Unhelpful Lessing

The 2007 Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing, probably now thinks herself a prophet. A prophet of doom. Lessing spoke to journalists in Stockholm about God-knows-what and also shared views on the US Presidential race. It is what she said about Barack Obama that hit the news wires though, as she must have intended. The Illinois senator, fresh from caucus sweepstakes in yesterday's primaries, will be killed, if he were to become president.

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Obama "would certainly not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would murder him," said Lessing.

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I am not in the cult of Obama (I'm for Hillary), but find Lessing's comments most baffling. If this was all she had to say on the matter, why say it? Troubling even, that her comments do not seem an expression of concern for Obama's safety but rather, a direct statement of what would happen. The rights or wrongs of such an eventuality did not seem worth dwelling upon, it seemed. Never mind that Lessing's views directly contradict voting results, which show more and more white people (men especially) voting for Obama; let's not forget he won South Carolina, in the 'deep south'.

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Literary greats have been talking (and taking sides) on the great race between Hillary & Obama (and this blog will come to that), but here is one instance in which an esteemed wordsmith ought to have kept her words firmly to herself.

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To say Obama would be killed if he were to win the US presidency is the same as if the Nobel committee had refrained from giving Lessing the prize because:

This frail 88-year-old woman on her last legs would surely keel over and die of shock if we were to give her the Nobel.