Joan Didion: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live

_We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live_ by Joan Didion

NY:  Everyman Library, 2006

ISBN  0-307-26487-4

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Where the Kissing Never Stops”

(42)  Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.  

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem”

(90)  He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers.

“On Keeping a Notebook”

(103)  “The party was _not_ for you, the spider was _not_ a black widow, _it wasn’t that way at all_.”  Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

“Notes from a Native Daughter”

(131)  In fact that is what I want to tell you about:  what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento.  If I could make you understand that, I could make you uinderstand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento _is_ California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension;  in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.

“Letter from Paradise, 21º 19’ N., 157º 52’ W.”

(146)  On the whole I am able to take a very long view of death, but I think a great deal about what there is to remember, twenty-one years later, of a boy who died at nineteen.

NB:  WWII graves in Honolulu’s Punchbowl

“Goodbye to All That”

(171)  Someone who lives always with a plane schedule in the drawer lives on a slightly different calendar.

The White Album

“The White Album”

(185)  We tell ourselves stories in order to live.  The princess is caged in the consulate.  The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.  The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the seventeenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which.  We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens.  We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.  We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while.  I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common conditon but one I found troubling.

(211)  In other words it was another story without a narrative.

NB:  Receiving a diagnosis of MS

“James Pike, American”

(216)  apologue - a moral fable, especially one with animals as characters

“Holy Water”

(225)  The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.

"The Getty”

(233)  (I have never been sure what the word “nouveau” can possibly mean in America, implying as it does that the speaker is gazing down six hundred years of rolled lawns.)

“Good Citizens”

(241)  … the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

“Notes Toward a Dreampolitik”

(251)  To watch a bike movie is finally to apprehend the extent to which the toleration of small irritations is no longer a trait much admired in America, the extent to which a noexistent frustration threshold is seen not as psychopathic but as a “right.”

“In the Islands”

(281)  What the place [the Royal Hawaiian Hotel] reflected in the Thirties it reflects still, in less flamboyant mutations:  a kind of life lived always on the streets where the oldest trees grow.

“In Hollywood”

(296)  There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy, an inability to devote more than token attention to the preoccupations of the society outside.  The action is everything, more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics;  more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.

NB:  venture capital

(297)  [at Adolf Zukor’s 100th birthday celebration]… but on this night there is among them a resigned warmth, a recognition that they will attend one another’s funerals.

“On the Morning After the Sixties”

(329)  … the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.

(330)  I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults.

NB:  Silent Generation of the 1950s, which I’ve now seen confused with the generation that fought WWII

Salvador

(362)    “Don’t say I said this, but there are no issues here,” I was told by a high-placed Salvadoran.  “There are only ambitions.”

… That this man saw _la situación_ as only one more realignment of power among the entitled, a conflict of “ambitions” rather than “issues,” was, I recognized, what many people would call a conventional bourgeois view of civil conflict, and offered no solutions, but the people with solutions to offer were mainly somewhere else, in Mexico or Panama or Washington.

(388)  There is a sense in which the place remains marked by the meanness and discontinuity of all frontier history, by a  certain proximity to the cultural zero.

After Henry

“Pacific Distances”

(592)  When I first moved to Los Angeles from New York, in 1964, I found this absence of narrative a deprivation.  At the end of two years, I realized (quite suddenly, alone one morning in the car) that I had come to find narrative sentimental.  This remains a radical difference between the two cities, and also between the ways in which the residents of those cities view each other.

“Los Angeles Days”

(614)  … something in the human spirit rejects planning on a daily basis for catastrophe. 

“L.A. Noir”

(653)  In a city [Los Angeles] not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city even then afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth bomber, the conviction that something can be made of nothing may be one of the few narratives in which everyone participates.  A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life.

“Sentimental Journeys”

(686)  Later it would be recalled that 3,254 other rapes were reported that year, including one the following week involving the near decapitation of a black woman in Fort Tryon Park and one two weeks later involving a black woman in Brooklyn who was robbed, raped, sodomized, and thrown down an air shaft of a four-story building, but the point was rhetorical, since crimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story a lesson, a high concept.

