The British newspaper, the Guardian, asked seven American authors to reflect on the Bush era. Their essays are scathing.
Tobias Wolf writes about get-togethers with friends: "When we meet for dinner we do our best to take up other subjects - books, gossip, movies, our children - but then, like the addicts we've become, we sneak back to the drug of outrage, shooting up the latest barefaced lie and squalid revelation, not forgetting to list yet again the national and global catastrophes brought about by the incompetence, hypocrisy, muddleheadedness, venality, truculence, mendacity, callousness, zealotry, machismo, lawlessness, cynicism, wishful thinking, and occasional downright evil of the administration of George W Bush. Our economy is in freefall, our public school system a disgrace, our military exhausted, the wounded and traumatised dying of neglect, yea, the very earth groaning for relief - and he's optimistic! Yessiree! Looking forward to it! Leaning toward us over the podium with that exasperated little squint and that impatient, dentist-drill voice, utterly at a loss as to how he got saddled with a nation of such gloomy Guses and crybabies.
"Eddying around our own indignation again and again, as if caught in some Bermuda Triangle of complaint, we are unable not to remind each other of the fatal character of George Bush's incomprehension, the thousands upon thousands who have died by his blithe actions and inactions, and his inability to understand at any level - political, moral, emotional - the terrible damage he has done, this man whose idea of sharing in the grief of parents who've lost a son or daughter in Iraq is to give up playing golf! If he really did.
"There - I've stepped in the trap again. I can't help it. And for many of us that has been a defining condition of life in George W Bush's reign, this unanswerable need to register anew and aloud our shock and dismay, indeed our disbelief, at finding him at the wheel as we wake each morning."
Siri Hustvedt writes: "For years,Americans have been listening to a president who has essentially cut the world in two. We are 'the protectors of freedom' fighting the 'evil-doers' who 'hate freedom'. . . .
"Playing on the age-old fear of malignant outsiders and foreigners, both those residing on American soil and elsewhere, the administration successfully created an atmosphere of absolutism after 11 September 2001. The exhortation 'If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists' is a form of political speech that makes dialogue impossible. There is no legitimate response because anyone who counters with another thought has already been lumped with an inhuman enemy. In psychiatric parlance, rigid polarities like those the President has made time and again are regarded as pathological: 'splitting'. The patient is unable to tolerate ambiguity and insists on viewing the people in his life through an 'all good' or 'all bad' lens. Bush and his cohorts have been masterful splitters, employing a language that gives no room for exchange and necessarily distorts reality, which, unfortunately, is usually murky. This kind of speech does not recognise an interlocutor, a real human other. It is speech without empathy, and it is startlingly similar to the rhetoric of the Muslim radicals who spew venom on the West and 'the enemies of Islam'."
Walter Mosley writes:
"Bush, along with his cronies - Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Rice and Rove
- received the strongest hand that could be dealt a sitting president and squandered the potential for true personal, party, national and international advancement. After the World Trade Centre disaster we (Americans) had the sympathy and support of much of the globe on our side. But instead of capitalising on this largesse we declared war on the world and upon our own people - especially the poor. . . .
"Our soldiers have been killed and maimed, scarred physically and psychologically. Most have seen no remuneration and their homeland is no safer or any more secure.
"Bush has done many things wrong. Sometimes these transgressions have hurt us but even when we are wounded we learn. We now have a glimmer of understanding why so much of the world hates us and why so many others have disdain for our archaic sense of pride and vacuous moral authority."
Aleksandar Hemon writes: "I am no historian but it is my guess that the Bush regime would be in the running for the worst elected government in the history of Western civilisation. The score sheet is catastrophic: American foreign policy and international prestige are in tatters; the deficit and the national debt are reaching Zimbabwean proportions; states are impoverished and national infrastructure is falling apart; the practices of democracy have been so devalued that a militant bimbo is a viable vice-presidential candidate, while race-baiting is acceptable campaign practice. What to say of the destruction of New Orleans and the collapse of financial markets, neither of which the Bush court seemed particularly interested in until it was too late? Nothing Bush and his administration handled has remained undamaged, no stone misturned, all children left behind to forage through the debris in the aftermath of the past eight years."
Rick Moody writes: "The Ownership Society! That was the name for this second term of Bush's America, and it's logical to assume Bush didn't come up with the coinage himself, because how could he have? He has trouble getting through a simple sentence. Probably some staffer, gifted with ad speak, came up with it, coining what was already de facto policy, the notion that the government needs to remove itself entirely from the business of regulation and owning industries, leaving the oversight of corporate capital - as well as derivatives, packaged mortgages, and so on - to an ill-equipped marketplace.
"What the Ownership Society came to feel like to the overwhelming majority of Americans was feudalism. The modern return of the robber barons. No backstop in the case of catastrophic illness. No backstop in case of corporate malfeasance. No backstop in the case of a despoiled natural environment. No backstop in the case of cascading corporate bankruptcies. The wealthy and the large corporations, now largely unregulated, were free to do as they wished in most if not all areas, in order to increase the bounteous riches of their executives."
Edmund White writes: "Perhaps the most depressing moment in the last eight years was Bush's re-election. As a teacher, I've long lamented the dumbing down of America; now I was tempted to see our educational failure as a plot to keep the electorate stupid and gullible. In America, a tiny elite receives a rigorous education and the rest of the population is kept in darkest ignorance, just as a small percentage of our youngsters constitute Olympic champion athletes and the rest of the population is grotesquely obese: a strange idea of democracy. I was prepared to believe that Dubya's first election had been a mistake or a cheat, but the idea that the voters could re-elect him was too grim to contemplate."
Joseph L. Galloway writes in his McClatchy Newspapers opinion column: "They played on our fears like a mighty Wurlitzer Organ, frightening us with lies into an unnecessary war in Iraq. Frightening us into re-electing George Bush, even after we knew that he was anything but presidential, anything but intelligent, anything but a worthy, effective leader.
"They frightened us so badly that we voluntarily surrendered the precious rights that a million American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and others bought for us with their lives during two centuries of freedom and democracy.
"They used fear to violate international law, to torture and imprison thousands of suspected enemies without charges or trials. They used fear and invoked national security to suspend the right of habeas corpus, the foundation of our freedoms.
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