...'anti-communism' was seen, correctly, as the bait the United States would always take.
        -Joan Didion, Salvador

For the ironist, there can be no worse fate than to be proven wrong by events.  For irony depends for its effect on the universal acknowledgment that the thing stated is manifestly false.  How inconvenient then to find out it's actually true.  This is yet another reason why irony is fundamentally a weapon of conservatism.

A conservative can simply send up the news trends and fads as they come along (spiritualism, evolution, communism, psychiatry, the New Deal, Wicca, Feng Shui, etc.), assured that just a couple of years down the line, even their current adherents will realize how inane these beliefs were.  But pity the poor Leftist who when he turns his hand to satire, must try to make the accumulated wisdom of several millennia of Western culture seem foolish.  Little wonder then that authors like Evelyn Waugh have worn so well, that the belittling of bourgeois values by an author like Sinclair Lewis seems so profoundly misguided today, and that authors like Philip Roth have turned their sights away from middle class conventions and towards targets like political correctness, having lived long enough to see all their earlier countercultural works rendered obsolete.  It's a simple enough lesson; if you want your work to have lasting value, you should probably parody the newest idea, not the oldest.

Joan Didion built her career and her reputation on a series of brilliant essays and decent novels which laid bare the arid pretensions of the pop ethos of the 60s and 70s, particularly the virulent California strain.  Her two volumes of collected essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, are as good as the best cultural criticism of Tom Wolfe.  Though she probably would not have called herself a conservative, she did contribute to National Review, and it would be hard to read her journalism as anything other than a conservative critique of the declining moral situation in America.  But with Salvador she pretty seriously lost her way.

The book combines a series of essays she wrote for that most reliably doctrinaire of journals, The New York Review of Books (which even today is probably rooting for a comeback by the Sandanistas), after a two week visit to El Salvador in 1982.  It's surprisingly hard to recall now, but Central America was the final proving ground for American anti-communism.  Nicaragua and Grenada had gone communist on Jimmy Carter's watch, and several other nations' right wing governments teetered on the edge, most noticeably El Salvador's.  When Ronald Reagan came to office promising to reverse this losing trend in the Cold War and to start rolling back the tide of communism, El Salvador became an unlikely focus of U. S. policy.

In many ways, Central America, with its unsavory but anti-communist regimes, was the ideal laboratory in which to try out Jeanne Kirkpatrick's thesis that we should stand by our allies when they confronted Marxist revolutionary movements, because an authoritarian right wing regime would eventually evolve into something approaching a democracy, while a totalitarian communist government would only yield to force of arms.  As Kirkpatrick herself wrote, this meant accepting methods and practices of friendly governments which we would normally find abhorrent.  And, predictably, the American Left tried to use the deficiencies of these friendly governments in order to stop the administration from aiding them.  This battle over anti-communism eventually culminated in the completely anti-Constitutional Bolland Amendment and the Iran-Contra scheme to get around it.

Joan Didion does her usual superior job of evoking atmosphere, the sense of dread that accompanied El Salvador's violent campaign against its Marxist guerillas.  It seems like every time she rounds a corner there's another dead body lying there.  It sounds like a horrible place, and the government of Roberto D'Aubuisson must certainly have been brutal, even senselessly brutal, and murderous.  In the best of all possible worlds, America would never associate itself with such regimes.  Instead, we would only support liberal democratic governments and would hold even their feet to the fire, to insure that not a single human right was violated.  But that was essentially the Carter approach--acquiescing in or even fostering the overthrow of friendly governments if they were insufficiently democratic--and it was a disaster.  In country after country (Nicaragua, Iran, etc.), the mildly repressive were replaced by the totally oppressive, and they became active enemies of the U. S. to boot.

There remained only three alternatives : (1) we could, as many on the Left did, have simply embraced groups like the Sandanistas and the Marxist "reforms" they brought to their countries; (2) we could have returned to the natural American posture of isolationism, leaving the rest of the world to fend for itself; or (3) we could, and in fact did, try a new way, supporting friendly authoritarian governments where they still were in power and aiding right-wing guerilla groups in countries where the communists had taken over (Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua).  This third option required us to accept levels of repression and outright murder which would normally have been intolerable.  However, in the context of a global Cold War, there was little or no difference between this moral compromise and that which was made during WWII, when FDR and Churchill embraced Stalin and the Soviet Union.

Just as in WWII, this marriage of convenience helped bring the Cold War to a rapid and successful conclusion.  But there was one huge difference in how the postwar scenarios played out, a difference which proves Kirkpatrick's point.  Where the Soviet simply replaced the Nazis as a hegemonic power in eastern Europe after WWII, and became our enemies for forty years, in the aftermath of the Cold War our unsavory allies rapidly evolved into relatively democratic and capitalist friends.  Just last month (April 2001), President Bush convened a meeting of all the nations in the western Hemisphere (with the notable exception of Cuba) at which it was agreed that they would all work towards creating a hemispheric free trade zone.  Such are the fruits of a realistic foreign policy.

Which brings us back to Ms Didion, who ends her reports from El Salvador with the words : "...and
the State Department announced that the Reagan administration believed that it had 'turned the corner' in its campaign for political stability in Central America."  Though obviously intended at the time to be arch and ironic, we see now that they contained more truth than she realized.   It is entirely understandable that after forty years of continuous war, folks grew tired of the fight.  That is why it was so important that Ronald Reagan determined to win the Cold War, rather than let it keep dragging on.  The problem in not that folks like Ms Didion wanted out, it is that they despaired of anti-communism emerging victorious.  For liberty always wins in the end; the forces of oppression, however powerful they may seem at a given instant, are always perched on a rotten foundation and always overextend themselves.  That even so perceptive a critic as Joan Didion thought the Cold War had become unwinnable, that she thought anti-communism was mere bait being used to ensnare us, suggests just how visionary was Ronald Reagan in forecasting imminent victory.  Where Ms Didion's ironic pieces on the social fads and decay of the 1960s and 70s are as pertinent today as the day they were written, this book is no more than a curious reminder of a dark time in America when the intellectuals had, almost uniformly, quit on us, when, as Yeats had predicted, the best lacked all conviction.

(Reviewed:07-May-01)

Grade: (C)