No man is an island, entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,
As well as if promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery or a borrowing of misery,
As though we are not miserable enough of ourselves
    but must fetch in more from the next house,
In taking upon us the misery of our neighbors.

John Donne, Meditation XVII

I heard Barack Obama live, at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC, two years ago.  I was in the Ballroom of the Washington Hilton with a bunch of hardened political junkies, aging hippies, reformers and bloggers, not that these are hardened categories.  Lunch was over: people flowed in from every door until every inch of wall space was occupied.  Persons who need a lot of personal space would not have been happy in the crush.  Obama opened his mouth and started to tell us stories.  No pin would have dared to drop, and if one did, nobody would have paid it any attention.  There were no applause lines, as I recall, and no applause once he launched into the meat of his address.  When he finished, silence for perhaps an eternity, or perhaps 10 seconds.  Who knew?

I thought about entitling this little piece The Rhetoric of Narrative, but I may save that for another entry.  Connectivity through narrative is probably what this is/will be about.  I think feeling connected is very important to our President-I read this in his books and in his speeches.  And I'm risking hubris to muse upon why this is so important to him.  A tentative thesis is that outsider status makes a person either alienated or crave community, and I would suggest that the second alternative is the choice Obama has made.

I think Obama seeks to make both linear (i.e. historical) and lateral connections, and he does this at levels from the personal on outward.  I think I'll hold off on his use of history for a bit, if no one objects, and think more about his forging of community, though the two are interrelated to a point where separating them for discussion's sake doesn't really do justice.  

MHO, Obama is unique among public personages in having ties to so many communities deeply suspicious of each other.  I remember early in the campaign Bozos (mainly white Bozos) wondering if he was black enough.  How does one establish roots of any kind when one lives in so many different places, and when the choice of place is not one's own. It wasn't just the geographic mobility  which was unusual:  it was the age at which it was experienced.  The only comparable experience might be children of the military--yet there's a similarity base to base which makes the constant change a little less disorienting, I think.

A few years ago, the New York Times published a series called Class Matters, and it is still available online.  I use it in a course I teach on Class and Culture in America.  (I'm being even more oblique than usual, but bear with me-or not).  One of the sections which caught the class's interest the most was Day Eight-the "Relo Class"...which told the story of the Link family (ironic name there), at that time of Alpharetta, Georgia.  The narrative was about the endless community hopping which marks the career path of the upwardly mobile...belonging everywhere, belonging nowhere.  The Links had no links.  It turns out that one of my students had lived in Alpharetta-and in six other communities and was currently living in Connecticut.  He was nineteen years old.  I asked him how he liked it.  He hated it.

Barack Obama: of Hawaii-of Kansas-of Indonesia-of Chicago-of California--of Cambridge- of the White Community-of the Black Community-out of Kenya-out of Ireland-attached to the Christian Tradition-attached to the Muslim tradition.  It makes the head spin.  I haven't heard him tell an Irish tale, but everything else appears somewhere in his writings or speeches.  His personal story relies so much on tradition that I catch a special reliance upon and affection for persons a generation or more older than he is.  I resonate with this as the grandson of Swedish immigrants who were geographically mobile but rooted in a settled tradition to a far greater degree than their grandchildren are.  That Washington noon he spoke about a one hundred and two year old woman who came out to see him, and how honored he felt by that.  One of the great themes of the Conference was the beating back of threats to Social Security-one of Josh's great causes.  Obama didn't cite statistics-Tom Harkin and others did that.  Obama told us a story about a magnificent woman of one hundred and two who deserved better of us... of the future senior citizens who would be equally worthy.

One thing I've also noted is that he increasingly uses language of the grandparents generation-or at least language my grandparents would have been comfortable with.  I listened to the Cairo Speech, and out of it the phrase "hateful and ignorant" burrowed direct into my brain.  Perhaps the reason was that I heard that phrase growing up more than once.  What a difference there is between "Axis of Evil" and "hateful and ignorant".  The first could have been written by any six figure Madison Avenue Mogul: the second could have been said by any granny in any of the United States-the language of the slogan is met by the language of the people and bested by it.  

Now my grandmother's racial ideas weren't all that different from those of Obama's grandmother.  But she would never allow us to use the N word in her house.  That was hateful and ignorant.  The Bozo Brethren in Media Land (the Cisterns too) (groan), immediately tried to make this yet another code in replacement of the War of Terror.  But I think they really underestimate Obama's subtlety... "hateful and ignorant" describes a type of human behavior applicable to individuals of any religious or national group.  The killing of Dr. Tiller was "hateful"-Bill O'Reilly's use of "Tiller Baby Killer" was hateful and ignorant.  I expect to hear the President  condemning behavior in granny language again and again.  The slaying at the Holocaust Memorial testifies to the hateful ignorance of radicals on the right.  And so it goes.

And so it goes with me too.  Too many points doth a boring blog make, and I've probably put all but the hardiest to sleep.  One last thing-a teaser to something I expect I'll write about later, and probably get thwacked for when I do.  At the core of connectivity is empathy, about which George Lakoff wrote some interesting words at Huffington Post.  I don't know if anyone else has drawn attention to this, I suspect I'm late to the game.   I was grieved when Obama backed away from this a bit, and I sent a note to Whitehouse.gov to let some minion know that I want empathetic judges.  More empathy, and less irrationality in the penal system--if it ain't broke don't fix it, but if it is broke, fix it quick--like Dickday suggests.