Political Fictions by Joan Didion

Author:Joan Didion [Didion, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-375-41426-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2001-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

What has lent Mr. Gingrich’s written and spoken work (or, as he calls it, his “teaching”) the casual semblance of being based on some plain-spoken substance, some rough-hewn horse sense, is that most of what he says reaches us in outline form, with topic points capitalized (the capitalization has been restrained in the more conventionally edited To Renew America) and systematically if inappositely numbered. There were “Seven key aspects” and “Nine vision-level principles” of “Personal Strength,” Pillar Two of American Civilization. There were “Five core principles” of “Quality as Defined by Deming” (Pillar Five); there were “Three Big Concepts” of “Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise,” Pillar Three. There were also, still under Pillar Three, “Five Enemies of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (“Bureaucracy,” “Credentialing,” “Taxation,” “Litigation,” and “Regulation”), which might have seemed to replicate one another and would in any case have been pretty much identical to Pillar Four’s “Seven welfare state cripplers of progress” had the latter not folded in “Centralization,” “Anti-progress Cultural Attitude,” and “Ignorance.”

In Window of Opportunity, Mr. Gingrich advised us that “the great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts,” and offered “five simple steps to a bold future.” On the health care issue, Mr. Gingrich posited “eight areas of necessary change.” On the question of arms control, he saw “seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons.” Down a few paragraphs the seven imperatives gave way to “two initiatives,” then to “three broad strategic options for the next generation,” and finally, within the scan of the eye, to “six realistic goals which would increase our children’s chances of living in a world without nuclear war.”

“Outlining” or “listing” remains a favored analytical technique among the management and motivational professionals whose approach Mr. Gingrich has so messianically adopted. (Balancing the budget and “finding a way to truly replace the current welfare state with an opportunity society” could both be done by the year 2002, he advised the Congress on the occasion of his swearing-in as Speaker, “if we apply the principles of Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker.”) Yet, on examination, few of his own “areas” and “imperatives” and “initiatives,” his “steps” and “options” and “goals,” actually advance the discourse. The seventh of the seven steps necessary to solve the drug problem, as outlined in To Renew America, calls for the government to “intensify our intelligence efforts against drug lords across the planet and help foreign governments to trap them,” in other words exactly what both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the United States Southern Command have been doing for some years now. No piety can long escape inclusion in one or another of Mr. Gingrich’s five or four or eleven steps; another of the seven steps necessary to solve the drug problem is the reinvigoration of Mrs. Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign.

The first of the “eight areas of necessary change” in our health care system calls for “focusing on preventive medicine and good health,” which meant, in Window of Opportunity, offering Medicare recipients $500 for not going to the doctor.

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