Caesar Obama-o

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman, provoked ridicule when he said last week that 'Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar'.
He didn’t mean that Barack Obama is a literary titan who doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus while petty men like Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves.
But what he did mean, while no less fatuous, is also disquieting in its implications: for the first time, the United States of America has a president whose supporters talk about him in the same effusive and worshipful tones usually reserved for the likes of Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong II.

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