Slimming for the Beach

First the Kennedys endorsed him. Now a writ­ing giant has endorsed Barack Obama. Toni Mor­ri­son wrote to Mr Obama, in part:

“In addi­tion to keen intel­li­gence, integrity and a rare authen­tic­ity, you exhibit some­thing that has noth­ing to do with age, expe­ri­ence, race or gen­der and some­thing I don’t see in other can­di­dates. That some­thing is a cre­ative imag­i­na­tion which, cou­pled with bril­liance, equals wisdom” .

[both arti­cles from The New York Times

Can you imag­ine a sit­u­a­tion in Ire­land where Sea­mus Heaney or John Banville or indeed any other writer endorsed a can­di­date for Pres­i­dent or Taoiseach?

Mean­while, it appears more likely that the US econ­omy has been bushed — again. A New York Times pre­view of Mr Bush’s last State of the Nation speech is headed Echo of First Bush: Good Econ­omy Turns Sour [requires registration]

It would seem that War=Econony buck­ling under the strain. Who would have thought?

I don’t want to pain myself as well as you, dear reader, by quot­ing the obvi­ous line about fail­ing to learn from his­tory. Per­haps given the open­ing para­graph, it might be more apt to quote this one.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in his­tory, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the sound of a nation, long sup­pressed, finds utter­ance.
-Jawa­har­lal Nehru (1889–1964)