Joan Didion - Democracy

1) Shining Star , Inez had written on the piece of paper.

2) Twinkling Star

3) Morning Star

4) Evening Star

5) Southern Star

6) North Star

7) Celestial Star

8) Meridian Star

9) Day Star

10)???

“Hey,” Billy Dillon said. “Inez. If you’re drafting a cable to Janet, tell her we’re retiring her number.”

“Mort’s raising a subtle point here, Billy,” Harry Victor said. “Pick up a phone.”

Inez crumpled the piece of paper and threw it into the fire. On the day Carol Christian left for good on the Lurline Janet had not stopped crying until she was taken from the Pacific Club to the pediatrician’s office and sedated, but Inez never did cry. Aloha oe . I am talking here about a woman who believed that grace would descend on those she loved and peace upon her household on the day she remembered the names of all ten Star Ferry boats that crossed between Hong Kong and Kowloon. She could never get the tenth. The tenth should have been Night Star , but was not. During the 1972 campaign and even later I thought of Inez Victor’s capacity for passive detachment as an affectation born of boredom, the frivolous habit of an essentially idle mind. After the events which occurred in the spring and summer of 1975 I thought of it differently. I thought of it as the essential mechanism for living a life in which the major cost was memory. Drop fuel. Jettison cargo. Eject crew.

IN the spring of 1975, during the closing days of what Jack Lovett called “the assistance effort” in Vietnam, I happened to be teaching at Berkeley, lecturing on the same short-term basis on which Harry Victor had lectured there between the 1972 campaign and the final funding of the Alliance for Democratic Institutions; living alone in a room at the Faculty Club and meeting a dozen or so students in the English Department to discuss the idea of democracy in the work of certain post-industrial writers. I spent my classroom time pointing out similarities in style, and presumably in ideas of democracy (the hypothesis being that the way a writer constructed a sentence reflected the way that writer thought), between George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway, Henry Adams and Norman Mailer. “The hills opposite us were grey and wrinkled like the skins of elephants” and “this war was a racket like all other wars” were both George Orwell, but were also an echo of Ernest Hemingway. “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he” and “he began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross” were both Henry Adams, but struck a note that would reverberate in Norman Mailer.

What did this tell us, I asked my class.

Consider the role of the writer in a post-industrial society.

Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words, consider the social organization implicit in the use of the autobiographical third person.

Consider, too, Didion’s own involvement in the setting: an atmosphere results. How? It so happened that I had been an undergraduate at Berkeley, which meant that twenty years before in the same room or one like it (high transoms and golden oak moldings and cigarette scars on the floor, sixty years of undergraduate yearnings not excluding my own) I had considered the same questions or ones like them. In 1955 on this campus I had first noticed the quickening of time. In 1975 time was no longer just quickening but collapsing, falling in on itself, the way a disintegrating star contracts into a black hole, and at the scene of all I had left unlearned I could summon up only fragments of poems, misremembered. Apologies to A.E. Housman, T.S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz:

Of my three-score years and ten

These twenty would not come again.

Black wing, brown wing, hover over

Twenty years and the spring is over.

This was the school in which we learned

That time was the fire in which we burned.

Sentimental sojourn.

Less time left for those visions and revisions.

In this rather febrile mood I seemed able to concentrate only on reading newspapers, specifically on reading the dispatches from Southeast Asia, finding in those falling capitals a graphic instance of the black hole effect. I said “falling.” Many of the students to whom I spoke said “being liberated.” “The establishment press has been giving us some joyous news,” one said, and when next we spoke I modified “falling” to “closing down.”

Every morning I walked from the Faculty Club to a newsstand off Telegraph Avenue to get the San Francisco Chronicle , the Los Angeles Times , and the New York Times . Every afternoon I got the same dispatches, under new headlines and with updated leads, in the San Francisco Examiner , the Oakland Tribune , and the Berkeley Gazette . Tank battalions vanished between editions. Three hundred fixed-wing aircraft disappeared in the new lead on a story about the president playing golf at the El Dorado Country Club in Palm Desert, California.

I would skim the stories on policy and fix instead on details: the cost of a visa to leave Cambodia in the weeks before Phnom Penh closed was five hundred dollars American. The colors of the landing lights for the helicopters on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon were red, white, and blue. The code names for the American evacuations of Cambodia and Vietnam respectively were EAGLE PULL and FREQUENT WIND. The amount of cash burned in the courtyard of the DAO in Saigon before the last helicopter left was three-and-a-half million dollars American and eighty-five million piastres. The code name for this operation was MONEY BURN. The number of Vietnamese soldiers who managed to get aboard the last American 727 to leave Da Nang was three hundred and thirty. The number of Vietnamese soldiers to drop from the wheel wells of the 727 was one. The 727 was operated by World Airways. The name of the pilot was Ken Healy.

I read such reports over and over again, pinned in the repetitions and dislocations of the breaking story as if in the beam of a runaway train, but I read only those stories that seemed to touch, however peripherally, on Southeast Asia. All other news receded, went unmarked and unread, and, if the first afternoon story about Paul Christian killing Wendell Omura had not been headlined CONGRESSIONAL FOE OF VIET CONFLICT SHOT IN HONOLULU, I might never have read it at all. Janet Ziegler was not mentioned that first afternoon but she was all over the morning editions and so, photographs in the Chronicle and a separate sidebar in the New York Times , VICTOR FAMILY TOUCHED BY ISLAND TRAGEDY, were Inez and Harry Victor.

That was March 26, 1975.

A Wednesday morning.

I tried to call Inez Victor in New York but Inez was already gone.

SEE it this way.

See the sun rise that Wednesday morning in 1975 the way Jack Lovett saw it.

From the operations room at the Honolulu airport.

The warm rain down on the runways.

The smell of jet fuel.

The military charters, Jack Lovett’s excuse for being in the operations room at the airport, C-130s, DC-8s, already coming in from Saigon all night long now, clustered around the service hangars.

The first light breaking on the sea, throwing into relief two islands (first one and then, exactly ninety seconds later, the second, two discrete land masses visible on the southeastern horizon only during those two or three minutes each day when the sun rises behind them.

The regularly scheduled Pan American 747 from Kennedy via LAX banking over the milky shallows and touching down, on time, the big wheels spraying up water from the tarmac, the slight skidding, the shudder as the engines cut down.