Fiction So Bad It Kills

As Frank Rich reminds us, the neo-con artists who have been running the country for the last five and half years have been creating the worst kind of amateurish fictions imaginable. The problem is that they themselves are so dissociated from the imaginative engine that drives most successful fiction, that they have literally become the worst hacks in literary history.

Says Rich:

The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set it free.

But for the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, words like "truth" and "free" ring hollow. The lying has become an out-of-control cancer growing on the nation and now we are all becoming affected by it.

Is there an antidote?

---

Metadata: politics, fiction