April 27, 2011--Core Culture

When not able to sleep while on the road there is always talk-radio to either bore me to sleep or make me crazy. An exception is Red Eye Radio, hosted from midnight to 5:00 AM by an intelligent and literate conservative, Doug McIntyre.

A few from the lunatic fringe call in, but he reminds them in a gentler way than I would that they are missing the full story. Like last night when someone called to rage about Obama's being controlled by left wing foreign policy ideologues. She was well enough informed to mention Samantha Powers and Susan Rice. Though he agreed that Obama has liberal advisors, he reminded her that George W. Bush was pressed into a disastrous preemptive war in Iraq by his own right-wing ideologues, Richard Pearl and Paul Wolfowitz.

Another caller struggled to express why she is uncomfortable with Obama. "I'm not a birther," she said, "They're nuts or just haters. A certificate of living birth is good enough for me. It's not that. I voted for him and had high hopes for his presidency, but there is something about him that disturbs me. I don't quite know how to express it. It comes out in part from his detached style. But that's not it. He feels alien to me. Culturally, I mean. His core culture doesn't feel like most other Americans'. I loved Kennedy and even Jimmy Carter and they both felt American. I didn't care much for Reagan and came to detest Bush, but at their cultural core they too felt American. Obama is different. So there's a part of me that understands the birther thing. People trying to figure out why Obama feels foreign. Again, I feel certain he was born in Hawaii, but still there is something about him. As I said, it's his core culture. That's the best I can come up with."

McIntyre tried as best he could to talk about what she was attempting to express but didn't do much better. He too dismisses the birthers but agreed that Obama does in some ways feel "foreign."

The next day, over BBQ at Sonny's in Brunswick, Georgia, we tuned in on a conversation at the adjacent booth. It was much cruder than what I had been listening to on the radio. Like the stuff you hear from Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. And of course from Donald Trump, Snide, borderline racist stuff stemming from a deep desire to delegitimatize Obama and thereby erase him from the history books.

Back in the car I told Rona about what I had been tuned in to the night before. She said something seemingly shocking I hadn't previously heard or read.

"I can relate to that cultural core business. At his core, Barack Obama doesn't feel American.

"What?" I exploded, "Have you gone over to the other side? Or worse?"

"Calm down and let me finish," I took a deep breath and slowed the car so as not to get into an accident. "Of course he's a natural-born American, just like the Constitution requires; but a very different kind than all our other presidents. I think his 'problem.'" she made air quotation marks, "is that though he was born in America, he received much of his early education in a non-American school in Indonesia. For four years between the ages of 6 and 10.

"I wonder," Rona continued, "what kind of American history he learned as a young boy. Did he learn, like children who go to elementary school in the United States, about our national history and myths? You know, about the Declaration of Independence; forgive me, the Boston Tea Party; Bunker Hill; George Washington and the cherry tree; and Abraham Lincoln and the log cabin? When did he learn the National Anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance? Did he have to memorize the Gettysburg Address? In other words, did he received the kind of indoctrination, or if you prefer--socialization--as a child we did, or did he learn it as a young adult?

"Even if a lot of the 'history' we were taught was as much patriotic myth as factual, still it was what was instilled in us at a very early age and can be called, as the women from that radio show, our core culture. it's deeply rooted in us and one of the few things that unites us as a people. Flawed as it may be as history, it contributes to forming our national consciousness."

"Interesting," I said.

"I say this not to discredit him or raise questions about his love for America or his patriotism but because unless he got a childhood version of the education all native-born Americans receive, he by definition is different. In a sense he's more like an immigrant who learned these things later in life. And this reality, more than his birth certificate, may be why people have disquieting feelings about him."

"You could be right. This isn't birther stuff . . ."

"The hard core ones are simply crazy and incapable of not hating him."

". . . but it could explain why the non-crazy ones, and others who are not obsessed about his origins, feel uneasy about him."

"Mind you," Rona continued, "In spite of this, the kind of background he has is just what we need now in our president. Like it or not we live in a globalized world with special insights needed to help us negotiate new relationships, especially with Islamic countries. He gets it and is also smart enough to know the history, the key players, and hopefully has the right diplomatic touch to change the nature of some of our international relationships."

"We both felt that when we became aware of him back in 2007."

"It's the good news and the bad news. The bad--it presents very complicated political problems for him at a time when most Americans feel we are losing our dominant place in the world and are looking for someone to blame or for simple explanations for our troubles. Obama, for them, is the perfect scapegoat. The good news, of course, if that if he and we and the world get lucky, he might turn out to be a game-changer."

"All good points," I said. "Let's see what else I hear on Red Eye later tonight and at the next BBQ joint up in North Carolina."