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Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11

joan didion frank rich

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In Fixed Ideas Joan Didion describes how, since September 11, 2001, there has been a determined effort by the administration to promote an imperial America--a "New Unilateralism"--and how, in many parts of America, there is now a "disconnect" between the government and citizens.

"[Americans] recognized even then [immediately after 9/11], with flames still visible in lower Manhattan, that the words 'bipartisanship' and 'national unity' had come to mean acquiescence to the 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."

Frank Rich in his preface notes: "The reassuring point of the fixed ideas was to suppress other ideas that might prompt questions or fears about either the logic or hidden political agendas of those conducting what CNN branded as 'America's New War.'"

He adds, "This White House is famously secretive and on-message, but its skills go beyond that. It knows the power of narrative, especially a single narrative with clear-cut heroes and evildoers, and it knows how to drown out any distracting subplots before they undermine the main story."

Book and cover design by Milton Glaser, Inc.

44 pages, Paperback

First published April 1,2003

This edition

Format
44 pages, Paperback
Published
April 1, 2003 by New York Review Books
ISBN
9781590170731
ASIN
1590170733
Language
English

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About the author

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joan didion

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Joan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 61 votes)
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61 reviews All reviews
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chaseroosh
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Questi tre articoli di Joan Didion del 2003 sarebbero stati interessanti, dirompenti e fuori dal pensiero comune se letti nel 2003. Ma pubblicati in un libro nel 2021? Risulta un po’ troppo operazione commerciale per il ventennale. Questi pensieri che Joan Didion ha sicuramente anticipato rispetto ai tempi nel 2003 ormai nel 2021 sono stati detti e ridetti in migliaia di articoli.
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MajoEve
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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This book was a quick but powerful read. It contained a lot of details about the aftermath of the attack on New York City on September 11 that I vaguely remembered, and some that I had forgotten. Given the current politics, this book is more powerful now then when it was written.
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CherishAnime
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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A slight book - a magazine article, really - published in a money grab, or more charitably, because responsible America needed any voicing and any platform allowed it in the face of the ubiquitous hate and paranoiac fantasy of the post-9/11 era.

Didion effectively paints the peculiarities of the administration's tactics for quelling dissent, or even thought, really, and the contradictions inherent in their "they hate us for our freedoms" rhetoric.

Was this period as scarring for everyone else as it was for me? The absolute capitulation of the Democrats in congress and the nation's "respectable" press - NYT, et al - seems to be an episode few feel to have real bearing on our current political situation; like trauma, America's body politic has either blacked-it out, or wishes to ceaselessly relive it, without conscious knowledge of doing so.

Even the literature of the left on 9/11 - Zizek's Desert of the Real, Chomsky's 9/11, Spiegelman's Shadow of No Towers - it's all sort of confused; haphazard, or just iterations of margins around an absent center. Didion's essay suffers from the same lack of mattering, of understanding, or of conviction in some way. Even the critics of the post-9/11 stultification of the political process seemed to have been in its capture.
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emiliaisbetter
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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An essay in book form- scathing and provocative. Didion examines our national reaction to 9/11 and her conclusions are not comforting. But then, in light of the history that has followed, how could they be?
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FenominalJA
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Short, smart essay on same-old politics after 9/11. Love the Didion.
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Amsun19
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Un libriccino minuscolo ma di assoluto spessore. Joan Didion ha una sensibilità nel trattare qualunque tema che rende impossibile non amarla.
L'unica nota dolente è il prezzo: 12 euro per letteralmente 30 pagine (60, ma scritte a metà) è un offesa ai lettori. Prendetelo in biblioteca.
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Justlike1984
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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60 pagine che avrebbero potuto essere 30, non per la mancanza di contenuto ma per l'impaginazione inutilmente costruita in una colonna ogni facciata per richiamare la forma delle torri gemelle. Pur essendo una lettura scorrevole il contenuto risente indubbiamente dei segni del tempo, considerazioni interessanti ma che dopo ventun'anni dal disastro sono ripetitive, già lette, già espresse, come se la conversazione su un avvenimento così doloroso fosse ancora ferma ai primi mesi successivi. Così si torna a un miscuglio di pensieri tra il dispiacere per ciò che è accaduto e la presunzione di chi dice "io ve l'avevo detto!", rendendolo, a conti fatti, un testo non strettamente necessario.
Seguimi su IG: @animainrivolta
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