Many readers are echoing this one:
I know you have a fantastic group of readers, but this reader's post must be in the top 10 I have ever read on The Dish. If there is any way you can tell this person, please do.
You just told him. Another differs:
Your reader claims that "TCK’s are usually unable to view the world in a simplistic dualistic way. On the contrary, they are usually over-achievers, get advanced degrees, and are infinitely curious about the world." That may (or may not) be true. But you could just as easily argue that TCKs will never know some really important things – can never know them – precisely because they've never had the experience of growing up in one culture which they knew (however erroneously) to be the way the world is.
Think of Flannery O'Connor's quip that she could see more from her front porch in Milledgeville, Georgia, than she could on any tour of Europe. That isn't simply an indictment of the kind of smug and self-important cosmopolitanism on display in your reader's letter. Nor is it simply a defense of the kind of organic experiential knowledge that is only possible when one is rooted to a particular place and time. At bottom, it is a profound statement about the limits of human knowledge itself.
Travel the world and try to transcend your culture all you want, but you won't ever succeed. Not really. As Alasdair Macintyre put it, we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. There will always be a part of us that it is the product of the time and place and family in which we first came of age, perhaps especially when we are reacting to that experience and trying to "transcend" it. And even if by some miracle we actually succeeded in that project, then whatever else we may have gained, we will also have lost the ability to be truly a part of any culture from the inside.
That's not a fate that I or many so-called Middle Americans want. Believe it or not, we actually love this country. We are interested in and honor its people and its history. We are rooted in and not ashamed of the local communities and neighborhoods and families of which we are a part (even if, because we love them, we want to change them for the better).
Obama got that in 2008. Or at least he did once he got raked over the coals by HRC for denigrating the cultural and economic anxieties of working class white people in his now infamous "clinging to their guns and Bibles" speech. It would be a catastrophic mistake for him to forget that lesson in 2012. Obama's background makes him unique. It makes him who he is. But so does mine as a gay southern Evangelical whose family has been living here for generations. And so does yours as a first generation gay Catholic Anglo-Irish immigrant.
The game of "Who sees the world more broadly?" is a silly one to play. And also dangerous in these times when what we really need are shrewd leaders who are so intimately familiar enough with American politics and culture that they not only see the breadth of our problems, but also their depth.
The Dish 