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consequences of their mistakes and failures. Extending the idea to the societal
level, true self-respect comes from admitting the folly of American involvement
in the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and the upsurge of urban violence, and then
understanding the price to be paid for insensitivity. Here Didion as the reporter
turns objectivity inside out, calling upon herself as the “source" of her
information on the subject of self-respect. Didion adds:
To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond
the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand
on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and
omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the
gift irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or
carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie
down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we
make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of
course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.28
Meanwhile, Didion’s follow-up collection of essays on the Sixties, The
White Alburn, again calls upon novelistic narration and the subjective
positioning of the writer to chronicle moral stagnation and social disorder. In the
title essay about the late 1960s, Didion asserts that many Americans were
troubled by the recognition that every story they had been told about what
constitutes happiness and the American Dream began to ring false. The ‘'scripts”
for one’s role in society were being mislaid as of 1968; “cues” were no longer
being heard or understood. Instead, people were having to improvise their lives.
Life under the American Dream was supposed to have a clearly defined
beginning, middle, and end, but by the late Sixties the “plot” consisted of little
more than a “cutting-room experience.”29 Didion notes: “In what would
probably be the middle of my life, I wanted still to believe in the narrative and
the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with
every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than
ethical.”30
The theme of the breakdown of individual and societal narrative flows
throughout the “White Album” essay, with Didion wandering through the
turbulent landscape of California during the late Sixties to eyewitness the
disintegration of certainty. The diverse elements of this landscape include the
San Francisco State College protests, the rock group The Doors, singer Janis
Joplin, Eldridge Cleaver, and Manson follower Linda Kasabian.31 In reference to
the latter, Didion utilizes the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Charles Manson
family in 1969 as the quintessential metaphor for disorder. Nothing she had ever
learned could adequately prepare Didion for the brutality perpetrated by the
Manson family: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties
ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the
murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a
sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”32 Part