Monday, March 24, 2008
In her article Barack Obama's desperate desire to belong, British writer Janet Daley tries to understand Barak Obama's loyalty to Preacher Wright. In her opinion, like all Americans, Obama is lonely:
..and she comes to the conclusion that:
Of course, it doesn't have to be ethnicity any more. You can find your communal identity through gender, or sexual orientation: you just have to be able to plant your feet on solid ground somewhere and find people to holds hands with, so as not to be swept away in the endless, terrifyingly anonymous void.
What a peculiar misinterpretation. If the reader responses are any indication, I'd guess that most Americans like our rootless, terrifyingly anonymous void. If we didn't, there wouldn't be such a market for Westerns, or songs about Route 66 and the open road.
I guess this kind of agoraphobia is the result of living on a little soggy island where people rarely move far from home. When I visit, I often hear Brits express this bizarre idea that Americans regret separating from the 'mother' country.
I never have the heart to tell them that we don't.
* Link thanks to Alan Sullivan
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Dennis Prager says he's looking for a father figure. That's the best explaination based on what we know about him.
Something like that is evidently true of him. Whether it's a desire to compete for the love of a mother who cared more for her causes and lovers than for him, or the need to fit in for the reasons the author noted, some kind of insecurity has created this person who continually tries to reconcile all contradictions and to be the embodiment of the reconciliation of all contradictions.
He obviously has a very deep need to say yes to everyone. It seems like the same impulse that leads others to seek moral equivalence where there is none, but in him it's a bigger beast.
I don't know if the generalization works, but it does explain the Obama story. He was abandoned by his African father and raised by white relatives in multicultural Hawaii. He chose to come east to Chicago, and affiliated with Wright to cement his black identity.
Daley's theory doesn't explain why most black leaders don't have a problem with Wright's sermons (or with Obama's support of him)
Obama's support of Wright does demonstrate a problem that exists in America, but I don't think it has much to do with 'rootlessness'. This issue is like the O.J. trial. Blacks see it one way, and whites see it another way, and there's very little similarity between the two interpretations.
This issue will probably solidify Obama's support in the Black community, but his inability to understand why Whites (and Hispanics and Asians) are upset by this shows that he might not understand these groups as well as he thought.
The feeling of anomie in the USA isn't a myth. It's true for some, perhaps for many Americans. But that doesn't mean that the author isn't being simplistic in her view. There are many patterns of belonging or isolation in the USA, and many reactions to those patterns. You cannot generalize about America, which is a vastly complex society.
And I'm wondering if her contrasting the US to Europe isn't a bit contrived. I would imagine that a feeling of anomie isn't uncommon there, either.
Also, I'm puzzled about what the author calls our abandonment of historical continuity. What does she mean by that? Unless it's another riff on the traditional European theme that the Americans "have no culture" or that we "have no history."
Notice that the author quickly moves away from the notion of ethnic or cultural solidarity as a basis for a feeling of belonging and identity...after all that might be seen as "Racist." As if basing one's identity on being gay would fulfill one's completely for a sense of identity, a substitute for a history and heritage. Who's being ahistorical now?
Britons are going to feel awfully disconnected when their culture completely disppears. And they will also feel rather stupid for encouraging it to happen.