Legal Commentary

McCain versus Obama: "placelessness," faith, and dreams

By Beldar

Peggy Noonan wrote an op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled The End of Placeness. Although more often lately I have found myself disagreeing with her political observations, I remain a fan of her prose, in part because it has a vivid and authentically consistent voice even on the printed page. And she herself is sensitive to such things, as yesterday's piece reflects when she describes the attending "a gathering a few weeks ago for an aged Southern sage":

Even as an outsider, you knew them. They were Mississippi Delta people ? Mizz-izz-DEHLT people ? and the sense of placeness they brought into the room with them was sweet to me. It allowed you to know them, in the same way that at a gathering of, say, Irish Catholics from the suburbs of Boston, you would be able to know them, pick up who they are, with your American antennae.

She's not talking only of dialects and accents and language, but more broadly of local cultures. She laments the modern flattening down of such distinctive indicators of people's distinct local roots. Of how this connects to this year's presidential nominees, she writes:

Messrs. Obama and McCain are not from a place, but from an experience. Mr. McCain of course was a Navy brat. He bounced around, as members of the families of our military must, and wound up for a time in the suburbs of Washington. Mr. Obama's mother was somewhat itinerant, in search of different climes. He was born in Hawaii, which Americans on the continent don't experience so much as a state as a destination, a place of physical beauty and singular culture. You go there to escape and enjoy. Then his great circling commenced: Indonesia, back to Hawaii, on to the western coast of America, then to the eastern coast, New York and Cambridge. He circled the continent, entering it, if you will, in Chicago, where he settled in his 30s.

The lack of placeness with both candidates contributes to a sense of their disjointedness, their floatingness....

I think she's half-right here, or rather, that her observation is only wholly true with respect to one of the nominees. About the other nominee, in the most important way, she's wrong. And it's the part she's wrong about with one candidate, along with what she's wholly right about with the other, that actually matter a great deal in this election.

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on August 16, 2008 (boomark / email).