Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“What was most startling about the case that the State of California was preparing against Lucille Miller was something that had nothing to do with law at all, something that never appeared in the eight-column afternoon headlines but was always there between them: the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live.”

Like the previous quote, this one illustrates the idea that the fictions that people consume has begun to shape them, as Didion describes in Lucille Miller’s case and the way she conducts herself in her affair.

“I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.” 

For many of Didion’s generation, John Wayne functioned as the epitome of stoic masculinity, and his movie-star persona has a profound effect on Didion’s thinking when she is confronted with the real man.

“[Baez] has a great natural style, and she is what used to be called a lady. ‘Scum,’ hissed an old man with a snap-on bow tie who had identified himself as ‘a veteran of two wars’ […]”

This quote illustrates the culture war going on around Joan Baez and particularly illuminates the way that the people of Carmel are unwilling to take her on her own terms.

“Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.” 

Didion’s sympathies for Baez lie in the fact that Baez seems reluctant to continue her career as a folk singer, preferring her quiet life at the Institute she helps run. She sees Baez as a person who has been trapped by her fame more than freed by it.

“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”

Didion sees Laski, who is the leader of a splinter sect of Communism, as someone who is looking for meaning in his life, just like anyone else. This is both a far different portrait of a Communist than was common at the time and also, in some ways, a rejection of Laski’s beliefs; he could just as easily have turned to any other system of meaning.

“That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake […] but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.” 

Didion thinks that Howard Hughes, who by this time was a reclusive eccentric, is a particularly American hero because he demonstrates the unspoken desires of the American consciousness in his individualistic isolation.

“Everyone goes home flattered, and the Center prevails.”

Didion’s ultimate view of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions is that it’s an unserious group committed to middlebrow thought and ego-stroking rather than serious intellectual work, which, of course, is a profitable and popular model.

“But Las Vegas seems to offer something other than ‘convenience’; it is merchandising ‘niceness,’ the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it, how to make the arrangements, how to do it ‘right.’” 

Didion unpacks the disconnect between the image of the Las Vegas wedding and the reality she’s witnessed, which is far more earnest in its intent than the reader may expect.

“It was not a country in open revolution. 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.” 

Didion sees the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco as the center for a growing crisis in the American identity, and her time there bears out the idea that she may be witnessing a lost generation.

“During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara’s room, and about five-thirty some children had a fight on the street. A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. A cat scratched a beagle in Sharon’s lap. Except for the sitar music on the stereo there was no other sound or movement until seven-thirty, when Max said ‘Wow.’” 

Didion’s portrayal of an acid trip as viewed from the outside highlights how devoid of meaning the event is to her; what may be viewed as profoundly moving by the people on drugs is revealed to be an empty afternoon.

“Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.” 

Didion sees the irony of women like Barbara embracing traditional roles of womanhood as a radical act; just because Barbara got her ideas about the ‘woman’s trip’ from Indigenous people does not make it the radical reinvention that Barbara thinks it is.

“Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum.” 

Didion’s conclusions about the hippie movement are consistently pessimistic; she sees it as a moral decline that is built on the disconnect between the new generation and the previous, in part because they have not been adequately prepared to live in America.

“As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from ‘a broken home.’ They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.” 

Didion’s view here is in line with her life: she came into her own as a successful writer and gained agency over her anxiety and frequent migraines through writing. What she sees in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood confirms her belief and leaves her with the impression that the primary problem among the hippies is a lack of agency.

“My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” 

Didion’s lifelong habit of notebook-keeping centers around her sense of self, and she sees it as a tool for keeping in touch with her younger selves.

“To have the sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent”

Didion believes that learning to have self-respect is a marker of true maturity, and it allows someone to function with a degree of independence of thought and act that is otherwise impossible.

“[W]hat could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal 

Didion is deeply suspicious of people who claim a moral stance, as she knows that the underpinning beliefs that constitute morality are deeply personal and deeply various; almost everyone operates on the belief that they are in the moral right.

“My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as ‘Joan’s husband.’ Marriage is the classic betrayal” 

Didion playfully depicts the tensions between her family, who have spent generations in the Central Valley, and her husband, who, like her, has lived in New York and Los Angeles.

“It is very easy to sit at the bar in, say, La Scala in Beverly Hills, or Ernie’s in San Francisco, and to share in the pervasive delusion that California is only five hours from New York by air. The truth is that La Scala and Ernie’s are only five hours from New York by air. California is somewhere else.” 

Didion is from the Central Valley of California, which has a distinctly different culture from that of the cities and the common understanding of the state.

“All that is constant about the California of my childhood is the rate at which it disappears.” 

As Didion gets older, she realizes that the functional disappearance of the town she grew up in as it transitions to the aerospace industry mimics her own realizations about how her own understanding of the place is its own kind of disappearing fiction.

“I misapprehended Hawaii completely, for if there is a single aura which pervades Honolulu, one mood which lends the lights a feverish luster and the pink catamarans a heartbreaking absurdity and which engages the imagination as mere paradise never could, that mood is, inescapably, one of war.” 

The attack on Pearl Harbor looms large in the minds of 1960s Hawaiians, and not only for negative reasons: Didion writes that it opened up whole new industries and created the modern, multicultural Hawaii that is no longer run by a few oligarchs

“More than anyone else in the society, these men had apparently dreamed the dream and made it work. And what they did then was to build a place which seems to illustrate, as in a child’s primer, that the production ethic led step by step to unhappiness, to restrictiveness, to entrapment in the mechanics of living.”

The mansions that Didion writes about are a testament to the flaw of the Industrial American Dream that more productivity is better, because the end result is what she describes: a life run by the machinations of living rather than purpose.

“To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.” 

Didion is writing about the way in which the winds have an biological effect on people, which indicates larger ways that Los Angelinos (and people in general) are influenced by their environments and social systems.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” 

This quote, which refers to Didion’s time in New York, is a profound summation of the problem Didion faced: she was unable to see when her life in New York had lost its sense of purpose. The quote functions in two ways: it reflects the time period she’s writing about, and it also represents her own struggle to put that time into a meaningful form for the essay she’s writing.