In this country, growing up, being educated, living in certain environments, you develop certain characteristics. I'd say they’re cultural. I'd say for Barack Obama to go into blue collar neighborhoods in Pennsylvania is, for him, like going into a different culture. So of course it seems a bit foreign to him. And of course he seems a bit foreign to people there, not just because of the color of his skin, but because of his accent and his bearing.
Today, Maureen Dowd weighed in, stamping her feet and shrilly proclaiming her Irish working class roots. But she should stop and think: she’s grown enough away from those roots to distinguish her views from her family’s in her column on numerous occasions. And when I’ve heard her on the radio, she hasn’t sounded like she comes from South Boston, or the D.C. equivalent. People who haven’t left those areas still sound like they come from them.
So Barack hasn’t got an acting coach. Maybe Hillary does. She sounded a bit black when speaking in a black church, a bit white southern in the south. Now she sounds blue-collar. But mostly she sounds Wellesley and governing class Washington D.C.
I grew up in an upper middle class family in New York City. My father was a physician, my mother a graduate of Barnard, a Seven Sisters college. THEIR parents were blue collar, or close to it. My father’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and Austria in the early twentieth century. My grandmother came from a shtetl. She carried on conversations with God and spent a lot of her time in the kitchen making latkes and gefilte fish, brisket and homentashen, chicken soup with matzoh balls, etc. etc., depending on the season. My grandfather came from a city in Poland where he had been a printer. He left to avoid service in the tsar’s army. Not only was he a Jew, he was a socialist, forever proclaiming the rights of the little guy to the munificence of the U.S. My grandmother learned to read and write as an adult in the United States. In her beloved America.
Like many immigrant families, they had aspirations for their children, socialism not withstanding. These aspirations were cultural. My grandparents were very proud, boastful even, of my father’s academic achievements. My grandmother used to brag that he’d come right home from school and sit by the window doing his homework. They had shrines to his medals, to his day as child mayor of New York, whatever. My father told me different stories: for instance, about his friends and him planting tins with fireworks under trolley car wheels and running like hell, hoping they might derail one (I don’t think they ever did). My father’s sisters went to college, too, and “married well:” one, a dentist, one, an interior architect who “did” the big new renovation of Macy’s basement in I guess the 1950s.
My grandfather managed to move the family from St. Ann’s Avenue to The Grand Concourse. Everyone still hung their laundry on lines that ran from apartment to apartment and still shouted out the windows to people on the street, still clustered in the courtyard to gossip, still brought out folding chairs to enjoy the evening air on hot days, and still argued over pennies with local shopkeepers. My grandfather still filled the apartment with his cigar smoke, still made farmer’s cheese, pot cheese as they called it, which emitted a smell he loved and I hated. He still shouted for my grandmother from whatever room he was in: “Dontcha! Dontcha! Get me more whatever.” They spoke Yiddish more than they spoke English. But still, it was a step up they were very proud of.
My mother’s family seemed to me growing up a little more, shall I say, controlled . My mother’s father also was a printer and at one time he published a small-town newspaper. My grandmother was a copyreader. Maybe they weren’t more “elite.” Maybe they were just born and bread northeasterners of non-Jewish, non-southern European ancestry. My grandfather’s family was from upstate New York, or at least some of it was. They were Protestant, American Baptist, if I’m not mistaken. My grandmother’s family was from NYC, most of them Irish Catholic. My grandfather’s family had been in the country since the 1700’s, most of my mother’s from a century later. They belonged. But even they, Irish Catholic and Wasp: they were two cultures, too. Certainly two religious traditions. My grandmother was banned from the Catholic church for not agreeing to have her children raised Catholic because my grandfather wouldn’t stand for it. At some point, I'm told, a lady came around and suggested the kids go to the Episcopal church, and they did. And four acquired an Episcopal identity while one became Catholic as her mother had been. Who knows what dynamics went into that? My mother and her siblings all went to college, and it was the education level and life in a NYC that they found magical that I think my parents had in common. They both wore their shiny new upper middle classness, pervaded by strong intellectual and arty streaks with pride.
