THC: What about the political aftermath of the event? The media has presented the idea of the “reinvention” of George Bush in his “finest hour.” Does this relate to Political Fictions’ idea that politics has become a “show”?

JD: There was this reinvention of Bush as a leader, which was entirely required by the narrative of the moment. He’s a very mysterious figure to me—he operates a lot of the time behind the screen of everyone around him. The extent to which he’s operating at all we have no idea. I have the sense that he’s operating less than meets the eye. [Laughs.] But we don’t know. It will be an interesting period to deconstruct.

THC: What do you think about the way the media has been portraying the air strikes of the last few days? When Bush gave his speech before Congress a few weeks ago he actually specified in the speech that we might have “dramatic strikes, visible on television.” There was this idea of a war “made for TV” in his speech.

JD: There were these kind of delphic utterances, about “some of it you will see, some of it you won’t see.” [Laughs.] This is the part we were meant to see. There was even the talk of sending in the Delta Force; the Delta Force has not been fantastic but we keep seeing these videos of it. We haven’t actually heard about too many successes in a lot of years. There is that video aspect to what we’re seeing. On the other hand, some response had to be made. Clearly, time was running out in terms of domestic politics to make a response, and so we made it. Where it will take us is hard to know.

THC: What would you say about the American people’s ability to forget? Right after the election people were talking about the lack of legitimacy Bush had; right now he has a 90 percent approval rating.

JD: I was talking a couple years ago about this ahistorical quality to Christopher Dickey, the Newsweek bureau chief in Paris, and he said that the absence of memory—the refusal to recognize history—has been America’s genius. And it has. There is a sense in which the whole idea of America is that it doesn’t have anything to do with the past.

THC: What about the recent upsurge in a kind of patriotism?

JD: In the immediate aftermath of the attack, most people—I’m not talking about people on television—most people couldn’t find words for it. There was a surge of actual patriotism, by which I mean a sort of a visceral love of the place, the home, the family. But then that got overtaken by jingoism. I had to go to the West Coast a week after the attacks so I was gone for a week, and when I came back to my astonishment New York was full of flags. It happened during the second week. I mean, I couldn’t believe it, they were all over, every place you looked there was a flag. It was kind of troubling because it seemed to be something that people felt they had to do.

THC: Stepping back into more abstract terms, your book feels very descriptive but not terribly prescriptive. So what do you think has caused this transformation in our political process? Who are the behind-the-scenes players?

JD: Everyone inside the process has benefited. And that’s a larger and larger group of people. It’s not just politicians. It’s all the people for whom politics is their business. It’s people you see all day long now on the talk shows. Because of cable, there is no hour of the day when you can’t watch somebody within the political class arguing with somebody else within the political class. These are people who don’t have a very deep commitment to the rest of the country; in fact, they have none. You saw that most markedly during the year that led up to the impeachment; essentially the political class turned against the people and excoriated them at every opportunity for not going along with the notion that Clinton had to go. The American people were said to be interested in nothing but the Dow Jones, which was saying they were selfish, they were stupid, they were irresponsible. You saw the idea of secular democracy itself put up for grabs that year, which was pretty startling.