This diary acknowledges that tribalism and race are playing big parts in this year's presidential election. There are Americans who are deeply threatened and, because they are threatened, they are willing to remain both ignorant of facts and spread false information to reinforce the ignorance of others.
This diary traces the bloodlines of four white tribes to create a full-blooded American.
This full-blooded American, in this diary, declares a need for a public response to America's problems. Two forces in politics fight against this: the politics of rewards for individual success and the American Incumbent Party.
Read Kathleen Parker's article "Getting Bubba."
http://jewishworldreview.com/...
Read Glenn Greenwald's commentary on Parker's article and the standards of the Washington Post. This includes commentary on the Obama-Edwards alliance and Parker's reaction (think "pretty boys" and you can guess the rest).
"High Standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed Page" May 17, 2008
http://www.salon.com/...
Read DHinMI's Dailykos diary about Tom Davis' memo to Republicans about their electoral chances this year. Within the memo itself, and there is a link in the diary, is perceptive commentary on the Democratic Party's divide between its cultural and economic bases.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
In a nutshell, Parker defends people who don't see Obama as a "full-blooded American." She is a current mouthpiece for a tradition of nativism in American politics, one that believes those who have been here the longest not only should be in charge but also deserve to be in charge. Greenwald, as might be expected by anyone familiar with his work, is appalled by this and the fact that the Washington Post, a newspaper corporation that is no longer like the one that led the country's news organizations on Watergate, spreads this thinking. DHinMI's diary discusses Davis' criticism of Republicans who will not change the Republican brand though it needs, for them, severe change while also noting the need for a bridge between the factions in the Democratic Party, a bridge that must be built, in part, by both of the Clintons.
I am the product of four white tribes that will be identified as the Ha family, the Hu family, the C family and the V family.
The Ha family left the English midlands and came to Maryland in the early 1650s and settled in the Puritan Providence area that later became Annapolis. There is some evidence, based on family names, that they trace to the Angles/Saxons invasions of England. The Ha family moved to Pennsylvania in the 1700s where they married Germans (including a representative of a group that had, at the urging of their minister, virtually emptied a Palatinate town in 1707), Welsh and a descendant of an English-Mohawk marriage. Family members fought in Washington's army but were losers in the post-war argument over which state, Connecticut or Pennsylvania, controlled the local government. Generation by generation movement landed the family in the Sepo area near Lewiston, Illinois, before the Civil War. This family provided soldiers to the Union including a sergeant in Sherman's army that marched across Georgia and into the Carolinas.
The Hu family was Scots-Irish and immigrated to near Staunton, Virginia, in the 1700s. There is some evidence that members of the family fought in Nathaniel Greene's army during the Revolutionary War. Generation by generation movement landed the family in the Bernadotte area near Lewiston, Illinois (pronounced "Burney-dot" by locals in an example of Illinois regionalism to "out" nonnatives; just about any town in Illinois with a French name is willfully mispronounced by locals in a kind of "one of us" test; "Bourbonnais" is pronounced "Bore-bone-iss" for example.). Family members "went south" for the Civil War; one returning veteran named my great-grandfather after two Confederate generals though, despite what Harper Lee said in To Kill a Mockingbird, it did not turn him into a slow, steady drinker.
Post-Civil War Lewiston was divided into North/South settlements. The town is where the Illinois and Spoon Rivers join and is best known as the site of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_River_Anthology). Despite deep cultural differences (the Ha were Republicans and the Hu Democrats), my steady, deeply-religious, pillar-of-the-Congregational Church but secret Mason grandfather married my red-haired, firey-tempered grandmother. This union produced my mother and her sister, both born in Galesburg. His service as a Judge Advocate reserve officer in World War II brought them to California.
The C family came to New England in the mid-1600s and religious differences sent them into the Vermont foothills. This family came from Norwich and London. Family names and economic position in England would indicate Norman, and thus Norse-French, background. The fact that the family stayed in Vermont during and after the Revolution would indicate "rebel" tendencies but by the 1870s they were losers to the McCormick Reaper agricultural revolution ("Don't Fear the Reaper" was a McCormick advertisement), the family left Vermont like many other small farmers for Montana and the State of Washington. My grandfather went into the laundry business in Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
The V family came to Seattle, Washington, in 1893 by way of my Norwegian great-grandfather's fishing boat. It was a one-way trip to take advantage of a booming economy among Scandinavian immigrants. In Seattle, he met and married a Swedish girl who had come through Ellis Island soon after it opened and had promptly taken the Great Northern Railroad, once it was completed, to Seattle. Perhaps in a fit of pique, great-grandfather dropped his family name (Lars' son; Larson) and adopted the name of his hometown, Vick.
My grandfather and grandmother met and married in Seattle, bringing together Nordic background after hundreds of years of division. I merely note the fact that my father returned to Norwich as a member of the Army Air Corps in World War II, survived a coin-flip that would have caused him to die flying into a Norwegian mountain and earned his Distinguished Flying Cross as a B-24 navigator while bombing a small Palatinate town on Christmas Eve, 1944.
My father and mother met in Los Angeles. I am a native Californian. I am about as white as an American can be at the same time as I can trace family in America back far enough to link to family before white people were here. I married a woman of Spanish and Russian background and we have produced two daughters, both of whom will add more to America than they will take out. My family is American enough to have been here before the Revolution and they fought on the right side. I'm American enough to have veterans on both sides of the Civil War. My father was a decorated combat veteran of World War II.
I give permission to Barack Obama to be President of the United States and change the way we do things. I give permission to the Democratic Party to wrest power from the decaying failure of the Bush presidency and its allies, the Republican Party, and change the way it exemplifies leadership by promoting action and sacrifice among the citizenry and not just elect politicians. I give permission to John Edwards to seek economic redress for the poor in America. May he be considered for the position of Attorney General, as well, to help reinstate the rule of law in America as well as insure voting rights for all. I give permission to Al Gore to seek influence in American politics that will create laws, institutions and businesses dedicated to constructing a healthy economy. I give permission to Jim Webb to do the right thing for our veterans and savagely criticize McCain if he won't come on board. I give permission to the western Governors to lead their states to the Democratic side, especially Napolitano. Just because he's from Arizona shouldn't give him a free ride. And may the Latino vote help win the electoral votes of at least New Mexico and Colorado.
The Republican Party markets itself in a way that says if an American has any form of economic success, that American should vote Republican to protect that success from some kind of others that would take it away and give it to those who don't deserve it. This marketing ploy must be crushed once and for all. The Incumbent Party, a Party dedicated to the idea that certain people deserve to have power in America and others do not, a Party that has adherents in both major political parties and is promoted by and protected by what is known as the mainstream media, needs to be defeated. Government must become optimistic again and unafraid of its own citizens including those who aren't "full-blooded."