote, by removing from debate those issues that concerned the country at large. This might have seemed, at the time, a ticket only to marginalization. It might have seemed, as recently as 1996, a rather vain hope that the nation’s opinion leaders would soon reach general agreement that the rearming of the citizenry’s moral life required that three centuries of legal precedent and even constitutional protections be overridden in the higher interest of demonstrating the presence of moral error, or “determining whether a crime has been committed,” as Kenneth Starr put it in the brief he submitted to the Supreme Court in the matter of whether Vincent Foster’s lawyer could be compelled to turn over notes on conversations he had with Foster before his death. Yet by August 1998, here were two of those opinion leaders, George Will and Cokie Roberts, stiffening the spines of those members of Congress who might be tempted to share the inclination of their constituents to distinguish between mortal and venial sins:

G. W.:

Cokie, the metastasizing corruption spread by this man [the president] is apparent now. And the corruption of the very idea of what it means to be a representative. “We hear people in Congress saying, “Our job is solely to read the public opinion polls and conform thereto. Well, if so, that’s not intellectually complicated, it’s not morally demanding. But it makes a farce of being a …

C.R.:

No, at that point, we should just go for direct democracy.

G. W.:

Exactly. Get them out of here and let’s plug computers in….

C. R.:

… I must say I think that letting the [impeachment] process work makes a lot of sense because it brings — then people can lead public opinion rather than just follow it through the process.

G. W.:

What a concept.

G. R.:

But we will see.

To talk about the failure of Congress to sufficiently isolate itself from the opinion of the electorate as a “corruption of the very idea of what it means to be a representative” is to talk (another kind of “end of the day,” or bottom-line fact) about disenfranchising America. “The public was fine, the elites were not,” an unnamed White House adviser had told The Washington Post about the difference of opinion, on the matter of the president’s “apology” or “nonapology,” between the political professionals and what had until recently been deferrred to, if only pro forma, as the electorate. “You’ve got to let the elites win one.”

No one should have doubted that the elites would in fact win this one, since, even before the somewhat dampening polling on the Starr report and on the president’s videotaped testimony, the enterprise had achieved the perfect circularity toward which it had long been tending. “I want to find out who else in the political class thinks the way Mr. Clinton does about what is acceptable behavior,” George Will had said in August, explaining why he favored impeachment proceedings over a resignation. “Let’s smoke them out.” That a majority of Americans seemed capable of separating Mr. Clinton’s behavior in this matter from his performance as president had become, by that point, irrelevant, as had the ultimate outcome of the congressional deliberation. What was going to happen had already happened: since future elections could now be focused on the entirely spurious issue of correct sexual, or “moral,” behavior, those elections would be increasingly decided by that committed and well-organized minority brought most reliably to the polls by “pro-family,” or “values,” issues. The fact that an election between two candidates arguing which has the more correct “values” left most voters with no reason to come to the polls had even come to be spoken about, by less wary professionals, as the beauty part, the bonus that would render the process finally and perpetually impenetrable. “Who cares what every adult thinks?” a Republican strategist asked The Washington Post to this point in early September 1998. “It’s totally not germane to this election.”

— 1998

The following is based on a lecture given November 2002 at the New York Public Library .

1

Seven days after September 11, 2001, I left New York to do two weeks of book promotion, under other circumstances a predictable kind of trip. You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an “event,” a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, and leave a 5 A.M. call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city. During the week between September 11 and the Wednesday morning when I went to Kennedy to get on the plane, none of these commonplace aspects of publishing a book seemed promising or even appropriate things to be doing. But — like most of us who were in New York that week — I was in a kind of protective coma, sleepwalking through a schedule made when planning had still seemed possible. In fact I was protecting myself so successfully that I had no idea how raw we all were until that first night, in San Francisco, when I was handed a book onstage and asked to read a few marked lines from an essay about New York I had written in 1967.

Later I remembered thinking: 1967, no problem, no land mines there.

I put on my glasses. I began to read.

“New York was no mere city,” the marked lines began. “It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”

I hit the world “perishable” and I could not say it.

I found myself onstage at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco unable to finish reading the passage, unable to speak at all for what must have been thirty seconds. All I can say about the rest of that evening, and about the two weeks that followed, is that they turned out to be nothing I had expected, nothing I had ever before experienced, an extraordinarily open kind of traveling dialogue, an encounter with an America apparently immune to conventional wisdom. The book I was making the trip to talk about was Political Fictions , a series of pieces I had written for The New York Review about the American political process from the 1988 through the 2000 presidential elections. These people to whom I was listening — in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Portland and Seattle — were making connections I had not yet in my numbed condition thought to make: connections between that political process and what had happened on September 11, connections between our political life and the shape our reaction would take and was in fact already taking.