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Political Fictions by Joan Didion

24:36 recording · EN · 3 speakers

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Brief overview

Joan Didion's Political Fictions gave Denise Retera the outsider's eye she now uses reporting The Hague.

  1. The process outranks the countryDidion argues insiders let the theoretical process eclipse the observable citizen with a real problem.
  2. Campaigns are a travelling film setOnly the location changes: Dukakis tossed a ball off every plane, with Greek dancing held in reserve.
  3. Keep the outsider's wonderRetera's aim back in The Hague is to stay close to herself and not become an insider.
Executive Summary AI
  • In this NRC Haagse Zaken summer series, host Iris Verhulstonk asks returning political reporter Denise Retera which cultural object shaped her view of politics, following last week's Game of Thrones episode with Liam van de Ven.0:38
  • Retera chose Political Fictions by Joan Didion, the American essayist who died in 2021, written after the New York Review of Books asked her to follow the 1988 presidential campaign between George Bush and Michael Dukakis.2:47
  • Didion's argument is that politics constantly manufactures fictional stories — tightly staged campaigns and simplified versions of reality — produced by a club of insiders, media included, inside what she calls 'the process', which values itself above any outcome for the country.7:05
  • Retera recognises this in her own work: her first Hague piece in 2022 covered Geert Wilders campaigning at an animal feed bank in Nissewaard, where he asked owner after owner about their pets until the enthusiasm visibly cost him effort, and she saw the same gap between image and reality walking Utrecht with Liliane de Ploumen and Jesse Klaver.12:59
  • She closes on image-making today — Mark Rutte's apple and bicycle at the Binnenhof, timed so three bites were always gone on arrival, and his refusal to be filmed entering a car — concluding that a journalist should show not only the stage but the script, the audience and the backstage.19:41
Key Quote
“Because I was absolutely no political junkie and saw myself as a journalist more as a kind of street rat.”
— Denise Retera3:52
Key Quote
“I've got to see the next president, I've got something to tell him.”
— Denise Retera9:18
Key Quote
“this election isn't about ideology, it's about competence.”
— Denise Retera18:09