Living in Joan Didion’s Culture Shock

What kind of a man picks a fight with a woman old enough to be his mother?

Daunte Wright. Just a poor black guy, with an arrest warrant and a previous firearms violation, trying to go about his business.

And what kind of a woman apologizes profusely, sobbing uncontrollably, for trying to do her job but failing?

Minnesota police officer Kim Potter, white and working in the same area where black Fentanyl addict and thieving bully George Floyd was martyred.

The guilty verdict in Potter’s manslaughter trial landed the same day that writer Joan Didion died. Two pieces of sad news to close out the year.

Didion was known for her brutal honesty.

Her essay “On Self-Respect,” written when she was a young staffer at Vogue magazine, considers “the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life” as the source of self-respect.

Potter has self-respect. Wright did not.

“Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about,” Didion writes. “They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”

Didion was not one to wallow in historic wrongs that cannot be changed.

“(I)t did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. … “(A)nything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt… .”

People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes and know the price of things, Didion writes.

“If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character…”

What kind of character did Wright and Potter exhibit?

All that was required of Wright was that he allow himself to be handcuffed and taken into custody, then booked on the warrant – and likely soon released.

At the time of his encounter with Potter he had already skirted prosecution of two cases from 2019 in which he was accused of participating in a carjacking and another where he was accused of shooting a man in the head leaving him brain damaged (the victim’s family is now suing the Wright estate for a cut of the millions it will receive because of Potter’s error). Wright also had a prior conviction for armed robbery.

Perhaps Wright, 20, looked at Potter, a 48-year-old white woman, and wrote her off as inconsequential. He’s a black man, and black lives matter. The news media can’t say it enough.

Potter testified she probably wouldn’t have stopped Wright for three low-level traffic violations, but she was training another officer. She became concerned, though, when she ran his name and discovered he was driving on a suspended license, had a restraining order against him, and a warrant for his arrest on a weapons charge. It’s not hard to imagine what she thought could happen when he resisted arrest.

There would have been no opportunity for her to mistakenly reach for her gun instead of her Taser had Wright simply cooperated. He chose not to.

The jurors in her trial got to hold her gun and Taser to compare them. The gun is far heavier.  But like most cops in American, Potter rarely pulled her firearm or Taser.

It might have been more useful for each juror to gear up in all the gadgetry police are now expected to wear. Cops can feel shackled. Not just with equipment – but with the public’s expectations that they should not hurt anyone. Enforce the laws by magic, or take some “special training” that will make everyone cheerfully cooperate.

Potter’s deep remorse for mistaking her gun for a Taser did her no good. Her 26 years of police work turned out to be as irrelevant as Wright’s criminal history, which the media generally ignored.

It’s too bad she cried so hard. The mistake she made occasionally happens in her line of work. The only way it will ever stop happening is if criminals stop behaving like criminals, or cops stop behaving like cops – in which case, criminals can do whatever they want.

One of Didion’s most famous essays was “Sentimental Journeys” about the Central Park Five. Five black teenagers were convicted of raping and brutally beating a white jogger in 1989. They initially implicated one another, and one of them even boasted about his participation in the crime. By the time they changed their tunes, they were found guilty and sentenced to prison.

Didion went after the media for their pack mentality, their rush to run with the same narrative – the Ivy League grad victim representing New York’s brave spirit in the face of vicious acts of “wilding.”

Even New York’s first black mayor, David Denkins, joined in saying he hoped the city “would learn a lesson from the event and be inspired by this young woman.” (Actually, after the victim finally recovered, she would go into seclusion for 14 years, and as Didion noted, there were 3,254 rapes reported the same year of the Central Park rape.)

Eventually, a serial rapist named Matias Reyes, who was in prison on other crimes, confessed to the Central Park rape. His DNA matched.

The media whip-lashed in the other direction – elevating the Central Park Five to hero status, ignoring that one of the reasons the teenagers had trouble defending themselves is they were elsewhere in Central Park committing other, lesser crimes when the jogger was raped. Like the current media done with Daunte Wright’s criminal history, reducing it to hanging an air freshener on his rear-view mirror.

When enough neighborhoods have degenerated, Americans may come to their senses and marvel at the gullibility and gutlessness of a media that turned guys like Floyd and Wright into martyrs.

Lynch mobs now come in all colors. They no longer wear white hoods. We now have black good ol’ boys like Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison who fast-tracked the prosecution of Potter. Her “crime” occurred in April 2021, and the verdict came near the end of December. Likewise, Ellison made sure Derek Chauvin was swiftly brought to trial.

The criminal justice system didn’t seem interested in prosecuting Wright for his cases from 2019. Had he been prosecuted and convicted, he might still be alive by virtue of being incarcerated.

The war on cops has not gone unnoticed by the criminal community.

“Carjackings sweep through the Twin Cities” was a headline this week in a Minneapolis newspaper.

Didion saw this America coming. In 1975, she delivered the commencement address at the University of California Riverside. She didn’t preach that the graduates should try to make the world better. She urged them to live in it and try to understand it as it is.

“Some of you are going to spend the whole rest of your life in culture shock,” Didion said, “and what I’m trying to say is that I think you should.”

She invited them to look at the myth of the 60’s through her eyes, “a decade in which everyone lived in an entirely imagined world; when everybody operated from an idea and all the ideas got polarized and cheapened.”

Americans collectively lost the ability to think and judge, she said.

“The whole country was like a cargo cult. … Nothing meant what it was supposed to mean.”

She reassured them: “There is an objective reality. Take it on faith.”

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

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