From a profile of Senator Barack Obama in the latest (05/07/07) New Yorker, here's an excerpt dealing with Sen. Obama's father who left his wife and son, eventually returning to Kenya to work in the government.
Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility--the belief that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing--all are part of the American dream of moving west, first from the old country to America, then from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the open central plains and on to the Pacific. But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness. When Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time and learned how his father's life had turned out--how he had destroyed his (government) career by imagining that old tribalisms were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could rise above the past and change his society by sheer force of belief--Obama's aunt told him that his father had never understood that, as she put it, "if everyone is family, no one is family." Obama found this striking enough so that he repeated it later on (in his book), in italics: If everyone is family, no one is family.
Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people, and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, is seems only a natural progression.
Contrast the statement of Senator Obama's aunt, "If everyone is family, no one is family," with the title of Sen. Hillary Clinton's book on childrearing, It Takes a Village. Joe Sobran's response to Sen. Clinton's book was something like, "In the city, the village is a gang."
At least on the issue of family policy, Senators Obama and Clinton seem to be poles apart.
