Grab Instantly Political Fictions Outlined By Joan Didion Published As Interactive EBook

is something one should talk about in another time, in another country, "
Major Jocoaitique to Todd Greentree and Major McKay in Joan Didion's "The West Wing of Oz", Political Fictions,



"History is context"
Joan Didion

"Joan Didionand I mean this in the most adoring and complimentary way possibleis a wellknown stone cold bitch.
"
Madeleine Davies in "Joan Didion's Crème Caramel Must Be Very Hostile", Jezebel,

How could I not forever love Joan Didion She is a prose goddess who is prepared to burn down every single America's sacred political temples.
She takes no prisoners. Reagan is an empty shirt who can hit a mark, George Bush, Sr. Boring. The Clinton campaign Bottomfeeding, focusgrouped idiots, George W. Bush A pandering fool for Christ, And I think she actually liked most those politicians as people,

Joan saves her hottest anger for when she is writing about the opinion makers, the political journalist, etc, I honestly think whenever she switches gears from politicos to the hacks, she puts away the ink and starts to write with blood and those backroom attorneys plotting Clinton's demise or Clinton's campaign, and the absolute buffoons who try to keep us uptodate on the horse race of the campaign.
That special class of idiots who type the narrative we are supposed to ingest about the moral failings, the moral resurrection, the need for morality in our politicians.
She hates them all. It is a delicious thing to watch, The closest emotion I can point to is that feeling I get when I watch Dexter or Hannibal cut up and eat one of their righteous kills.
It both disgusts and thrills me,

And yes. Certainly. Didion is part of the game, She is part of the narrative makers she bitches about, However, she is a wiser Buddha, a cooler Jesus, a Moses who can really kick political ass, If I could with ease, hand out to a handful of my favorite writers the secret of eternal life, I would save an early vial for Queen Didion.
I can't imagine a written world without her wit, her sideways shivs, her beautiful prose, A political year with out Didion is a political theatre I don't want to watch,

Anyway, this book is made up of eight articles and a forward:
sitelinkInsider Baseball, New York Books, Oct, The West Wing of Oz sitelinkEyes on the Prize, New York Books, Sep, New Gingrich, Superstar
. Political Pornography
. sitelinkClinton Agonistes, New York Books, Oct, Vichy Washington
. sitelinkGod's Country, New York Books, Nov,

Read them, Read them all. We have started a brand new election year and among all the bullshit and political noise, it helps to have a lighthouse, a golden goddess to guide one through the darkness of spin, Luntzcraft and massaged messages to light, truth, and damn good prose.
Torn on this one. Didion is hilarious, and tears into Reagan, Gingrich, Clinton, and the DC media apparatus with equal gusto, Some great extended meditations on the nature of political scandal, Marred by a sneering contempt for the religious right that seems akin to the selfsatisfaction she skewers elsewhere, Does Marvin Olasky have “a view of women not far from that of the Taliban” Didion says yes, I found the writing style to be incredibly dry and that the narrative voice assumed a familiarity with the details of the timeperiod being described.
While I was able to discern what Didion was saying, I did struggle throughout reading this book, The first story, based on actual reporting, is interesting, . . but the rest of the book seems to be a series of book reviews from thes Newt Gingrich, a bunch of Clinton drama.
And one Google search later reveals that, yes, they are book reviews from the NYRB, Perhaps if Id known that going in, my expectations could have been adjusted, Didion is now being sniped at by the new, identitarian left as too snobbish, Well, she is. She is a conservative too, in the old, old sense of that word, But by gum, she is observant she knows the linguistic rules of order and she can generate a mystic sense of oracular terror out of a copyright note.
She may loom the largest, both poetically and prophetically, of the mid century giants, The last quarter here, a series of book reviews that snipe at Newt Gingrich, is dullish, The essays in Joan Didion's Political Fiction cover American politics from the mids to the"election" of George Bush, They rest on a premise Didion validates over and over again: the stagecraft of national leadership in the United States is individual ambition in search of popular wherewithal, and when no wherewithal is to be found, it is readily enough created and then sold to an increasingly alienated, largely nonvoting public as "true" by a collaborationist press.


U. S. political leaders, Didion shows, really don't want to have to deal with voters they want to perform for each other and through media magic trick voters into believing what they say and do is in the national interest.
There isn't, in Didion's view, that much difference between Republicans and Democrats at the highest levels except who is in power at a given moment.
And both parties do their best to be the party in power by concocting political fables du jour that bewilder, belittle, and turn off the voting public.
It's safe to cry, "Fire!", in the theater of American politics because there's almost no one in that theater anymorethe noise you hear is a canned soundtrack, a cacophony of special interests substantially unrelated to anything resembling your interests or mine.


Didion's descriptions of Bill Clinton, Robert Dole, Newt Gingrich, and Bob Woodward are masterpieces of skewering still living flesh and then roasting it thoroughly.
She presents Clinton and Gingrich as a pair of fraternal twins, which they were: two boys bounced around in weaklyfathered circumstances and determined through narcissistic resentment and odd brilliance yes, they're smart, in a way to be elected president of the senior class, the president of the United States, or Speaker of the House.
The main theme in the Clinton portrait is selfpity, lots of it, the kid who is always on the comeback trail, The main theme in the Gingrich portrait is wacky intellectual selfdelusion, But both guys were salesmen, and boy, did they sell whatever they thought the public would buy,

As Bob Dole put it, he might start out saying one thing in a campaign, find that it didn't work, and end up saying something else.
So what That was politics, And with a bizarrely uncritical press led by a figure like Bob Woodward, the minstrel of method, not substance, Dole could say something like that and more or less he lost the presidency to Clinton, after all get away with it.


Didion's analysis of how a group of sanctimonious "evangelical" fundamentalists, led in one battle by Ken Starr, is an excellent study of how even a failed impeachment/removal effort targeting Bill Clinton still shifted the national fantasy agenda away from security and prosperity to "values," i.
e. , the Ten Commandments, the obligatory declaration by highest level aspirants that they were the followers of Christ Jesus our lord and savior, This led George W. Bush to espouse the nutty theology of a decidedly lesser saint propounding compassionate conservatism and faithbased organizations, And it led Al Gore to choose as his running mate the perpetually sincere, Godfearing Joe Lieberman whose natural successor, of course, is the oddity known as Mike Pence.


Were Americans really that revolted by Bill Cinton's hijinks with Monica Lewinsky Didion offers poll after poll indicating that they really weren'tthat in fact a high percentage of Americans found themselves to be divorced Americans because they indulged in the same kind of private satisfactions.


But polls themselves, Didion shows, are artful fictions designed by the political class to serve the political class's interests, and they seldom get at what average Americans want from political leaders.


Over the last two decades, politics in America have just gotten worse, The ways in which the Reagan administration lied about what it was up to in Central America were fairly highgrade nutrition in comparison to the zero calorie lies machinegunned our way on an almost hourly basis by the Trump administration.


Trump himself validates Didion's thesis: lying doesn't matter in politics, Empty phrases like "Make America Great Again" or "I'm going to build a wall" matter, at least for the time being, To say that this is bad for the republic is to understate the case, The last forty years of political class leadership have been ever darker experiences, The white lies have turned into black lies, bald lies, insulting lies, boorish lies but apparently that's okay, Income inequality isn't a problem, guns aren't a problem, climate change isn't a problem, . . and if you think otherwise, why, let's simply declare we're going to have Medicare for all, college is going to be free, and all the polluting corporations in the U.
S. are going to clean up their act, That's the kind

of gobbledygook that Didion documented in her lifetime and we are living through in ours,



.