Language gets tired. Whenever I read the word “woke” still in circulation these days, I get tired too. Then belligerent! I picture the year 2020 as a dingy hotel jacuzzi, which some reactionary writer has now refused to leave for half a decade, skin beet-red, the Legionnaire’s setting in. Tachycardia can’t be far off now... Still, cliches and jargon have their diagnostic uses, a kind of DSM manual of our manias, self-delusions and phobias. None of us can hide from our own words and are likelier to be seen publicly mishandling them.
In recent years, for example, people (like me) frequently used the word “democracy” when adamantly stressing the importance of constitutions, independent courts, checks and balances, civil liberties: precisely the counter-majoritarian features that stand between the popular will and Caesarism, your classic mob-strongman alliance. Well, us democracy types were really talking about the importance of liberalism here, in the word’s philosophical meaning. But “liberalism” in the U.S. has a bad brand — on account of all the libs, I guess — so we talked about democracy instead. Now “democracy” has a bad brand too. On account of all the libs.
For all the concern about AI chatbots spay-and-neutering our writing skills, machines will never beat humans at torturing the language. Joan Didion (dragged back into current-events circulation due to an ongoing media scandal) was a malicious quoter, armed with an ear for the egos and social structures hiding behind the words, which she’d repurpose in vain little quote snippets like in “California Dreaming”:
Every weekday morning at eleven o’clock, just about the time the sun burns the last haze off the Santa Barbara hills fifteen or twenty men gather in what was once the dining room of a shirt manufacturer’s mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean and begin another session of what they like to call “clarifying the basic issues.” The place is the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the current mutation of the Fund for the Republic, and since 1959, when the Fund paid $250,000 for the marble villa and forty-one acres of eucalyptus, a favored retreat for people whom the Center’s president, Robert M. Hutchins, deems controversial, stimulating, and perhaps above all, cooperative, or our kind. … The selection process is usually described as “mysterious,” but it always involves “people we know.”
Oh? Well, it turns out the Center “is supported on the same principle as a vanity press,” Didion reports. “People who are in a position to contribute large sums of money are encouraged to participate in clarifying the basic issues.” Italics mine. One of Didion’s great skills was capturing the way “language becomes more memetic, more meaningless just as the ground begins to swell under the feet,” Patricia Lockwood once appraised. “If you are tuned to where the language goes strange, you will anticipate the narrative they’re going to try to sell you.”
You see the phenomenon everywhere: People lead, language follows and then gets a little lost. The worst offenders tend to play in the political arena. Democratic House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, for example, recently said that Democrats “believe in a country where you have a strong floor and no ceiling,” an apparent reference to venture capitalist Oliver B. Libby’s new book/political movement, “Strong Floor, No Ceiling.” The progressive’s pleasure receptors are not being activated by this sort of rhetoric, but progressives aren’t the target audience. (That would be independent voters.) The slogan itself has all the hallmarks of old stepped-on product repackaged with new labeling, right down at the linguistic level. “Floors” and “ceilings” entered professional use long ago and have enjoyed durable careers as political cliches. But it turns out throwing these two particular cliches in the cement mixer together creates a wholly new substance that is no longer load-bearing as a metaphor: If my apartment had a “strong floor, no ceiling,” I’d probably be pretty upset. Maybe I could shoot off fireworks from bed.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor’s social media accounts under Trump II keep ranting about “Western Civilization” and “Americanism,” “globalists” versus “the People.” I hope “Americanism” at some point involves telling “the People” of “Western Civilization” how to file wages and hours complaints for all their unpaid overtime. But the suffocating and weirdly abstract rhetoric of white doom suggests the interests of workers are getting dragged toward a scary-looking shed.
Didion the observer, the skewerer, the outsider to propagandas of the public and the self, the 20th century inspiration to be imitated only at the 21st century writer’s peril. “How much can we really rely on someone who loved the Doors?” Lockwood asked. While in Montreal recently, I picked up Didion’s novel “Democracy” at a bookstore and chatted with the bookseller about Didion’s history as a conservative (so wonderfully captured by Sam Tanenhaus in this episode of “Know Your Enemy”). The bookseller, an older woman, recalled fearing Didion’s study of the underbelly of San Francisco in 1967. “Don’t touch the summer of love!” the bookseller murmured in recollection. But of course, “She was right.” All those lost young kids.
“Democracy” seems an ironic title to the actual story. This is a slithery novel of manners about a politically connected Hawaiian family of mainlanders and their self-delusions, set against the embarrassing American military withdrawal from Saigon in 1975. There’s not much democracy in “Democracy” but a lot of what I would call “society.” Didion appears as a character, a journalist and author pursuing the main character: Inez Victor, an RFK-esque Democrat’s wife, who carries on a lifelong emotional entanglement with your standard-issue international man of mystery while performing the public-facing obligations of political spousehood.
All through “Democracy,” Didion the novelist seems uncomfortable with traditional narrative customs expected of her:
First looks are widely believed instructive. The first glimpse of someone across a room, the first view of the big house on the rise, the first meeting between the protagonists: these are considered obligatory scenes, and are meant to be remembered later, recalled to a conclusive point, recalled not only by novelists but by survivors of accidents and by witnesses to murders; recalled in fact by anyone at all forced to resort to the narrative method.
I wonder.
I wonder too. Didion struggled with writing “Democracy,” a reality reflected by Didion-the-narrator on the page in the book’s closing: “It has not been the novel I set out to write, nor am I exactly the person who set out to write it. Nor have I experienced the rush of narrative inevitability that usually propels a novel towards its end, the momentum that sets in as events overtake their shadows and the cards all fall in on one another and the options decrease to zero.”
Avoiding these sorts of conventions, she reflects, means that anything could happen. Obeying cliche keeps you predictable. Keeps you boring.
Don’t be boring. Unless you don’t want anything to change.
Didion's "Democracy" is an update of a Henry Adams novel of the same name. Same town, different corruption.