Slouching Towards Bethleham by Joan Didion

This book, first published in 1968, and widely hailed as a modern classic from the very beginning, is something I missed along the road to obtaining my liberal education. Fortunately, I have three sons in college, so I have the opportunity to read what they are reading, to delve back into the reaches of what undergraduates are reading for credit, and learn a thing or two myself.
The book opens with a poem by Yeats, "The Second Coming". The poem is not only where the title of the collection of essays comes from, it summarizes the take home message that they contain:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The essays portray this sense that American society was splintering in the 1960s and 70s, that traditional moral and cultural restraints could no longer hold it together. Whether she's writing about a sensational murder or profiling California celebrities, discussing student demonstrations, the Black Panthers or the Women's Movement, or portraying her own physical and emotional problems, the consistent theme is one of the breakdown of the social order. But there's also a strong subtext which shows that the center, though embattled, really is holding; it is the margins, both at the upper and the lower ends of the social spectrum which are falling apart. The real danger lies in the middle's loss of confidence in it's own beliefs, a crisis of faith.
We can learn lessons from this that apply to American society and politics of today--there is a tide of exaggeration, tilting towards the end times that pervades the politics of today. Didion points out that in such a situation, where the proclivities of the opinion-making class have diverged so far from the preferences of the middle class, it would have taken an inordinate amount of courage for middle America to hold it's ground. That is a good lesson to be reminded of. The time of the essays was a time of change, and we may be again at the same such time.