The Bush of Fiction

A thought as W. hits theaters: President Bush may have been a disaster for American politics but he’s been a boon for popular culture. Phoebe Connelly at the American Prospect surveys the various Bush representations and notes that “we've moved beyond the one-dimensional screeds and the off-handed jokes in favor of certain elegiac fictionalization.” Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel, American Wife, and Oliver Stone’s W both cast the president as everyman. It is symptomatic, perhaps, of a certain disrespect for the president, but then “Sittenfeld and Stone have the space to fictionalize him precisely because Bush has become irrelevant to an extreme degree.”