Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 (2003)

As a product, this is a rather strange book—more of a pamphlet, really, hardly bigger in dimensions than a mass market paperback and with a total of 44 pages, plus Frank Rich's preface. It contains a single piece by Joan Didion that ran originally in the "New York Review of Books," where the articles can go long, but generally not book-length. Of course, with 9/11 and its aftermath top of mind once again with the recent news of the death of Osama bin Laden, it's not hard to see how one gets to formulating a book like this. It was such an alarming and depressing time (not that it's gotten particularly better, but at least the overbearing urgency for making colossal mistakes seems to have diminished somewhat), and, indeed, this essay was a heartening meditation in that time, when so few seemed able to see so clear what was happening. "[Americans] recognized even then," she writes, "with flames still visible in lower Manhattan, that 'bipartisanship' and 'national unity' had come to mean acquiescence to the [George W. Bush] 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." I'm not entirely convinced a majority of Americans actually did recognize that, but certainly from our vantage today the bad faith and incompetence of Bush and Cheney can be seen more than ever in stark relief. It was plainly visible then too, as this little book argues and provides evidence for by its very existence, but I lean toward believing it wasn't a message anyone seemed interested in hearing—even from what I observed among the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts. Ultimately that might make this tract interesting more as historical artifact. Try to imagine, as you read, that her points of view were considered dangerously radical, naïve, hidebound, and foolish. In actuality (or "meanwhile back here on planet Earth"), it overflows with a common sense, rendered with Didion's typical acerbic tartness, that was all too sadly in short supply then. We are still paying for the mistakes of that time—literally, still paying, for example for the radical, naïve, hidebound, and foolish Iraq War adventure. Which still has its defenders. And so, if only for that reason, this remains essential, even as it likely also remains an exercise of preaching to a choir.

In case it's not at the library.