The White Album by Joan Didion Page A

and some nonlocals too . Reducing the number of lone souls careering around the East-West Corridor in a state of mechanized rapture may or may not have seemed socially desirable, but what it was definitely not going to seem was easy . “W e’re only seeing an initial period of urifamiliarity” I was assured the day I visited Caltrans . I was talking to a woman named Eleanor Wood and she was thoroughly and professionally grounded in the diction of “planning” and it did not seem likely that I could interest her in considering the freeway as regional mystery . “Any time you try to rearrange people ’s daily habits, they’re apt to react impetuously . All this project requires is a certain rearrangement of people’s daily planning . That ’s really all we want . ”
    It occurred to me that a certain rearrangement of people’s daily planning might seem, in less rarefied air than is breathed at 120 South Spring, rather a great deal to want, but so impenetrable was the sense of higher social purpose there in the Operations Center that I did not express this reservation . Instead I changed the subject, mentioned an earlier “pilot project” on the Santa Monica: the big electronic message boards that Caltrans had installed a year or two before . The id ea was that traffic information transmitted from the Santa Monica to the Xerox Sigma V could be translated, here in the Operations Center, into suggestions to the driver, and flashed right back out to the Santa Monica . This operation, in that it involved telling drivers electronically what they already knew empirically, had the rather spectral circularity that seemed to mark a great many Caltrans schemes, and I was interested in how Caltrans thought it worked .
    “Actually the message boards were part of a larger pilot project,” Mrs . Wood said . “An ongoing project in incident management . With the message boards we hoped to learn if motorists would modify their behavior according to what we told them on the boards . ”
    I asked if the motorists had .
    “Actually no,” Mrs . Wood said finally . “They didn’t react to the signs exactly as we’d hypothesized they would, no . But . If we’d known what the motorist would do ... then we wouldn’t have needed a pilot project in the first place, would we . ”
    The circle seemed intact . Mrs . Wood and I smiled, and shook hands . I watched the big board until all lights turned green on the Santa Monica and then I left and drove home on it, all 16 . 2 miles of it . All the way I remembered that I was watched by the Xerox SigmaV . All the way the message boards gave me the number to call for car pool info . As I left the freeway it occurred to me that they might have their own rapture down at 120 South Spring, and it could be called Perpetuating the Department . Today the California Highway Patrol reported that, during the first six weeks of the Diamond Lane, accidents on the Santa Monica, which normally range between 49 and 72 during a six-week period, totaled 204 . Yesterday plans were announced to extend the Diamond Lane to other freeways at a cost of $42,500,000 .
    1976

 

     
     

    Good Citizens
     
     
    1
    I was once invited to a civil rights meeting at Sammy Davis, Jr . ’s house, in the hills above the Sunset Strip . “Let me tell you how to get to Sammy s,” said the woman to whom I was talking . “You turn left at the old Mocambo . ” I liked the ring of this line, summing up as it did a couple of generations of that peculiar vacant fervor which is Hollywood political action, but acquaintances to whom I repeated it seemed uneasy . Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even the most casual political small talk resemble a rally . “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,”