The Last Love Song (89 page)

She did follow through with a multi-city book tour, a week after 9/11, to promote
Political Fictions.
Her first stop was San Francisco, where she was glad not to be staying in the Mandarin, usually one of her favorite hotels; from the Mandarin, she would have been seeing the top of the Transamerica Building and probably couldn't have helped but imagine airplanes slamming into it.

Nor, being back now, could she forget her days in the Haight. For all the city's changes in three decades, it seemed to her that the political polarizations so apparent in the Vietnam era were still rippling just beneath the surface of American public life. In the wake of 9/11, the same old rhetoric—variations of “love it or leave it,” “hawks and doves”—appeared to be hardening. In Berkeley, just days before she'd landed, an antiwar demonstration (students reacting to President Bush's vague bellicosity) had deteriorated into a flag-waving contest: “I dare you to spit on my flag!”

In her City Arts and Lectures appearance at the Herbst Theatre, Didion read, as a tribute to New York, a selection from “Goodbye to All That.” When she got to the line describing the city as “an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power—the shining and perishable dream itself,” she paused.

“The last of the sentence nearly snagged inside her, then made its way out in a quaver,” said a
Chronicle
reporter. “And then for just a few seconds Joan Didion wept.”

On September 24, in Portland, Oregon, at the First Congregational Church, Didion, on the verge of tears again, seemed genuinely intrigued by what she would later call her “encounter with an America apparently immune to conventional wisdom.” In San Francisco and now in Portland, the people she talked to recognized that a “good deal of opportunistic ground” had been seized by the Bush administration, using 9/11 as cover: As she would write later in
The New York Review of Books,
in an essay entitled “Fixed Ideas,” “[T]he words ‘bipartisanship' and ‘national unity' had come to mean acquiescence to the administration's preexisting agenda—for example, the imperative for further tax cuts, the necessity for Arctic drilling, the systematic elimination of regulatory and union protections, even the funding for the missile shield—as if we had somehow missed noticing the recent demonstration of how limited, given a few box cutters and the willingness to die, superior technology can be.”

Leave it to Westerners—here on the Left Coast, the people she met understood that “Washington was still talking about the protection and perpetuation of its own interests,” proving more forcefully than ever the central thesis of
Political Fictions.
First the planes had been hijacked. Now the political class was hijacking the nation, veering it into policies, maybe even wars, most citizens didn't want. “These people got it,” Didion said of her audiences. “They didn't like it. They stood up in public and they talked about it.”

It happened again in Seattle, and in Los Angeles. Dear old L.A.… its long, beautiful, sweeping on-ramps where the San Diego intersected the Santa Monica, its searing sunsets glancing off the palm trees and the stark white wall of the Carnation Milk Building on Wilshire, its ocean breakers full of fluorescence …

The people got it in L.A.

“Bush says the country needs to be reborn,” a journalist said to her, incredulously.

“They're all saying stuff like that.”

“Do you think this event has sort of played right into—”

“Plays right into that, doesn't it? Yeah,” Didion said. “That cleansing event that precedes the Rapture.”

“Now I suppose we have to think about the Rapture.”

“We kind of had the Rapture, didn't we?”

Occasionally, on the road, she had to defend herself against charges that she'd seen the light of the Left and been blinded by it, that her formerly conservative outlook, her contrarian spirit, had been replaced by liberal orthodoxies.

Thomas Mallon would write that her “view of our cold war victory [is] so blinkered that its chief consequence appears to have been not the liberation of Eastern Europe but economic downturn in Los Angeles County,” making “Joan Didion much more typical of literary intellectuals than she used to be.”

Joe Klein, hardly an impartial critic—Didion had
zinged
his reporting in a piece—called her political theories fantasies, and her “notion that non-voters are a seething, alienated mass who would turn every election into a Democratic Party landslide” a delusion. In fact, Didion had said no such thing.

She could be criticized fairly not from the Right or the Left, but from the red-hot center. She had become one of the people she disparaged, a reporter
inside the process.
“Remember Mencken?” said her friend Earl McGrath when asked about the ironies of her makeover. “
Don't get too close to the bastards; you might get to like them?
Well, I think Joan got to like them.”

As for her personal politics: “My responses are pretty much the same as they were when I was voting for Goldwater. I don't see a whole lot of shift,” she insisted. “[T]hey're pretty straightforward, stay-out-of-our-hair politics.” It's the
parties
that changed, she argued: “I don't know who is represented by the current Democratic Party, or the current Republican Party.” The Democrats had moved to the right and the Republicans were no longer averse to swollen bureaucracies. So where to turn?

Didion's “political trajectory” was based on an “unorthodox conservatism” serving as “the foundation for idiosyncratic critiques of power,” Rachel Donadio observed accurately. In her maturity, Didion's self-correcting quality, her ability to be ruthlessly self-evaluative and change her mind when she saw she'd been wrong, trumped her contrarian streak. If she had a strong capacity for denial, she had an even stronger will to shuck her illusions once she'd exposed them.

“I think of political writing as in many ways a futile act,” Didion said. But “you are obligated to do things you think are futile. It's like living. Life ends in death, but you live it, you know.”

*   *   *

In New York, she dreamed of being locked inside her apartment in Saint John the Divine, next to her mother's ashes.

The city had changed in the short time she'd been gone. “[P]eople, if they got it, had stopped talking about it,” she wrote. “I came in from Kennedy to find American flags flying all over the Upper East Side, at least as far north as 96th Street, flags that had not been there in the first week after the fact.” The attack on the World Trade Center “was being processed, obscured, systematically leached of history and so of meaning,” she observed. It was “finally rendered less readable than it had seemed on the morning it happened. As if overnight, the irreconcilable event had been made manageable, reduced to the sentimental … [to] repeated pieties that would come to seem in some ways as destructive as the event itself. We now had ‘the loved ones,' we had ‘the families,' we had ‘the heroes.'”

