Even A Broken Modo Is Right Twice A Day

Orrin Judd notes this passage from Maureen Dowd:

Barack Obama, the wunderkind who came out of nowhere to win the presidency, was supposed to push America out of the ditch and into a glittering future. But modernity is elusive when you’re in a time machine to the 14th century called Afghanistan. The tableau of Obama at Dover evoked the last line of “The Great Gatsby:” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

As Orrin notes, “‘Jay Gatsby’, who invented an identity for himself to abet his social climbing, cuts mighty close to the bone.”

Or to use the language that excuses a mid-century social climbing figure, a sort of Gatsby-as-everyman, “The Japanese have a saying: ‘A man is whatever room he is in.'”

Related: Charles Lewis of Canada’s National Post on “Nuns, Pope Benedict and Maureen Dowd’s Nazi slur.”

(Via Free Canuckstan.)