Levelheaded Bob 7-20-08

Obama, the Culture Expert

I have mixed feelings about Barack Obama, and it is causing me to have to evaluate him from several perspectives.  I don’t dislike him.  His statesmanship is inspiring, but I am not easily taken in by the words of men.  I feel that many career politicians are moved to say anything, and appeal to anyone in order to become the leader of the strongest nation in the world.  I have to always question their sincerity and nobility.  It is not true that anyone can become president of the United States.  There is a price one pays to become a credible piece in the chess game of power.  That doesn’t mean that they can’t still have their own mind outside of the influences that helped them gain the vision of power.  They are basically themselves, pandering to our own selfish agendas while blindly and sometimes intentionally steering clear of involvement in a less visible New World agenda.  A few leaders have actually known exactly what they were doing and indeed have been recruited to move our nation in the direction of One World philosophy.  However, in my opinion, these leaders were doing this because they were raised in or initiated into this possibly sinister belief system.  They believe to their souls that this direction is the best for this country and the world.  Obama has all the ingredients of the One World philosophy (whose model could be negative or positive).  He is a mixture of the extremes of the many races of this world, and was raised outside of the continental U.S. until his manhood.  He is multicultural, having had exposure to peoples, religions, and customs outside of his U.S. birthright.

     In some ways, he is out of touch with American mainlanders.  I heard him recently making light of American’s not possessing broader cultural skills.  He rightly pointed out that Europeans tend to speak multiple languages, and joked that American’s only know trite foreign phrases.  I would have thought that he of all people would not have so wrongly stereotyped the American people, since he himself is so deeply diverse.  I also saw this same attitude toward his stereotypical view and comments about Pennsylvanian’s ‘clinging to guns and religion’.  I have found that those left of center (or foreign to the U.S.) have a Hollywood image of mainstream America.  They view them as ‘cowboys’ and ‘rednecks’.  This conjures up other old stereotypes associated with Southern dialects, white supremacy, gun-toting hillbillies, trailer park inhabitants, and religious hypocrites.

     Obama need only look at a map to find the answer to why Europeans are mostly multi-lingual.  In short, the most obvious reason is the fact that these smaller countries and republics in Europe border in clusters around each other, making culture and language more homogenous.  Our nation of many immigrants from Europe have a broad border with Canada (English and French) separated by sparsely populated vast wilderness and the inland seas of the Great Lakes to the north, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to the east and west yielding only the language of the sea, while a slender border of a Spanish speaking country that we had a history of war with exists to our southwest.  Obama is incorrect that American’s do not have such a rich language culture.  Many Americans on the southwestern border are very familiar with Spanish culture and indeed speak the language or understand it beyond trite phrases.  America, love it or hate it was initially influenced and established by mostly English speaking Caucasian men.  It seems almost criminal to our presently more diverse culture to even utter such sacrilege within our current politically correct nation, but nation building has to start somewhere.  Today, we tend to be apologetic for such a English speaking, White foundation.

     I was raised in a community that was mostly German Lutheran, though I am neither of Germanic descent nor of the Lutheran faith.  Until WWll, some church sermons were still delivered in the German language within my community.  These U.S. Germans voluntarily disenfranchised themselves at this time from the Fatherland and their native tongue to promote the national language of the United States and make clear their allegiance.  That unifying language was that of our founding fathers, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.  You hear a similar story from most Americans who came from somewhere else be they Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, German, Spanish and others who sacrificed their native languages to adopt the official unifying language of English.  Prideful, and righteously so, many of those immigrants kept their native languages alive within their families, communities, and neighborhoods.  Obama need not chastise those American’s who did not have the ‘fortune’ to integrate culturally, nor does he need to apologize for his ignorance of mainland American culture.  He was ill informed, due simply to the fact that he was raised outside of mainstream America.

     I heard one news network state that Obama had to “learn how to be a black man in America” upon his arrival to the mainland.  As a white guy in America, I will not pretend to know what that exactly means, but I will take a swat at it.  Barack’s father was an African, not an African-American.  I believe he was a Kenyan to be specific.  I am also supposing that his father and his decedents had not suffered slavery as most blacks in America could rightly claim of their own heritage.  Barack’s mother, being white, makes him half Caucasian in today’s America.  Some blacks and whites might argue that being a little black makes you all black even in a slightly less colorblind age.  I have never understood this type of mass social degradation that acknowledges purity to one race, while all others are deemed something less.  It is as if anything less than pure clear water is somehow contaminated.  I have witnessed it in all cultures but purity tends to lean toward whoever has the numerical advantage.  U.S. Blacks having been robbed of their culture and forced in to several hundred years of slavery and servitude, bought into this nonsense by no fault of their own.  I have long thought that some relics of the Civil Rights movement, who were far inferior to Martin Luther King in influence, would identify Obama as an Uncle Tom.  I said this in earlier articles, which predate Jesse Jackson’s wanting to castrate Barack for his difference in views concerning the black community.  Please note that castration and lynching were two horrifically cruel and deadly acts attributed historically to white violence toward blacks.  This makes Reverend Jackson’s remarks even more incredibly insensitive.  Imagine if the same castration comment had been made by a white man about Obama.  It would have been unforgivable.  To some blacks, Barack seems like a foreigner himself, not having truly shared in their struggle.  In many ways this view may be justified.  As an independent conservative, I worry more about far left influences on Barack that have left him so stereotypically opinionated about many Americans.  These influences may have started prior to his birth when his mother and father (of different cultures) met in a Russian language class while attending college.  What was their mutual interest in the Russian language?  At this time, we were smack dab in the middle of the Cold War.  Did they want to represent their respective countries as future diplomats?  Were they curious about the language of our adversary?  Or, might they have been communist sympathizers, socialists, Marxist or just plain anti-establishment?

     I know a lot about Obama the college student, attorney, and a little bit about Obama the politician.  The Good Book says that a child’s development is pretty much cast by the age of seven.  I want to know more about Obama the child, the influence of his parents, grand parents, and step father.  How did they help mold the mind of this man who could very well become the leader of the free world?  Obama is a brilliant man who says he stands for change.  Once I see a change in his somewhat canted view of many Americans and a willingness to understand their religious beliefs and interpretations of basic inalienable rights, than perhaps I won’t be suspicious of his ‘flavor’ of change.  If he can be that big to change in his opinion about much of the American people, than I can seriously contemplate him being able to connect with the other half of the citizens of the U.S.  We need a president who speaks across party lines, and to all Americans; not just the majority of those who show up to vote at the polls or to what ever side the electorate swings.

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