Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Obama   [John Derbyshire]

If you go to a recognized university to study English literature, you should naturally expect to encounter the great names. At Ohio State University, one of those great names will be Barack Obama.

Barack Obama and/as Literature

English 275: Thematic Approaches to Literature (5 credits) …

The outraged undergraduate who passed that to me, with pitiful entreaties on no account to use his name (this is the Academy: they don't like dissent) added the following eloquent prediction:

I'm almost starting to feel sorry for the guy. He's just an ambitious young politician, but nothing he does will satisfy these people's need for a Messiah. Sooner or later it will turn out that he has an Enemies List, did an intern, traded arms for hostages, got attacked by a man-eating bunny-rabbit, puked on a Japanese diplomat … whatever. Every president has something. Having turned this one into Jesus Christ, they'll do the next logical thing and crucify him.

But not, apparently, before students at college Eng. Lit. departments all over the republic have been force-fed yards of Obama's soporific prose.

02/04 07:40 AMShare