President Bush, whose leadership the pundits sorely questioned before the attack, and who was conspicuously missing from view on the day itself, was trotted out by his handlers at flag-waving events, swearing to bring the world's “evildoers” to justice. In
The Washington Post,
David Broder praised the president's “moral clarity” and likened him to Lincoln. CNN said he was poised to lead us into “America's New War” (though the enemy and the proper battlefront had yet to be identified). “[T]his reinvention of Bush as a leader … was entirely required by the narrative of the moment,” Didion said.

As for the coming battle: “You know that famous Vietnam thing—how do we get out of Vietnam? There's a sense in which we're not going to be able to say that we won this one and leave,” Didion suggested. “I think there will probably be an unpredictable [political] shift of some kind. I don't mean a shift to the left or a shift to the right. I mean a shift I can't even imagine.”

The beginnings of this shift, whatever it would be, were already apparent. “[W]e have been instructed at regular intervals since September 11, 2001, [that] ‘they' attacked us because they hate everything we stand for, our freedom most of all,” wrote
New York Times
columnist Frank Rich. “If that is the case, history will have to explain why post-9/11 America was so quick to rein in the freedom of debate even as we paid constant self-congratulatory lip service to this moral distinction between them and us. September was not over before Ari Fleischer, the President's press secretary, set the tone. ‘There are reminders to all Americans they need to watch what they say, watch what they do,'” he said.

At first, Didion had noticed people thronging bookstores immediately after the attacks, buying volumes on Islam, on American foreign policy, on Iraq and Afghanistan. Like folks in Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, they
wanted
to “get it,” to study, to learn. But then—as political scientist Steven Weber observed—the national “discussion got short-circuited.” The “tone of the discussion switched, and it became: What's wrong with the Islamic world that it failed to produce democracy, science, education, its own enlightenment, and created societies that breed terror?” In Weber's estimation, it was a “long-term failure of the political leadership, the intelligentsia, and the media in this country that we didn't take the discussion that was forming in late September and try to move it forward in a constructive way.”

Instead, Didion said, it became a “discussion with nowhere to go.”

Predictably, the narrative settled on fantasies (nonexistent weapons of mass destruction) and familiar tropes (national security) to bolster the administration's previous priorities. “I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go,” said President Bush, and so the invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing directly to do with the 9/11 attacks, became a self-fulfilling prophecy—a Catch-22. “Given all we have said as a leading world power about the necessity for regime change in Iraq, our credibility would be badly damaged if that regime change did not take place,” said James R. Schlesinger of the Defense Policy Board.

In the early days of the war stirrings, Didion would travel to the World Trade Center site. She didn't have a police pass, so she would stand at the nearest barricade, about a block away from the crater. “It draws you toward it,” she said. “It has almost the impact of a great cathedral.” The site's power lay “not exactly [in] the amount of the destruction,” she thought. “Other things have been destroyed through our lifetime; a higher number of people have died in a lot of combat situations. This, you can't quite come to terms with it, you can't quite grapple with it. It's a really direct challenge to our idea of … modernity, to our idea of progress, to our idea of secular democracy. Someone said, ‘You can't have that, we can take that away.' That is what everyone is trying to come to terms with.”

The rush to war seemed to her an obvious warning that the harm we'd do ourselves in overreacting to the tragedy posed our gravest danger. “I think that democracy has shallow roots in America,” she said. “Unless people take care of it, it is not assured.”

Instead, over and over, our leaders loved to gamble with it—
this
impulse, Didion recognized all too well, especially in the recovered alcoholic George W. Bush.

In her own attempts to
get it,
she discovered enough to know that for decades, leading up to this moment, America's policies in the Middle East had been one shell game after another: “Stall. Keep the options open. Make certain promises in public, and conflicting ones in private. This was always a high-risk business,” Didion said. Now our bluffs had been called.

To cite one important instance, in the 1980s we had armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Russians, but we had lost control of them, just as the FBI lost control of the Symbionese Liberation Army in California in the 1970s, and now our training and weapons were turned against us.

In response, our leaders behaved like desperate addicts: double down, another try, come on—just this one last time.
What business are they
all
in.
It was like the portrait of the feeble old gambler in
The Last Thing He Wanted,
the father, slipping away, sipping a glass of bourbon-laced Ensure: “Jesus Christ,” he says. “I needed this deal.”

 

Chapter Thirty-five

1

The deaths of her parents freed Didion—indeed, filled her with urgency, especially in the wake of 9/11—to reexamine extensively the California myths she'd inherited from them, and finally, after decades, to complete the book she'd once wanted to call
Fairy Tales. Where I Was From,
published early in 2003 (a year that would end by taking her, tragically, to
where she would go
), was, as one critic has pointed out, an aria made for the concert stage, a muscular combination of essay, reporting, and memoir, a now-dissonant, now-harmonized amalgamation of American prose styles loosed upon the impossible subject of
whatever happened to this country,
a story beginning, for Didion, with the nation's westward expansion.

The book was a grand performance dedicated to Frank and Eduene, who would never see it. Twice in her lifetime, Didion had become so nervous before giving a reading that she had wanted to throw up, and on both occasions her parents had been sitting in the audience. Now their seats were empty. The show was for them (had
always
been for them), but their absence was required for it to work, a further complication in the writing, a parenthetical catch of the breath, a sob in the syntax: This was not a book about
dis
enchantment with her origins so much as
loss
of charm. She wrote, “There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”