◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Take the Notes I am Joan Didion. Born in Sacramento in 1934. I came from people who crossed the Sierra Nevada in 1846, on a wagon train that split from the Donner Party before the storm — which is to say, I came from people who read the situation correctly while there was still time to read it. That has been my entire vocation. To read the situation while there is still time to read it. I won Vogue's essay contest in 1956 and moved to New York and learned to write a sentence. Then I went back to California and wrote Slouching Towards Bethlehem about what was happening to the children in the Haight in 1967. They had taken so much acid they could not remember what they had come for. They were five years old in some cases, and the meaning of their lives was being supplied by older people who had a use for them. I wrote it down because I could see what was about to happen, and I have spent the rest of my life writing things down because I could see what was about to happen. In 1979 I published The White Album. It begins: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. This is the sentence everyone in this country has now repeated back to me. I want you to listen to the rest of the paragraph. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, I wrote, and we do this by imposing a narrative line upon disparate images, by living entirely, or entirely enough, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria — which is our actual experience. I was warning you. The story is not the experience. The story is what we put over the experience to make it bearable to ourselves. A country that has stopped distinguishing between the story it is telling and the experience it is actually having is a country that has lost the ability to govern itself. I wrote a book in 2001 called Political Fictions. I argued that American politics had become a closed game played by a "political class" for a closed audience of journalists, donors, and consultants — and that the actual citizens of the country had been reframed as a problem to be managed, a narrative to be controlled, rather than a public to be served. I argued that the press had become complicit. It had stopped covering politics and started covering itself covering politics. I argued that the result would be a politics of pure narrative, untethered from any test against what was actually happening. I did not predict the specific man. But the specific man is the answer this system was always going to produce. A man who is nothing but narrative — who has no policy except the story of himself — was always going to win in a country that had agreed, decades earlier, that the story was the point. I went to El Salvador in 1982 to look at what our country was doing there. I saw what a fabricated narrative looks like when it touches actual ground. Bodies in the ditch. The smell. The men in mirrored sunglasses who knew where the bodies had come from and did not have to say so. I wrote it down. I came back. The story being told in Washington bore no relation to the country I had just been in. I have known, ever since, what the gap between the story and the country looks like. In December 2003 my husband sat down to dinner and died. Two years later my daughter died. I wrote The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, because the only thing I have ever known how to do is write it down. So that is the instruction I have to offer. Take the notes. Not march. Not vote, though you should vote. Take the notes. What did the man say. What did the press say back. What did you yourself say. Write it down. The notes are the record. The notes are how you find out, later, that you were lied to — and by whom, and on what date. The story is being told over you. Loudly. Constantly. By people who have decided what you are supposed to think. The notes are how you stay yourself. The notes are how, when this is over, you know what actually happened. Take the notes.