My honors English teacher in my junior year of high school used to say that there are three themes in American literature: individualism, sense of place, and the American dream. He said this to a class with a large contingent of Navy brats, including me, including many (though not me) whose only sense of the place in which they lived was that they wouldn’t be there much longer and didn’t particularly want to be. (The town in which, through my parents’ determination, I did the majority of my growing up is a nice town in a beautiful part of the country; but at the time, anyway, it wasn’t the kind of place many of my teenage comrades found all that exciting.) I have long thought of John McCain primarily as a counterpart to my father: a Navy pilot, an officer and a gentleman. For whatever reason, I haven’t thought of him as a counterpart of my own, though from a different generation: a Navy brat. And yet, he was and is that, too; he too knows what it means to grow up in a world where home is not a place, but an institution and a people.Peggy Noonan picked up on this, and on the fact that Barack Obama similarly grew up in a variety of places, in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “The End of Placeness”. She’s right that sense of place, which my old English teacher considered such an important American theme, is disappearing; the Rev. Dr. Craig Barnes, of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Shadyside Presbyterian Church, has had some wise and thoughtful things to say on this. As the Rev. Dr. Barnes puts it, before the GI Bill and the rise of American prosperity following WW II, most Americans were Settlers, people who put down roots in a particular place and stayed there (and settled for whatever way of life they had there); those who didn’t were mistrusted. With the GI Bill and the beginnings of modern suburbia, a new generation of Exiles began (exiles being people who know where home is but don’t live there; he cites as an example his own family, which always went “home for Christmas” from their suburban life to the tobacco farm in North Carolina). Now, as he says, Exiles are giving way increasingly to Nomads: people (primarily Gen X and younger) who are equally at home everywhere because they aren’t really at home anywhere. It’s a significant issue for those of us who are pastors, though not everyone has realized it yet.Having this emerging reality mirrored in our presidential candidates is a strange thing, and I can understand Noonan’s reaction to it. That said, as Beldar points out, they mirror this very differently; though this fact is tangential to Noonan’s point, it’s nevertheless significant.I suspect part of Sen. Obama’s appeal to young voters during the primaries (which seems to be fading somewhat) is that his rootlessness, though an extreme form, is a familar type among those of my generation and younger; while few of us had mothers who married Africans and Indonesians and moved us to another continent, the story’s outline is familiar:
Obama, by contrast, can only remember meeting his father once, briefly, when he was 10, and he never met his paternal grandfather at all. They had no presence in Barack Obama’s life while he was growing up; they were only dreams and stories and faded photos, with an occasional letter. . . .While Obama at least had a long-term relationship with his paternal grandparents, even that came at the expense of being effectively abandoned to their care by his own mother—hardly an ideal situation. Indeed, the adults around young Obama seemed in his book to be tied to nowhere and nothing—and outside of their immediate family (and sometimes not even that), to nobody. Obama was both a literal and figurative “step-child.”
Of him it may truly be said, as Noonan does, that he is “not from a place, but from an experience”—and from an all too common experience among younger folks these days: the experience of divorce and remarriage, step-parents and moving from place to place as one’s mother or father or both chase their own self-fulfillment. The place he’s from is the broken family, and it’s a familiar one to many.Sen. McCain, by contrast, grew up with one of the oldest forms of placelessness in the human experience: he grew up in the military. That has some of the same effects, leaving you with the desire to belong someplace; but it doesn’t leave you truly rootless, because you find your roots in the military community and culture. (And it is a culture of its own, connected to but apart from mainstream American culture, make no mistake about that; our local college has even started exempting military brats along with international students from its standard cross-cultural class and including them in the “adapting to American culture” class instead.) Those of us who grow up in Christian homes learn to find our roots in the church as well, which is a very good thing in many ways. (This is why, when Beldar writes that “McCain got a rock-solid and abiding ‘faith’ from his grandfather and father—faith in them, in himself, in the U.S. Navy and the other U.S. military forces, and most importantly, in all of America—while at best, Obama got only ‘dreams’ from his,” I have to say he’s missed the most important faith Sen. McCain learned from his father and grandfather: faith in God.) The effects of this are very clear in this presidential campaign. Sen. Obama can stand before a German audience and call himself a “citizen of the world” because his psychological citizenship is pretty tenuous—his most formative experiences tie him more to Africa and Asia than to America. Sen. McCain could never do that. He doesn’t belong to Phoenix any more than Sen. Obama belongs to Chicago, but he is unquestionably rooted in America, down to the core of his being, through his generations-deep roots in the United States Navy. In the end, I guess that’s why my respect and admiration for the man trumps my deep reservations about him, and why I trust his instincts even if I don’t always trust his ideas.
Is it possible that anyone could be more unlike Obama’s mother, with her dizzying moves from husband to husband and country to country, than McCain’s mother, who was always the quintessential “Navy wife,” wholly integrated into an American military-family culture that is proud and vast and long-standing? However often Roberta McCain and young John moved, they were never alone, never strangers, never “lost”—and they never had to flail about trying to “find themselves.” Rather, from birth to adulthood, McCain was surrounded by people whose lives were dedicated to a clear set of ideals and a clear purpose. All those people continuously reinforced and reminded him of the faith—the dedication to duty, honor, and country—that he inherited as a legacy from his grandfather and father.
And for Sen. McCain, that’s the bottom line; that, ultimately, is his sense of place.