Americans uniquely broad-minded? Like George Bush, Sarah Palin, certain evangelical Christians, or the proponents of the 'War on Terror', for example?
The way in which this article plays upon the myth of the Founding Fathers and extrapolates from a few highly gifted and generous-minded individuals to the 'we' of every (legal) inhabitant of the country is, frankly, cheap, and assumes a naive and sentimental reader. Not to mention the arrogant rhetoric - yes, even if Obama said it first - of claiming that 'only in America could a majority of voters see a person who is so unlike them...as a fellow citizen who's capable of leading them.' How many Americans are, like Obama, of African origin? Is it really so few? How many of the leading figures in the public sphere went to Harvard? Obama is, as few would wish to deny, an exceptional individual. But what, honestly, does he really show about the supposed 'national imagination'? Did Walt Whitman have a 'national imagination'? Did T.S. Eliot, Henry James, or even Mark Twain?
It is really worrying that such nationalistic assertions implying an American superiority which, especially given the state of the world at the moment, it is no way justified in claiming, are still propagated in serious publications.
And I'd like to see how long it takes before the USA gets a female President.
Will Act for Food
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Obama hasn't indicated that he thinks of the arts in quite these sweeping terms; you won't find a bullet point in his arts platform that reads "American Creativity Will Make Us More Engaged and Liberate Us From the Marketers, Even as It Continues to Wear Away Our Prejudices." But if you seek a final sign that he understands how the arts can unite and inspire—and if the habit of hope instilled by the Obama campaign has carried over to the early days of the Obama presidency—you might take heart from a revealing episode on election night. At the pivotal moment of his victory speech, with the whole world watching, he didn't turn to Scripture, or the Founders, or any of the other places where you'd expect a politician to turn for a resonant allusion. When he said, "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America," he was riffing on a Sam Cooke song.
© 2009
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