Political Fictions

Political Fictions, published in 2002, is a collection of Joan Didion's articles on the American political proces written for the New York Review of Books beginning in 1988. The central theme emerges in her introduction: "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." This premise is self-evident to most everyone, never mind to a political cynic like me. An elite group sets an agenda which ensures that they will retain power and control and they enlist the malleable media to spin the agenda to the naive electorate. This notion may be stale but it's true.

Didion's prose is, as we have come to expect, impeccable and it kept me reading much longer than I would have been inclined to had anyone else written it. When I reached the last chapter, though, I'd had enough of the last century's US politics and put the book down. It always feels a bit like a defeat to leave a book unfinished. However, in this case, the defeat is a minor one. Only the hardcore political junkie could absorb such a heavy hit of campaign analysis without coming up for air. Read it in bits and pieces if you read it at all.