Adam Gopnik to Hendrik Hertzberg:
“Interesting thing, to me at least. If you Google Obama’s wonderful line “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” it’s credited right and left, and going back to the nineties, as a bit of Hopi Indian wisdom. I haven’t (a) read this anywhere or (b) seen anything made of the silent borrowing from the Eldest Peoples, etc. Also, frankly, I doubt that it can be a true Hopi aphorism, unless in some very different form, since I suspect the grammar works only in English. (You couldn’t say it in French, for instance, so far as I can figure.) I wonder who really did invent it, and where B.O. (ah! a difference! You can’t initialize him à la a Kennedy!) found it?”
