JOAN'S ARC Slate takes a look at Joan Didion's new book, "Where I Was From." The verdict is that Didion's latest is not a memoir -- as it is touted to be -- and effectively maintains a veneer of universality around the famed writer. Didion's talent has always been her style, her approach. It invites the reader to adopt Didion's perspectives, and the writer rarely gets in the way. Her approach is great for political and cultural journalism; it's less effective as a biographical tool.

If there is a great deal of personality in her essays, there is very little that is personal. Even in her most superficially revealing essays, like her much-beloved "Goodbye to All That," autobiographical facts give way to typologies. Her crying in Chinese laundries becomes "what it's like to be young in New York." New York becomes "an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself." In the end, for all the spare, vivid details about her walking down the street peering into the windows of brownstones, about drinking gazpacho when she is hung-over, the essay is about moving to New York and about being young—not about Joan Didion moving to New York and being young. This is, in many ways, her gift: She leaves space for thousands of similarly disaffected readers to enter her prose and passionately identify with it.

Her stylistic tics add to the illusion of personal revelation. Didion frequently addresses the reader directly, as if we have entered an intimate form of conversation. She writes, "When John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams." And her idiosyncratic cadences, her use of a kind of lulling, incantatory repetition, reinforces our sense of connection to her. Take this passage from The White Album: "It was Morrison who had described the Doors as 'erotic politicians.' It was Morrison who got arrested in Miami in December of 1967. … It was Morrison who got up there in his black vinyl pants with no underwear and projected the idea, and it was Morrison they were waiting for now."

And yet even after reading every single word Didion has ever published, how much does one know about her? One knows what she packs on a trip to interview a subject, one knows about the jasmine she smells on the way home from the airport in Los Angeles, but one knows almost nothing about her family, say, or her marriage, or her daughter. The personal information she imparts is so stylized, so mannered, so controlled that it is no longer personal information. The "I" in her essays is an elegant silhouette of a woman.

SEPTEMBER 11, 1973 Thirty years ago next week, the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the CIA. The Columbia Journalism Review focuses specifically on the role of Agustin Edwards, owner of Chile's largest newspaper. It's an illuminating glimpse into an infamous day in Latin American -- and United States -- hiistory.

Pinochet would stay in power for seventeen years. During that time, El Mercurio served as a shill for the dictatorship, maximizing its economic success and minimizing — to the point of distortion and obfuscation — its widespread repression, which included the murder and disappearance of thousands of Chileans, systematic torture, and multiple acts of international terrorism in Latin America, Europe, and even the U.S.

Thirty years after the coup, Chile is only beginning to open the book to this chapter of its past. General Pinochet's 1998 arrest in London — he fought extradition to Spain for human rights crimes and eventually was allowed to return to Chile, where the Supreme Court ruled he was mentally unfit for a trial — has led to indictments, arrests, and incarceration of a number of his military men.

And what of Edwards and his media company, and other private sector actors who actively collaborated in the downfall of electoral democracy and the advent of a brutal military dictatorship?

The effort to bring ethics charges against Agustín Edwards at the Academy of Journalists is a wholly symbolic gesture, although it does mark a growing movement to hold civilian collaborators responsible for their actions. The U.S. government documents that secretly recorded those actions may provide valuable evidence — if not for legal action then at least for a moral accounting.

NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME Television critic reams ABC, the NFL and a handful of assorted celebrities (including the President of the United States) for last night's exercise in crassness, bad taste and forced overcommercialization. His critique of the football season kick-off event on the National Mall is scathing and detailed. And his closing reference to the use of over-the-top productions as having been an effective tool for fascist propoganda in the past is disconcerting.

American bad taste is the most powerful bad taste in the world. That seems to be what was really being celebrated on the Mall last night at an excruciating 55-minute rock concert ostensibly convened to herald the new pro football season and televised live on the struggling ABC network.


The event was deemed so auspicious that George W. Bush took yet more time off from fighting the war on terrorism to appear, via videotape, at the end of the concert and just before the game, in the manner of a TV huckster. He tried to make some connection between football and "the spirit that guides the brave men and women" of the military, much as the concert had done.

He also said pro football "celebrates the values that make our country so strong." Like what, violence and greed?

FAST TRACK TO INDEPENDENCE David Ignatius lays out some bold ideas from Ghassan Salame, a Lebanese political scientist and senior political adviser to the UN's chief in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died in the truck bomb attack on the UN office in Baghdad. Salame says the fastest -- and possibly most effective -- way to keep Iraq from crumbling into factions is to quickly cede political authority to the Iraqis. The UN would support the political transition, and the United States would continue to concentrate on security. Salame spells out his plan in Ignatius' column.

TOO COOL FOR SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK Coolfer is a zippy new weblog that's all about the rock-and-roll.

WALDO BIN LADEN The good news is that no one is really certain whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead -- which means he might be dead. The bad news is that it seems more likely that he is alive, living fairly well in the hills of Pakistan and Afghanistan, in regular communication with his al Qaeda chums and still has ambitious plans for blowing things up.

