Assuming this isn’t an April Fool’s prank, Alice Walker has an op-ed in the Guardian titled “Obama is the change that America has tried to hide.” Call me crazy, but that sounds like the title of an essay that should be written on loose-leaf paper and adorned with drawings of hearts, smiley faces and little squiggley birds flying past a sun. Here’s the opening:

I have come home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama-Clinton race for the Democratic nomination – a new country existing alongside the old. On any given day we, collectively, become the goddess of the three directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with which I am familiar.

And here’s the high-point of the piece merging the goddesses of vapidity with the goddesses of arrogance and mumbo-jumbo:

True to my inner goddess of the three directions, however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points, probably because I am older; I am a woman and person of three colours (African, Native American, European); I was raised in the south; and, when I look at the world after 64 years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer.
I want a grown-up attitude to Cuba, for instance, a country and people I love. I want an end to the war immediately, and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and drive themselves out of Iraq. I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the US to cease acting as if they don’t understand what is going on. But most of all I want someone with the confidence to talk to anyone, “enemy” or “friend”, and this Obama has shown he can do.

Really you must, must, read the whole thing.