NB:  tyranny of story, narrative

(702)  A preference for broad strokes, for the distortion and flattening of character and the reduction of events to narrative, has been for well over a hundred years the heart of the way the city [NYC] presents itself…

(713)  The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities.

(714)  In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general - problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the under-equipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color - the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented.

Political Fictions

“A Foreward”

(735)  The piece I finally did on the 1988 campaign, “Insider Baseball,” was the first of a number of pieces I eventually did about various aspects of American politics, most of which had to do, I came to realize, with the ways in which the political process did not reflect but increasingly proceeded from a series of fables about American experience.

(736)  It was also clear in 1988 that the rhetorical manipulation of resentment and anger designed to attract these target voters had reduced the nation’s political dialogue to a level so dispiritingly low that its highest expression had come to be a pernicious nostalgia.  Perhaps most striking of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.  All of this was known.

(737 -738)  The graphs themselves, however, told a somewhat more complicated story:  only third-five percent of nonvoters, or about seventeen percent of all adult Americans, fell into the “apathetic” category, which, according to a directory of the Shorenstein study [Vanishing Voters], included those who “have no sense of civic duty,” aren’t interested in politics,” and “have no commitment in keeping up with public affairs.”  Another fourteen percent of nonvoters were classifed as “disconnected,” a group including both those “who can’t get to the polls because of advanced age or disability” and those “who recently changed addresses and are not yet registered” - in other words, people functionally unable to vote.  The remaining fifty-one percent of these nonvoters, meaning roughly a quarter of all adult Americans, were classsifed as either “alienated: (“the angry men and women of US politics… so disgusted with politicians and the political process that they’ve opted out”) or “disenchanted” (“these non-voters aren't so much repelled by politics as they are by the way politics is practiced”), in either case pretty much the polar opposite of “apathetic.”  According to the graphs, more than seventy percent of all novoters were in fact registered, a figure that cast some ambiguity on the degree of “apathy” even among the thirty-five percent categorized as “apathetic.”

NB:  percentage of non-registered qualified voters

(738)  The interesting point at which the attitudes of voters and nonvoters did diverge was that revealed by questioning about specific policies.  Voters, for example, tended to believe that the federal budget surplus should go to a tax cut.  Nonvoters, who on the whole had less education and lower income, more often said that the surplus should be spent on health, welfare, and education.  “Nonvoters have different needs,” is the way the Post summarized this.  “But why should politicians listen?”

(742)  That this [incomes above $50,000 (1988 dollars)] was not a demographic profile of the country at large, that half 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 own 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. 

“Insider Baseball”

(750)  American reporters “like” covering a presidential campaign (it gets them out on the road, it has balloons, it has music, it is viewed as a big story, one that leads to the respect of one’s peers, to the Sunday shows, to lecture fees and often to Washington), which is why there has developed among those who do it so arresting an enthusiasm for overlooking the contradictions inherent in reporting that which occurs only in order to be reported.

(758)  This notion, that the citizen’s choice among determinedly centrist candidates makes a “difference,” is in fact the narrative’s most central element, and its most fictive.

“The West Wing of Oz”

(785)  In a 1991 Rand Institute report prepared for the Department of Defense, Benjamin C Schwarz noted that “the greed and apparent tactical incompetence of Salvadoran officers has so exhausted American experts posted to El Salvador that all the individuals interviewed for this report who have served there in the past two years believe that the Salvadoran military does not wish to win the war because in so doing it would lose the American aid that has enriched it for the past decade."

(795)  Not long after the Grenada invasion, for which the number of medals awarded eventually exceeded the number of actual combatants, the president, in his commander-in-chief role, spoke at a ceremony honoring the nation’s Medal of Honor recipients.

