De outras Joanas - 20

When the social structure starts to crack is when the dropouts and the delinquents and the crazies turn up.These are not people who don’t know the rules. These are people who can see, without understanding why, that the rules no longer make sense. But, once people like that are thrown out of the system, once they become druggies or panhandlers or abusers of all sorts, no one wants them back in. They get scape- goated. Individual moral failure is taken to be the problem. It can’t be the system. Part of wagon-train morality was leaving the weakest behind to freeze in the mountain passes. Survival, not caring, is what Didion thinks that ethos finally boiled down to—“careless self-interest and optimism,” the California mentality. California’s answer to the problem of broken people was to build more prisons to put them in.

- Louis Menaud, "Out of Bethlehem - The Radicalization of Joan Didion", na New Yorker desta semana.