YO, WHAT UP, THORNTON? "OT: Our Town," the new documentary on the struggle on a group of students in Compton to create a version of "Our Town" that resonates with their lives, is supposed to be an amazing piece of work.

TRAIN YOUR EYES An article on the public art planned for installation in the renovated Main Street Station provides some perspective on public art in Richmond over the years.

ART, UNDERGROUND Good art scenes usually thrive amidst adversity, and some recent changes in Richmond's art community are destined to test a historically placid group of creatives. First Fridays has formed a non-profit to help drive that monthly gallery hopping event; Artspace is moving across the river to the Manchester District; and the fine hipsters at Save Richmond continue to push the largely unartistic team driving the new Performing Arts Center complex downtown to think about the details.

TURNING ON THE WRONG DIME As the NYTimes reports [login:buttermilk.com, password: buttermilk], the Bush administration is beginning to work on a plan to bolster American troops in Iraq with international troops and to provide the United Nations with some control over the political dynamic there. If the plan goes through (and there are doubts), it will be the wrong move at the wrong time -- though it might deflect blame from the Bush team to the UN if Iraq crashes and burns this winter. The poorly executed stabilization plan (which continues to be developed on the fly) for Iraq has pushed a large swath of that nation to the brink already. It is very close to the point where the issue isn't how many troops are on the ground, or what countries they represent. Everyone is a target for either the Baathists, the militants flooding in from Saudi Arabia and Syria, or for the Iranian Shiia militants. The U.S. military cannot close the borders, hunt down the Baathist loyalists and Arab militants, restore a national infrastructure, rebuild an economy from scratch and stabilize an unwieldy political structure. Unfortunately, neither can the United Nations.

ALLAH'S CHUCKLE A new weblog has caught the fancy of many Internet wanderers. It's a rib-tickling send-up to radical Islam, it hits the mark as often as it misses it, and it features that ages-old picture of Osama bin Laden and Sesame Street's Bert.

THE OTHER CASUALTIES A rising tide of wounded soldiers arriving from Iraq carries with it a bit of "good news - bad news" perspective on modern warfighting. The good news is that the technology employed by the American military -- both by soldiers and medics -- is keeping many soldiers who would have been dead in past conflicts alive. The bad news is that few people are focusing on the thousands of wounded soldiers streaming into Andrews Air Force Base.

With no fanfare and almost no public notice, giant C-17 transport jets arrive virtually every night at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, on medical evacuation missions. Since the war began, more than 6,000 service members have been flown back to the United States. The number includes the 1,124 wounded in action, 301 who received non-hostile injuries in vehicle accidents and other mishaps, and thousands who became physically or mentally ill.

"Our nation doesn't know that," said Susan Brewer, president and founder of America's Heroes of Freedom, a nonprofit organization that collects clothing and other personal items for the returning troops. "Sort of out of sight and out of mind."

BYRD IN THE HAND You can question the politics of Senator Robert Byrd, but it's hard to argue his ability to grab a soapbox and speak with an eloquence rarely heard in Washington. A vocal opponent of war in Iraq, Byrd has turned his attention to the current challenge facing the administration -- securing the peace. He wrote this commentary before the bomb attack on the mosque in Najaf.

A hallmark of true leadership is the ability to admit when one is wrong and to learn from errors. Candidate George W. Bush spoke about the need for humility from a great and powerful nation. He said, "Let us reject the blinders of isolationism, just as we refuse the crown of empire. Let us not dominate others with our power -- or betray them with our indifference. And let us have an American foreign policy that reflects American character. The modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness." It is time for the Bush administration to swallow its false pride and return to that philosophy of humility before it is too late.

GEORGE W. BUSH, MASTER CRIMINAL Our President has violated U.S. Code Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8(g).

CLARK BARRED The Post's astute political columnist E.J. Dionne takes a look at the potency of a presidential run by retired General Wesley Clark. Clark is a relative unknown despite his impressive credentials, which leads many to think he's banking for the Vice-Presidential seat in next year's Democratic Party bus ride to the White House.

IDEAS ARE A FORCE I recently read journalist Christopher Hedges' "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning," which pulls his several decades of war reporting together into a meandering discourse on the nature of war, and its self-sustaining power. Hedges spoke at Rockford College in Illinois in late May, creating a bit of a tiff among the graduates with his liberal read on Iraq and his humanist view of war, power and conflict.

WHAT'S IN A NAME The Identity Thread is the sort of site you stumble across and then accidentally return to, mean to bookmark and don't, and then stumble across again. A literary site, the Thread is chock-a-block with interviews, fiction, non-fiction... more words than there are sticks to shake.

BUY A VOWELL After driving around town, from library to library, I finally tracked down the only copy of Sarah Vowell's "The Partly Cloudy Patriot" in time for a long weekend out of town. Woo. Vowell's short book of essays wanders the grey areas between small-town hipster, civic-minded idealist and slacker history buff. Not a modern Emerson, but perhaps a burgeoning Ford Maddox Ford. Follow the link for a lengthy 2002 interview with her at the Identity Thread.