Obama's Waste Land Revisited

I still think that young Mr. Obama's treatise on The Waste Land makes him sound like the butt of a joke in a Woody Allen movie (here).

But Sarah at Sarah Wrote That saw something else:

Obama on “The Waste Land” and T.S. Eliot got me to click over:

I haven’t read ‘The Waste Land’ for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements — Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality.

And then that picture. That look.