In a little noticed newspaper editorial this morning (Sunday, 17 February) Barack Obama picked up another in a series of obscure but important literary endorsements, viz:
Today's Paradise Lost Review, the free weekly news and arts scene paper from West Egg, Long Island, carried this endorsement of Barack Obama:
Daisy and I stumbled in from a night of revelry with beautiful Champaign jazz babies shocked to find out that the choice for a presidential candidate on the Democratic side had come down to a dame and black guy. While it is difficult to choose whom to support from icons sandwiched somewhere in-between the flapper and the jazzman, I am forced to choose the jazzman. I hear that the lady in the pantsuit dislikes intensely the poetry and music of mere words. She is like no flapper I ever knew. I simply cannot support a candidate who shows so little interest in the art and inspiration of our language.
So, it is with great enthusiasm that I throw my most heartfelt support for the skinny black guy with the beautifully musical name over the gun mol and her relentlessly callow pitch that what we say and how we inspire does not matter.
Here's mud in your eye,
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This is yet one more in a growing list of Lost Generation authors and early twentieth century figures who have jumped on the Obama bandwagon.