"Is It Too Soon to Start Talking About the Failed Obama Presidency Just Because He Isn’t President Yet?"

Reputed title of a Weekly Standard piece by P. J. O’Rourke, according to this NYT article called "Irony Is Dead. Again. Yeah, Right."

What's the connection between the death of irony and Barack Obama? Joan Didion made the connection, saying people these days were into "naïveté, translated into 'hope.'"

The Times -- struggling mightily to develop its theme -- tried to get Didion to explain herself:

“Basically,” she said on the phone Tuesday, “I don’t like to talk about anything I’ve written or that I’m writing. What you write down, there it is and you’ve done it.”

Which means: Fuck you, I'm a wordsmith.

Joan Didion felt "unexpressable uneasiness" about the election.

"We were getting what we wanted..."

... a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person's candidate, "a generational thing we couldn't understand" and the unthinking embrace of "naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism." Didion bridled at the wanton use of "transformational" and said she couldn't count the number of times she heard the 60's evoked "by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s" didn't involve decking babies out in political onesies.

Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama's doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated "welcome healthy realism" and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles "at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers." She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess "the congratulations of all the nations." She likened this to the naivete of thinking we'd be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, "in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear."

I love the way a breath of stale air is a breath of fresh air.

What are the new classics?

Entertainment Weekly does a very nice job of ranking the new classics — movies, TV, etc. — from the last 25 years. From the movie list:

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
10. Moulin Rouge (2001)
11. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
12. The Matrix (1999)
13. GoodFellas (1990)
14. Crumb (1995)
15. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
16. Boogie Nights (1997)
17. Jerry Maguire (1996)
18. Do the Right Thing (1989)
19. Casino Royale (2006)
23. Memento (2001)
24. A Room With a View (1986)
32. Fight Club (1999)
33. The Breakfast Club (1985)
34. Fargo (1996)
44. The Player (1992)
77. Sid and Nancy (1986)
91. Back to the Future (1985)

From the TV list:

1. The Simpsons, Fox, 1989-present
2 The Sopranos, HBO (1999-2007)
3 Seinfeld, NBC (1989-98)
5 Sex and the City, HBO (1998-2004)
6 Survivor, CBS (2000-present)
12 South Park, Comedy Central (1997-present)
14 The Daily Show, Comedy Central (1996-present)
17 The Office (U.K. version), BBC2 (2001-03)
18 American Idol, Fox (2002-present)
21 Roseanne, ABC (1988-97)
22 The Real World, MTV (1992-present)
28 The Larry Sanders Show, HBO (1992-98)
30 Late Show With David Letterman, CBS (1993-present)
38 Beavis and Butt-head, MTV (1993-97)
39 Six Feet Under, HBO (2001-05)
43 Late Night With Conan O'Brien, NBC (1993-present)
45 Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO (2000-present)
49 Twin Peaks, ABC (1990-91)
55. Pee-wee's Playhouse, CBS (1986-90)
63. Mystery Science Theater 3000, Comedy Central (1989-96), Sci Fi (1997-99)
64. The Osbournes, MTV (2002-05)
69. The Colbert Report, Comedy Central (2005-present)
75. Project Runway, Bravo (2004-present)
79. The Comeback, HBO (2005)
83. Absolutely Fabulous, BBC2 (1992), BBC1 (1994-2004)

From the book list:

4. The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995)
5. American Pastoral, Philip Roth (1997)
7. Maus, Art Spiegelman (1986/1991)
11. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer (1997)
28. Naked, David Sedaris (1997)
33. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005)
66. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, David Foster Wallace (1997)
72. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon (2003)

(The book list is heavily weighted toward fiction.)

