Yes.

That's all I really have to say about Ms. Didion's latest contribution to reality checking, which for me began with "The White Album." I appreciate this opportunity to share my enthusiasm for her thinking, writing, and honesty, but I really wish I could just tell her face-to-face what a great person I think she is. So to repeat, BRAVA!

....wait 'til they're through with the nation's financial system. You might want to start stitching together $100 bills right now, for when the impending Toilet Paper Riots commence.

Ah, well....as long as the next Republicrat Tyrant has a (D) next to his name, I'm sure everything will be okay. Never mind that Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, et al can be found in the list of top five corporate donors for both McBama's.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

mike gravel. his 'initiative for democracy' site makes the case for real democracy in america.

not only does citizen initiative power bring the pollies to heel, it also makes it worthwhile for people to participate in politics, for their opinions will count on 'referendum day'.

now, since government is a matter for 'them', many people pay it no attention. this disaffected group is bought at election time with lies and empty promises and is large enough to swing the election to who ever can spend the most.

ms didion is unhappy about amnesia, but gravel knows where it comes from and what to do about it. people who complain about the system are valuable, but people who have a better system are more valuable. i wonder what ms didion thinks about democracy. i wonder if she even knows what it is.

Honk it's horn too but I'm not getting on.

I was personally staggered by the Reagan Revolution and so missed out on all the latte-swilling. I've had my eyes wide open for the last 40 years and have been doing what I can to fight the power.

You wanna stand in the mirror and intone a pompous "We're ALL to blame" then you go ahead.

Count me out. I'm gonna hang with the folks trying to make a difference.

Scathing as Joan Didion is here, her words are still as good as the warm October rain outside my window. At least to me they are. I think we've been in a dream for quite some time now. Perhaps, we needed to dream. Perhaps, in our flight to sleep, we thought our dreams were comforting. Awake, maybe we distracted ourselves with stories, rather than acknowledging the wreckage around us. Otherwise, we might feel the kind of mad raging sorrow few can live with, let alone bear. Still, the wrong sorts of stories always and fatally lead to delusion.

In the South, sometimes the word "story" is used interchangeably with "lie". And I think it's those stories we've been hearing and telling: untrue stories. And I think they've made our country sick and weak and fearful.

At some point, and it should be soon, I hope we can look around and ask ourselves why it is so hard, in this culture, to recognize what is real. Why do we find ourselves rummaging through lies and confabulations, believing this detritus tells us anything? Why, like large scared children, must we be entertained?

I am always grateful for Joan Didion's clear gaze. However dark her outlook might be now, she is not conjuring up a fiction. And, as her prose has always shown, a bad truth is more bearable and more necessary than the most hopeful fantasy.

This is the most smoothly eloquent piece of writing I've read since... Well, since the last time I read anything by Joan Didion. That I can be drawn so effortlessly into this analysis at a point where I am so exhausted by the nonstop mental clutter and flagellation of the last twenty months of political discourse is a wonderful reminder that truly great writing is not just communication or volume, but craft. My compliments to the chef.

One is flooded with news daily and no one can remember what happened from week to week, the sheer quantity overwhelms. I can remember three channels and a handful of newspapers and periodicals, and that was all one read. Events did not move as quickly, and one could digest what happened and what it probably meant. Now, it's all out of control owing to the quantity and speed of coverage of events or faux-events, the continuous reporting, the internet, the zillion gadgets of electronic transmission 24/7, with full access and reporting to and from everywhere. So then, it's really no one's fault that people forget because no one could remember all this stuff, let alone understand what it all means, and meanwhile still remain connected in some coherent way to one's day to day existence.

Joan, when did you write this? Before the last debate? Or before the one before that?

Because if anything has become apparent in the last few weeks, it's that the American public's bullshit detector has evolved rapidly. While the talking heads on TV remain largely obsessed with the horse race of politics, with the sound-bytes of the day, the American public is seeing through it all with X-ray vision, honing in on issues that matter. Cheap points are scored, negative associations are made -- and the dial polls plunge. No one cares except the base. The Victim politics of 1988, the Beer Drinking politics of 2000, the Swiftboat politics of 2004 aren't working. I'm as cynical as any liberal out there. I've watched each debate with dismay, alarmed by the points that McCain and Palin have won, fretting that the left hasn't countered the attacks, worrying that the "higher road" approach was folly in light of the hardball politics of the last few years. And yet, convinced that "our side" lost, convinced that the rest of America was going to buy into the bullshit narratives... I saw all the polls bounce the other way. I saw that the negative attacks weren't sticking. I saw that the narratives finally meant less than the policy. The vast center of America is seeing past McCain's "Maverick" brand to his corrupt core; they're looking through Sarah Palin's glib gloss to her vacuous center. The growing attraction to Obama has little to do with his "story" and everything to do with the truths that he's spoken about America's falling place in the world, the way we have failed its vision -- and the way we can fix it.

The media is still seizing on the sound bytes, playing the narrative game. But even that is slowly changing. The changing mood of America and the constant criticism from the blogosphere seems to be slowly penetrating the mainstream media's defensive shell. Slowly it's become clear that Rush Limbaugh's hated "MSM" is not as much a "liberal" media or a conservative media as a lazy media, ready to package the spin and quote press briefings instead of engaging in real investigation or pursuing meaningful inquiries. But here and there, they're starting to wake up. In an era where reporters casually let spin stand without contesting the truth, whoever thought a lightweight like Katie Couric could effectively derail a political career through the simple medium of meaningful follow-up questions? Whoever thought that the media boys' club would be scrambling in panic as they watch the rise female, openly gay, openly liberal pundit Rachel Maddow who regularly vaults beyond the lazy horse-race tracking of most "political analysts" with her incisive intelligence and a focus on substance? Politics are supposed to be about something. The passionate political bloggers and activists all over the internet know that and slowly, they're helping to change the system.

Don't mistake the graying dinosaurs opining on your TV and your editorial pages with "we." They're not America. America, slowly, is getting smarter than that.