Absent in your book was any mention of Ralph Nader and the Green Party, or other third party candidates. Would you say it’s impossible to build a successful movement like that or is it even desirable?

Joan Didion: I think it is desirable. Basically with a third party we might have a chance at a two-party system again. I don’t think Nader ran a particularly strong campaign. There’s a tendency for both parties, for everybody in the process, to treat a third party candidate as a spoiler. And as long as that mentality is with us, the third party candidate doesn’t really get a fair hearing.

THC: What would you say the election, or the selection, or whatever term could be applied to the election of Bush in Florida—tells us about the state of the political process?

JD: As I said in the introduction to Political Fictions, it was a kind of high coup in the process, reducing the electorate to a few hundred voters and then fighting over them for 35 days. It was a perfect thing from the parties’ point of view; they had achieved parity. I don’t think it had anything to do with the democratic process or with anything in our politics that came before. I thought it was very peculiar, and I thought it was unfortunate that the Supreme Court decided to hear it.

THC: What about Bush himself as a political character, as an “actor”? People deride the way he talks. Others say it makes him more of an authentic man of the people, a common man.

JD: I think he’s still very unclear. In a sense, the way he talks has become a smokescreen for any serious discussion of what he does. I mean, we’re talking about how he talks. We’re not talking about what he does.

THC: You live in New York City. Have you seen Ground Zero since Sept. 11? Could you describe it from the eyes of a writer?

JD: I don’t have a police pass, so I haven’t been inside the site. I’ve been down, several times, to the nearest barricade, which is about a block away. It’s such a big site. I can hardly stay away from it. It’s in my mind all the time. It draws you toward it. It has almost the impact of a great cathedral. I don’t know anyone who has seen it who hasn’t been filled with a terrible awe. My brother and his wife were here from California over the weekend, and they went down to look at it, and then they went down to look at it again, without having intended to. It just kind of presented itself as something that they had to do.

THC: What do you make of that kind of magnetism?

JD: Well, I think a lot of us are still in shock, attempting to come to terms with it. I don’t know what we’re in shock at. It’s not exactly at the amount of the destruction. Other things have been destroyed through our lifetime; a higher number of people have died in a lot of combat situations. This, you can’t quite come to terms with it, you can’t quite grapple with it. It’s a really direct challenge to our idea of—as many people have said—to our idea of modernity, to our idea of progress, to our idea of secular democracy. Someone said, “You can’t have that, we can take that away.” That is what everyone is trying to come to terms with.