Most people who like my parents are products, in one way or another, of their parents’ valuing education and upward mobility (cultural values, by the way) have sloughed off their blue-collarness to fit into their new circumstances. My father I know made a great effort to sound educated, to sound like people he admired, and not to sound like a Bronx Jew. My mother must have to some, though a lesser extent, made the same effort. I know my aunts had a bit more I don’t know, eastern not-so-classy left in their speech.
My parents wanted me to reflect their values. It was easier for me than for them, because they had become models for me. Not all my peers had such parents, though, so in my high school, a public high school admission for which was by examination, we had required speech classes in which the teachers strove to wipe out the last remnants of uneducated New York we might reveal when we talked: no more terlet for toilet or Oi for I or Joisey for Jersey.
Education and the accompanying polishing and sometimes professions like lawyer and doctor represented success, status, the attainment of the American Dream: the result of hard work, for many blue collar familes in New York. This is Barack Obama, too. Nothing wrong with it. The best education, not big cars, was the status symbol he worked hard for and acquired.
A good thing, education, if you pay attention while you’re getting it. It really does broaden your horizons, teach you to think critically, teach you to dream. And actually, it often nurtures curiosity and the ability to see past your own elitism, if that's what you want to call it. It teaches you to value the complexities and varieties of the world, to learn about people different from yourself, to recognize your own good fortune and seek to share it. If you will, it makes comprehensible and valuable cultural relativism.
Our country has a perverse distaste for “intellectuals” today. In reaction to this distaste--prejudice, actually--some highly educated folks try to act “regular.” Others withdraw into academic environments where they cut themselves off from the ebb and flow of other people’s lives, where they hoard their ideas and keep refining them and refining them so they have little to do with the mess that is our world.
Obama has not done this. Obama’s sheen is the product of his environment; his interest in service is, too. His decency is what people should be measuring.
I’m a generation older than Obama. I was in college in the first half of the 1960s. Service was something people like me were told we owed because of the advantages we were lucky enough to have, hard work notwithstanding. People flocked to the Peace Corps. People tutored in inner city schools. People went into government. Obviously not everyone, but it was a fairly broadly shared ideal. Obama seems to be a throwback to our generation in that he shares this.
I went into the Peace Corps. Talk about living in a different culture. Interestingly, we were told in our training program not to “go native,” but to be ourselves, maintain our own values and at the same time to be open to the values we would encounter, not to challenge them. To live in the culture, but not become of it. Which is what most of us did. I was “upcountry” in Uganda. There were a handful of Brits and a handful of us. We were objects of great curiosity, but with time, we made friends and moved easily among the people we lived with. And they among us. There was shared humanity. We learned people there could be nasty as well as nice, that they shared many of the same concerns we did, that they, too, were compassionate. That they, too, had ambitions, though sometimes different from ours. We learned they thought some things about our culture were really nutty. Later on I became a social worker. I worked for a number of years as a case manager for people with developmental disabilities and their families in Missouri. A lot of my clients were blue collar, or were on welfare. I went into their homes. I never tried not to be me. They never tried not to be them. We learned from each other.
Barack doesn’t have to pretend he is what he is not. What he is as a human being is what people will respond to: does he have empathy? Can he accept people on their own terms? Can he value and respect them? Can he listen? Can he understand their problems? Can he offer hope?
We all talk to different people differently. If I were addressing fundraisers, I’d talk differently from how I talked to my kids, the lady across the street, or my doctor. In San Francisco, Obama sought to connect with his upper class, intellectual audience to raise money (and maybe some understanding). We have different motives in deciding how we talk to people. Being like Obama doesn't mean he has no connection to a blue collar past. It's that his style, his manner now isn't. It doesn't mean he doesn't understand or relate. Is Hillary putting on blue collar because she doesn't know who she is?
Who would judge a man by a single word? Or his decency by his style?
Enough with this elitism bit. Enough with the “bitter” bit. What kind of person is Obama? What kind of person is Hillary? Or McCain, for that matter. What's our best guess about their abilities to lead our country out of the morass it is currently in.