The state of America after Bush
The Observer,
Sunday November 2 2008
This week the George W Bush era will draw to a close. His was a momentous presidency, shaped by some of the most epic events in recent history - 9/11, the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the meltdown on Wall Street. But how will history judge President Bush? Here seven leading US authors reflect on his eight years in the White House, and the type of America that the 43rd president is leaving behind
Tobias Wolff
Celebrated novelist and memoirist. His latest short story collection, Our Story Begins, was published in August. Won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Barracks Thief (1984)
Last week I was roused from sleep by a strange dream - that my bearded, hairy-backed, happily married older brother Geoffrey, now 70 and up to his eyeballs in grandchildren, had decided to get a sex change. My mentioning this to anyone who knows him has unfailingly produced peals of laughter. All right - dreams are funny, when they're funny. But imagine waking every day to the dream that George W Bush is your president.
I simply can't, as Justice Scalia has advised, 'get over it'. As I grind my coffee to the morning newscast and the image of our confident president appears, the bile rises in the gorge, boiling over into tantrums and rants and declarations of despair that, even in the moment, strike me as clownish and pitiable, and are certainly viewed by my family in that light, until they join in.
No, I can't get over it, and neither can my friends, hard as we all try. 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.
(The rest is here.)
Sunday November 2 2008
This week the George W Bush era will draw to a close. His was a momentous presidency, shaped by some of the most epic events in recent history - 9/11, the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the meltdown on Wall Street. But how will history judge President Bush? Here seven leading US authors reflect on his eight years in the White House, and the type of America that the 43rd president is leaving behind
Tobias Wolff
Celebrated novelist and memoirist. His latest short story collection, Our Story Begins, was published in August. Won the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Barracks Thief (1984)
Last week I was roused from sleep by a strange dream - that my bearded, hairy-backed, happily married older brother Geoffrey, now 70 and up to his eyeballs in grandchildren, had decided to get a sex change. My mentioning this to anyone who knows him has unfailingly produced peals of laughter. All right - dreams are funny, when they're funny. But imagine waking every day to the dream that George W Bush is your president.
I simply can't, as Justice Scalia has advised, 'get over it'. As I grind my coffee to the morning newscast and the image of our confident president appears, the bile rises in the gorge, boiling over into tantrums and rants and declarations of despair that, even in the moment, strike me as clownish and pitiable, and are certainly viewed by my family in that light, until they join in.
No, I can't get over it, and neither can my friends, hard as we all try. 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.
(The rest is here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home