Tuesday, September 21, 2010

How To Obamify History Without Really Trying

It turns out to be harder than you might have thought it would be, being the president of the United States and all, to hire a decent speechwriter. True, you can always find a hip young staff brainiac to purvey your every word and move (and his own, while he’s at it). But even Google seems to have failed the battalion of  swell-headed policy twits you employ, one or two of whom might have studied, oh, let’s say history, at some fabulously famous institution of higher learning—if they still teach that kind of thing—but are now so busy live-tweeting their ice-cream socials among dictators, for example, that they just haven’t got the time to LOOK STUFF UP.  So you’re stuck embarrassing yourself today by saying things like Mexicans Were Here Long Before America Was Even An Idea (did they tour Jamestown?), for which tomorrow someone will have the embarrassing job of excusing you publicly, someone else will have the embarrassing experience of looking up from his iPad to hear he has been fired, and you will have the apparently unembarrassed temerity to go on grousing about your lousy job.

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