(797)  Jeffrey K Tulis The Rhetorical Presidency, 1987:  The routinization of crisis, endemic to the rhetorical presidency, is accompanied by attempted repetitions of charisma.  In Reagan’s case this style was further reinforced by an ideology and a rhetoric opposed to the Washington establishment, to bureaucrats and bureaucracies…  

NB:  speech as action and confusion

(799)  … ended by transforming the White House into a kind of cargo cult.

NB:  woo woo, also for the 60s

“Eyes on the Prize”

(813)  He [Jerry Brown] told Governor Clinton that the [1992] ticket would have his “full endorsement” in the unlikely eventuality that the platform was amended to include four provisions:  “a $100 ceiling on all political contributions, a ban on political committees (PACs), universal registration undertaken by government itself (together with same-day registration), and finally election day as a holiday."

(824)  … large numbers of Americans report finding politics deeply silly, yet the necessity for this reduction is now accepted as a given.

(826)  Political Scientist Walter Dean Burnham [1988?]:  “The Republicans, however, are perfectly happy to declare class struggle all the time.  They are always waging a one-sided class war against the constituency the Democrats nominally represent.  In this sense, the Republicans are the only real political party in the United States.  They stand for ideology and interest, not compromise.”

“Political Pornography”

(863)  The genuflection toward “fairness” is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal.  In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what “fairness” has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.

“Clinton Agonistes”

(875)  Perhaps because not all of the experts, authorities, and spokespersons driving this news had extensive experience with the kind of city-side beat on which it is taken for granted that the D. A.'s office will leak the cases they doubt they can make, selective prosecutorial hints had become embedded in the ongoing story as fact.

(890)  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.”

“Vichy Washington”

(909)  It was the solution to this problem, the naming of the citizens themselves as co-conspirators in the nation’s moral degradation, that remains the most strikingly exotic aspect of the event that came to dominate the late 1990s.

“God’s Country”

(936)  Almost  a year before the New Hampshire primary [2000 campaign after Clinton impeachment], then, the shape the campaign would take had already been settled upon, and it was not a shape that would require the Washington community to accomodate itself to the views of the country:  what was concerning Americans, it had been decided, was the shame they had to date failed to recognize.

…. More than two-thirds of Americans polled by The Los Angeles Times in February 1999, immediately after President Clinton was tried and acquitted by the Senate, said that his misconduct had not caused them to lose respect for the office the presidency.  Sixty-eight percent said that they did not want the issue raised in the 2000 presidential campaign.  More than three in five said that the Republicans pursued impeachment “primarily because they wanted to hurt President Clinton politically.”  Only one-third, or a number approximately the size of the Republican base, said that Republicans were motivated by concern about the effect of “Clinton’s actions on the legal and moral fabric of the country."

(944-945) … (like the fact that the number of Americans who belonged to churches during the American Revolution constituted only seventeen percent of the population).,..

Where I Was From

(963)  … a state where distrust of centralized government authority has historically passed for an ethic…

(1028)  Lakewood exists because at a given time in a different economy it had seemed an efficient idea to provide population density for the mall and a labor pool for the Douglas plant.  There are a lot of towns like Lakewood in California.  They were California’s mill towns, breeder towns for the boom.  When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it. Such towns were organized around the sedative idealization of team sports, where were believed to develop “good citizens,” and therefore tended to the idealization of adolescent males.  During the good years, the years for which places like Lakewood or Canoga Park or El Segundo or Pico Rivera existed, the preferred resident was in fact an adolescent or post-adolescent male, ideally one already married and mortgaged, in harness to the plant, a good worker, a steady consumer, a team player, someone who played ball, a good citizen.

(1044)  The perfect circularity of the enterprise, one in which politicians controlled the letting of government contracts to companies which in turn utilized the contracts to employ potential voters, did not encourage natural selection.

(1071)  This gets tricky.  Notice the way in which the author [Victor Davis Hanson] implicitly frames his indictment of himself and his family for turning away from the pure agrarian life as an indictment of the rest of us, for failing to support that life.