Political Fictions

More than seventy years ago H.L. Mencken satirized the politicians of his day by counseling the American people that we had the best Congress money could buy. Even then many observers seemed to understand that power politics served the needs of the elite, not the man in the street. Yet gradually this trend toward a polity more and more exclusively organized and perpetuated for the sole purpose of benefiting a small upper class has become noticeably more decadent and extreme, and it is this trend toward extremism that noted social commentator Joan Didion takes issues with in this absorbing series of essays centering on the dangerous drift toward an elitist polity. Miss Didion is an author with an incredibly diverse background, and while she is primarily known for her works of fiction, she has also delivered some provocative and thoughtful best-selling non-fiction works such as "Slouching Toward Bethlehem". Here, with her set of essays, "Political Fictions", she demonstrates her wry and sardonic insight into the political machinations and creative politics that characterize the American polity. While the reading is enjoyable and edifying, her protestations sometimes get to be a bit much.For Didion literally nothing is holy or sacrosanct, and she savagely lambastes the cynical manipulations she attributes to the political elite in this country, who she pictures as systematically and ruthlessly engaging and using their power in the act of exploiting current events in inventing what they then characterize as the political drama of democracy in action. And, to Didion's credit, she understands that nothing is really quite as simple as it seems on the surface. Thus she describes a cynical manipulation of a national yearning for a nostalgic view of America in what is a mind-boggling juggling of the truth. What she discovers in this search through the highs and lows of the political landscape is a solipsistic political view, engendered by an almost comically vapid attempt to pander to the public in an attempt to perpetuate their vulnerabilities in order to maintain power and control. It is difficult not to empathize with her observations, and to subscribe to most of what she says, especially her pointed observations of how much worse, i.e. how much more extreme and more vicious the political process seems to have become. Yet I have to admit to a bit of surprise at the level of shock she professes at finding the political process, especially as represented by the two political parties, to be a patently self-serving enterprise that both individuals and groups engage in to serve their own selfish interests. Thus, in tracing the plethora of ways in which such themes as a imagined American past are manipulated in order to further the aims of the political powers that be, she expresses horror to find that the two major parties, in concert with the electronic media, have consciously worked to deliberately narrow the forces within the electorate to a small but ma

What can I say I might be biased since I consider the discovery of Joan Didion one of the highlights of my lifelong passion for reading. Still this is her best effort in years and the chapter on the obsequious power lunch journalism of the likes of Bob Woodward alone is worth the price of the Hardcover.Other lovelies are the spit out loud funny reading list of that misunderstood" historian and intellectual"(pun fully intended) Newt Gingrich which reads like the Who's Who list of the Bible Belt conspiracy crowd and as well as the beautifully constructed and persuasively argued" God's County" which clearly states that the bias in power is neither liberal nor conservative but lily livered and infantile and forever catering to the constituancy that sees the Virgin Mary on a pancake in a drive- in and thinks curlicues on Hallmark cards will bring family values and a spirit of gentleness back to our errand ways. The fifth star is for the purity of her language and the sheer beauty of her complex but always rational thought patterns.

The convoluted Didion style bemoaned by a couple of reviewers here deserves a few words in its defense. The syntax, highly distinctive and mannered, is also steady and navigable once you get used to it. The quotations pulled by reviewer Peter Metzler as examples of poor writing were readable to me. I got the Hillary Clinton paragraph the first time because I'm familiar with Didion's framework, and I am also familiar with the topic she is writing about. Her style, slightly impatient in its way of throwing all the parts at you at once, demands that you keep up with it. I mean, all these essays are about delving into the buzzing "ether" of Washington and tracking (and trying to nail down) the coded language churning out of it. I'd be throwing things, too.If you read Joan Didion's essays from the early part of her career, working forward, you can trace the peculiar manner as it emerges out of a mind insistent that empirical data lacks meaning, complex structures are always rotting, and writing is ultimately futile. What remains in the ruins is this highly deliberate, manicured style that is, above all, trustworthy-for the reader and the "migrainous, crabby" writer. Words are never out of place in Didion's prose. Her famous style gels during the period of "Miami" and "Sentimental Journeys"- her two masterpieces.I wouldn't recommend Political Fictions to a new reader or someone unfamiliar with the players in Washington. There is a shift in these recent collected writings towards a kind of experimentally casual use of language within the syntax, where the author, comfortable with her method, relaxes the grip on her pen. The effect is thrilling for some of us, and apparently a chore for others.

The ditto heads of the world will not like this book. Many of their transmuted myths are challenged by Didion. I will not bother to compile a list of their headliners and legends. They prefer whipping boy prose. If it does not have the quasi paranoid syntax attacking liberals, then it is not worth their time. I like Didion's book because it reveals further the disturbing triangular symbiosis between the media's "journalist", the fragile bought and sold politicos, and those who make this arrangement their reality.

Yes, Didion's syntax is convoluted; one needs to be patient and attentive while reading this book. Didion spares no one. Clinton is opportunistic and juevenile: slick. What else is new with politicians? Master of the non sequitor, the lunatic Gingrich could have been a character in "Alice in Wonderland". Does Dinesh D'Souza really maintain a straight face when he tells us that Reagan the snoozer and jelly bean popper was in reality a shrewd strategist? The media uncritically bought into the bogus Clinton scandals, hook, line, and sinker. Didion demonstrates that we can't trust the government or the media. Now that we are presented with a threat to our survival, with the government in essence invoking martial law and the media cheering it on, Didion's revelations are topical and profoundly disturbing.