From the style list:

1. Madonna at the MTV Video Music Awards (1984)
2. Sarah Jessica Parker in the opening credits of Sex and the City (1998)
3. Michael Jackson in the ''Thriller'' video (1983)
4. Sharon Stone at the Oscars (1996)
5. Kurt Cobain and grunge style (1991)
7. Amy Winehouse's frocks, bold bras, and sky-high bouffant (2007)
13. Tom Cruise's Ray-Bans and tighty whities in Risky Business (1983)
16. Courtney Love's vintage slip dresses, Mary Janes, and home-grown dye jobs (1995)
17. The leather trenches and Neo-style shades in The Matrix (1999)
48. The goth look of Robert Smith and the Cure (1987)

From the tech list:

3. TiVo (1999)
4. iPod (2001)
5. YouTube (2005)
7. Digital Video Cameras for Consumers (1995)
9. Satellite-Radio Stations (2001)

From the video games:

1. Tetris (1985)

Ha ha. Sorry, I'm old!

From the stage list:

21. Hedwig and the Angry Inch (1998)

Sorry, I've seen a lot of these — the most expensive of these cultural pleasures — and didn't like them very much.

Romantic gestures (these aren't numbered for some reason):

• John Cusack blasts Peter Gabriel outside Ione Skye's window in 1989's Say Anything...
• Ewan McGregor breaks into ''Your Song'' while wooing Nicole Kidman in 2001's Moulin Rouge (2001).
• After her beloved Pedro (Marco Leonardi) dies making love to her in Like Water for Chocolate, Tita (Lumi Cavazos) eats matches, literally igniting her inner flame and burning her whole ranch to the ground.

Movie posters (pictured here):

The Devil Wears Prada
The 40 Year-Old Virgin
Jungle Fever
The Silence of the Lambs

Death scenes:

• Steve Buscemi + a woodchipper + the pure white snow of 1996's Fargo = arguably the most hilarious ooky death on film.
• Mel Gibson, sans intestines, bellows ''Freeeeedommmmmm!'' in Braveheart (1995).
• Warring exes Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner fall to their doom on a chandelier in 1989's The War of the Roses.
• Jack telling Rose not to say her goodbyes before freezing to death in Titanic (1997).
• Lucy Liu losing her head to Uma Thurman's blade in Kill Bill Vol. One (2003).

More lists at the link, but I'll stop here.

"The yield of her legendary scrutiny informed by a worldliness more political than clitoral."

Do you trust a writer who writes like that to tell you why one writer is better than another?

Her spare precise locution rewards not spectatorship but collaboration: the reader's full discovery of the dread she leaves largely tacit.

It's not hard to see that Joan Didion is a better writer than Erica Jong, but that doesn't mean that trying to write like Didion and not Jong will make you a better writer.

Joan Didion on Terri Schiavo.

Didion finds many interesting angles to the story. Her focus is not legal, but personal and psychological. She examines not just the motivations of Michael Schiavo and the parents, but also the motivations of all of us:

We do not know how many minutes Theresa Schiavo spent in cardiac arrest. It was later generally reported that this arrest was a "heart attack" caused by a potassium deficiency. The potassium deficiency, it was widely suggested, had been caused by what was sometimes described as "bulimia" and sometimes, more generally, as an "eating disorder."

This suggestion persisted, carrying with it a hint of the disapproval often expressed toward people in unfortunate circumstances who can be suspected to have had bad habits. The "bad habits" serve in such cases to isolate these unfortunate circumstances from our own. Patricia J. Williams, in The Nation, striking this not uncommon note, spoke of

the bizarre events played out in the name of force-feeding Terri Schiavo, a woman whose bulimic aversion to food was extreme enough to induce a massive systemic crisis that left her in what doctors describe as a "persistent vegetative state."

Theresa Schiavo, in this construct, had for whatever reason played a role in her own demise, meaning that what happened to her need not happen to us.

However comforting it may have been to believe this, the suggestion (no diagnosis exists) of an "eating disorder" appears to have been entirely assumptive, based on no evidence beyond the unexceptional facts that she had some years before gained weight, gone on a diet, and lost the weight.

There's much more in the article.