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Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11

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Good Lord that's a lot of money! $7.95 for 44 pages... and the margins are big, so text only takes up about half the page. Didion's point is that, post-9/11, certain ideas are fixed -- ideas set by the White House/National Security State/Military Industrial complex/Powers That Be. Mainstream media marches in lockstep, and feeds these fixed ideas to the people. According to Didion, dissenting views are marginalized, and questioning the (upgraded) status quo is a no-no.

The only thing is.... I've heard Didion's complaint that dissent is shut down from: Gore Vidal, Bill Maher, Air America, The Nation, Michael Moore, etc. So dissent ain't that shut down.

"Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11," by Joan Didion, features a preface by Frank Rich. The title page notes that the text is "as published in The New York Review of Books of January 16, 2003." The copyright page notes further that the book is based on a lecture given by the author at the New York Public Library on Nov. 13, 2002. It's a short book (44 plus xiv pages).

The book is an attempt to look critically at the "national pieties," or fixed opinions that seem to have gripped the U.S. national psyche since the terrorist attacks of 2001. Didion discusses the "death of irony," conflicting ideas and attitudes since 9/11, the "New American Unilateralism," etc. She also tries to put "the inevitability of going to war with Iraq" in historical context.

Didion's intentions strike me as admirable, but in the end I found the book to be lacking in profound new insight. Although she raises some intriguing issues, the text is oddly inert and ends abruptly. Still, it's worth reading if you're interested in the cultural debates spawned in the aftermath of 9/11.

I'm not sure why this essay from The New York Review of Books of January 16, 2003 was made into a book. It's more like a pamphlet, and a short one at that. Of course Joan Didion is an icon of the American left and a prose stylist deluxe as well as a trenchant social and political critic. Perhaps what Didion has to say is of great importance and perhaps she says it very well. Clearly the unstated assumption of the essay--that we would in fact bring about a regime change in Iraq (that is, we would invade Iraq) has proven prescient.

Didion's essay is in three parts. The first part is mostly an observation on how the Bush administration is attempting to preempt criticism of its policies by labeling critics as somehow unpatriotic or worse. One of the nice points she makes is that the "war on terror" is a misnomer since terror is not a state but a technique. (p. 8)

In the second part she identifies the first "fixed idea." She is talking about the government of Israel. She writes, "Whether the actions taken by that government constitute self-defense or a particularly inclusive form of self-immolation remains an open question." She goes on to say that almost no one in the US dare challenge the fixed idea that we must support the actions of the Israeli government. She says that the question is seldom discussed rationally or at all (in her circle, it would seem) because "few of us are willing to see our evenings turn toxic." ( p. 23) That she herself has to bury this assertion into the very middle of her essay and to express it so obliquely reinforces her point perhaps more strongly than she might have imagined.

In the third part she reveals the second fixed idea, which she identifies as the "theory" behind the "regime change in Iraq" pronouncements made in 2002 by President Bush. "I made up my mind [the President had said in April] that Saddam needs to go." (p. 36) The "theory" that Didion is talking about is sometimes called "The Bush Doctrine" or "The New American Unilateralism" or more bluntly, "The American Empire." The second fixed idea then is that "with the collapse of the Soviet Union" we have an opportunity and an obligation to move unilaterally and preemptively against our enemies as an imperial power might.

I'm not going to evaluate Didion's argument here--that is something you will want to do yourself--except to say that:

1) In reference to the rather high-handed attempt at managing the press and public opinion by the Bush administration, had the Democrats been in the White House post 9/11 they would have done something similar.

2) The actions of Hamas and the other Palestinian suicide/murder organizations make it difficult to take any side other than Israel's. If the Palestinian people had better leadership that would pursue their goals in the spirit and manner of, say, Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., they would find widespread (although not majority) support in the US; indeed, I believe, given world opinion, they would be successful.

3) Yes, we are indeed seeing the emergence of an American Empire. Whether we will have the wisdom to use our power so that we do not go the way of Rome in a relatively quick manner will depend on our ability to work with other nations for the betterment of the entire planet. This is something the Bush administration is not doing very well, but there is hope that the next administration will be wiser.

What has happened to freedom of speech in America? Why are we not publicly and openly debating the self-serving and undeomocratic policies of the Bush administration? Didion, in another fine essay on American life, asks these questions and tries to answer them. This is a fine book for anyone who worries about our nation proceeding out of control in its war for oil and corporate interests. Didion is clear in her concerns about why we have lost our powers of free speech and citizenship. A must read for anyone who cares about this nation.