Bush’s cultural legacy

The Guardian asked twelve leftish American writers and artists what the “cultural legacy of George W. Bush” would be.

Joyce Carol Oates scoffed at the very idea. “The ‘cultural legacy of George W. Bush’ would seem to be the punchline of a cruel joke,” she blubbered, “if there could be anything remotely funny about the Bush administration.” The other responses were just as predictable:

• “These past eight years have been about the worst that I can imagine” (Paul Auster).
• “Although all politicians tell lies, Bush has gone right round the bend as a liar. . .” (Gore Vidal).
• “[A]n administration of criminality, complicity and incompetence. . .” (Edward Albee).
• “I think the Bush administration did its best to create a vast wasteland” (Alex Gibney).
• “[T]here’s something about the brute force of this administration, and the fetishisation of brute force by this administration, which literally stands in opposition to civilisation and the arts” (Naomi Wolf).
• “Culture’s a dirty word to these people, like ‘liberal’ or ‘literate’ ” (Daniel Libeskind).

Three of them repeated, in almost the exact same words, the rumor, demonstrably untrue but apparently immune to correction, that President Bush is “a man who’s proud not to read books.”

Did it occur to none of these cultural authorities that their common style of foam-flecked hyperbole and reckless disregard for proportion and truth might just be that cultural legacy?

Update: Literary Saloon joins in, proud not to distinguish itself from the common style. “[I]t’s easy to agree with the whole lot of [anti-Bush writers in the Guardian],” because, after all, “they’re all pretty much agreed,” and apparently, then, they exempt you from having a single independent thought.