Joan Didion, R. I. P.

Joan Didion, one of our finest writers, died yesterday. Her voice will certainly be missed. Agree or disagree, I have always enjoyed reading her and I certainly recommend her works to anyone who likes to read good writing. 

Over at the Federalist Emily Jashinsky has collected a few excerpts from Didion’s writing. As a sometime memorial I will share them.

The first involves the pretense of the press, of the newsroom and especially its pretense toward fairness and objective reporting. Evidently, today's American press no longer even pretends to be even-handed, so Didion’s words ring truer:

“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,” wrote Didion. 

“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.”

And Didion counts among our greatest chronicler of the cultural dissolution we underwent during the Vietnam Era. Some of us remember those heady times. Many of us do not.

For both, here is Didion, describing the Zeitgeist in 1967:

It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco.

Joan Didion, R. I. P.