According to Keith Olbermann, George W Bush has broken the 'fundamental pact between himself and the people'. Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Pool/EPA
Just recently the ghost of Emile Zola reared its head in the United States, on the politics and news show Countdown with Keith Olbermann, of all places.
Nearly 110 years after Zola published an open letter damning the government for covering up the Dreyfus affair, Olbermann - a sports commentator turned liberal firebrand - delivered a 10-minute "j'accuse" to President George W Bush.
By commuting the sentence of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, George W Bush broke the "fundamental pact between [himself] and the people", Olbermann argued.
Olbermann proceeded to list Bush's infractions, which included "lying this country into war", causing the needless death of Americans, subverting the constitution and "creating the very terror that you claim to have fought".
"Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9 1974," he urged the president in a resounding conclusion, "resign."
What a difference 100 years makes. In one century, it's a novelist calling a president to account; in the next, Americans have to turn to a former sportscaster to get a spoonful of hard wisdom.
Granted, the US will never have the respect France has for its intellectuals. But it's not as if American novelists have steered clear of the op-ed pages. EL Doctorow has written pieces about torture and Paul Auster will collar pretty much anyone who will listen.
Around the 2004 election, novelists ranging from Jonathan Safran Foer to Susan Sontag banded together to raise money to defeat Bush. Recently the writer Stephen Elliot has been raising money for progressive candidates.
But when it comes to the arena in which novelists can have the most impact - their art - this generation (with the notable exception of Gary Shteyngart and his Absurdistan has been rather silent about the Bush years, so blisteringly described by Olbermann.
Part of this - I think - has to do with the difficulty so many novelists, let alone Americans at large, had in absorbing 9/11. The trauma, the anger and the loss of that event have sucked up all the imaginative oxygen in the room.
Six years after the attacks, the novel-based responses to that day - including Don DeLillo's The Falling Man - continue to trickle in. But no one is writing about rendition or torture or trumped up fears.
Maybe it takes time - but how much, really? In the early 70s, many of America's best known novelists addressed the climate of corruption in the Nixon White House in fiction, from Philip Roth (Our Gang, 1971) to Joyce Carol Oates (The Assassins, 1975) to Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977) which features Tricky Dick as a narrator/commentator.
"It's funny, isn't it" says one of Nixon's aides deep into Coover's novel, "how billions and billions of words get spoken every day ... and for some reason - or for maybe no reason at all - a few of them stick, and they're all we've got afterwards of everything that's happened."
Here's why the gradual drowning out of the public intellectual role in America is so dangerous - whether it's of novelists or historians or thinkers in general. The public intellectual's job isn't just to have an opinion, but a tangible memory and a context through which to view what just happened- whether it's 9/11 or the assault on the constitution.
And so, hearing that Shteyngart is working on a novel about the US defaulting on its debt to China is weirdly cheering. Hearing that Joyce Carol Oates is tackling a novel about a tabloid American family is comforting.
Why? Inspiring as it was, something tells me that Olbermann's j'accuse - which received no mainstream media coverage, and lives now in the temporary ether of YouTube - simply isn't enough.
