#154 We’ve Seen This Movie Before

<strong>Global Policy Watch: Joan Didion On Morality</strong><br/><br/><em>Insights on global issues of the day</em><br/><br/>- <em>RSJ</em><br/><br/>I want to write about the Andhra Pradesh cinema ticket price cap kerfuffle this week (<a target="_blank" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-the-row-over-cinema-theatre-ticket-prices-in-andhra-pradesh-7697910/#:~:text=At%20multiplexes%20in%20municipal%20corporation,5%20in%20non%2DAC%20theatres.">read here</a> for context). A regular reader, Prem Sagar, wrote to us last week giving us a picture of what was happening in Tollywood. All the great ingredients of a timeless PolicyWTF have come together there - good intentions, political games, conspiracy theories, a government order on price controls that Indira Gandhi would have been proud of and the inevitable unintended consequences. I wept with joy going through them all. <br/><br/>But before that Joan Didion. <br/><br/>The great chronicler of American life passed away a couple of weeks back. Why Joan Didion in a public policy newsletter, you may ask? Public policy is an interdisciplinary science. At the heart of it is understanding the public - the basis for its motives, its fears and insecurities and its wants. There was no one better than Joan Didion to show a mirror to a society in prose that was unsparing, sparse and crystalline. Didion didn’t go looking for grand narratives. There was no conscious painting of a big picture. She was intimate in her approach and got busy with the minutiae. But from that appeared something that made you rethink your priors. She wrote as she saw it. And she saw a lot. From the underlying vacuity of the unrest in colleges in the late 60s, the hollowness of the counterculture movement in California, the depravity hiding under Kennedy’s Camelot, the absence of any ideological truth bar nihilism among Black Panthers, the mendacity of Nixon and the arriviste pretensions of the Reagans. She covered them all with insight and acuity. <br/><br/>Not many realise today