One week after 9/11 Joan Didion was being interviewed by Jon Wiener for LA Review of Books.

‘JW: You’ve always paid close attention to our political rhetoric. What do you make of “Operation Infinite Justice”? JD: At first it sounded like we were immediately going to be bombing someone. Then it sounded like it was going to be something like another war on drugs, a very amorphous thing with a heightened state of rhetoric and some threat to civil liberties.
JW: You started this series of essays with the 1988 election, Clinton versus Bush senior — and you write that the story has been pretty much the same ever since: the American political process does not offer citizens a voice, or much of a choice; instead it is designed by and for “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” Of course that narrative was disrupted last week.
JD: It was disrupted, but if you listen to TV, everyone is trying to shoehorn it into their existing agenda. I picked up The National Review yesterday, where Anne Coulter was saying, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.” Even if we thought that was the way to go, how would we go about it? Put them in a 12-step program? Put them in Teen Challenge? We’re seeing a lot of the patriotism of Americans, but we’re in danger of seeing it drowned in a surge of jingoism. Which is kind of — frightening.
JW: You wrote in your book that, in the political developments since 1988, you saw a “nostalgia for an imagined America.” Is that continuing this week? JD: I think so. People are talking about “America losing its innocence.” How many times can America lose its innocence? In my lifetime we’ve heard that we’ve lost our innocence half a dozen times at least.’

(…)

‘JW: The New York Times quoted a Republican advisor who said this is “his natural rhetoric, which is very much regular-guy language and is very appealing.” JD: [Laughs] Yes.
JW: I gather you don’t find it very appealing.
JD: I keep thinking his family is from Connecticut.
JW: You’ve got the wrong idea there: he’s from Midland, which is in Texas!’

(…)

‘JW: Most pundits emphasized the unique and unprecedented qualities of the Bush v. Gorecontest in Florida that ended the 2000 election — but you wrote that the events in Florida were “not only entirely predictable, but entirely familiar.” What do you mean? JD: It was entirely predictable: at the most immediate level, the election was that close because both candidates had run the same campaign directed at the same small number of people. Florida had a certain poetry to it; it was like a haiku of what the process had become.’

Read the interview here.

Quite a few things that are being mentioned here appear to be almost timeless.

The nostalgia for an imagined America, or an imagined Europa.

The election process, a haiku.

And the heightened state of rhetoric and some treat to civil liberties.

We are still there, and in ten years from now we will be there as well.