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October 21, 2008
Americanism And Its Opposite
On a long car ride this weekend, my son and I listened to an audio book version of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, narrated by the author himself. I expected to be entertained and educated about some of the biographical details of the man who I expect will become the 44th president of the United States. What I got was considerably more.
The central thesis of the book—or perhaps its conceit—is that his father, a “mythological character” he hardly knew, was the epitome of the American dream. As the book implicitly acknowledges, the “idea” of American has from the outset been a foreign idea. It began as a vision and a promise to/by Europeans that their lives could be better in a newer world—a place where the bondage of old world prejudices and old world social and economic constraints could be broken. A world where a people could fashion for themselves a new identity out of nothing but the whole cloth of their own humanity.
Obama’s book is an elegant presentation of how that distinctly political and spiritual American myth became, for him, deeply personal and psychological—part of his own quest for personal identity, and the political template for his negotiation with the demands of racial identity.
In short, the book is one of the most elegant and compelling narrative arguments for “Americanism” I have ever read from a politician. Indeed, from anyone.
It’s in this light that I read (and watched) a headline grabbing political hack challenge Obama and other liberal Democrats on the issue of their “anti-americanism.” Such bullshit shouldn’t shock me—but it does.
As reported in Politico:
Early in the “Hardball” interview, Bachmann said she was “very concerned” that Barack Obama “may have anti-American views.”When Matthews pressed her about the connections between liberalism and anti-Americanism, Bachmann continued to blow on the coals: “Well, the liberals that are Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, they are over-the-top anti-American, and that’s the questions that Americans have.” She grouped into this Michelle Obama’s comments that “she’s only recently proud of her country.”
Matthews kept pressing.
“I guess when I heard the word ‘anti-American’ [applied] to Barack, I wanted to see how ready she was to apply it,” Matthews told Politico on Monday. “And she was ready to apply it pretty broadly.”
Matthews asked Bachmann how many of her colleagues were “anti-American.”
“What I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look,” Bachmann responded. “I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would be — would love to see an exposé like that.”
I'm not in the business of tossing about charges of anti-americanism--but only because I think such claims are themselves out of keeping with the American spirit of tolerance and democratic debate. But it is more than a little astonishing that a brash young African student whose impressions of American were established before he ever set foot on these shores--and was only here a few short years--knew more about the deep spiritual meaning of American identity than one of our own "representitives."
Posted by stevemack at October 21, 2008 12:46 PM
