Born in the U.S.A.

The so-called "birther" movement, which aims to prove that President Obama was not born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president, has absolutely no foundation in fact or common sense, but it says something rather interesting about its proponents' concept of Americanism.

The issue of where Obama was born is not what this is really about. And it's not even really about the blackness of Obama's skin. In fact, Obama is not "black" at all in many ways but is rather something far deeper and far more threatening to reactionaries.

"Black", as classically understood in our culture, means "African-American". Blacks, despite their persecution, are more "American" than nearly any other group that survives on this continent.

Blacks have been in America from the beginning, they speak English, they are largely Protestant; aside from the hue of their skin they have nearly everything in common with "Americans" as that term is understood by the reactionary right.

Blacks who descend from slaves have been in this country for centuries, far longer than my (Irish and German) people and nearly all other white ethnic groups. If a descendant of a slave had been elected president , I actually think that the reactionaries would be far less upset.

Consider that before Obama we had only one president out of 43 who was not a white male Protestant descending from Anglo-Saxons. Kennedy broke that formula with his lack of English blood and his Catholicism. And there were millions of Americans who did not like it one bit.

Staying in 1960 for a moment, let's think about Martin Luther King. He was black, as classically understood; a true African-American. When Kennedy was elected president that year, he was a third generation American. When King was arrested for a sit-in protest that same year, he was at least an eighth-generation American.

But unlike Martin Luther King, Barack Hussein Obama has very little "American" pedigree. Once whites could look past pigment, they realized that African-Americans were about as "American" as it gets. But even for the relatively enlightened, Obama does not fit that mold.

Obama, the Kansan Kenyan who came to Chicago by way of Hawaii via Indonesia, does not fit the previous definition of "black". Obama's father was NOT an African-American; he was an African. Obama is not black if "black" is understood to exclude other identities. Obama is a little bit of everything.

Obama's election was revolutionary not just because of his dark skin, but because he truly is post-racial. He is white. He is black. He has Christian roots. He has Muslim roots. One grandfather was an African tribesman. The other fought in Patton's army. Attempting to describe Obama's identity with a single word or phrase is a futile enterprise.

And that goes to the heart of the reactionaries' problem: they do not truly embrace the cosmopolitan ideal of the United States when they are confronted with that cosmopolitanism all crammed into the single canvas of a man who has become perhaps the most popular person on Earth.

So they argue that he is an other, because to be perfectly honest, he is if one has a 19th-century sense of what makes one an "American". So they say Obama is from the outer-sphere, that he is a pretender to the throne, an illegal immigrant who's taking a job away from a "real" American. It's actually not surprising that this "issue" has come to the fore.

In fact, I'm mostly surprised that these people didn't surface in greater numbers during the campaign. There is, of course, a disquieting aspect to this whole charade. These people can be dismissed as cranks, but it is from precisely this type of crowd and mentality that assassins are culled.

But perhaps the saddest thing is that some folks just can't take "Yes" for an answer. These are precisely the chest-thumping, crotch-grabbing, frothing jingoists who insist on constantly reminding all within earshot of America's superiority to all else. So now that Obama has proven that the dream is still real, why are they so upset about it?

Because some people don't want dreams to come true. There are two types of people to steer clear of in this world. One is the type that insists that he or she can impose his or her own dream onto other people for their own good. The second is the type that resents others when their dreams come true.