Birth of a Nation

Barack Obama will be sworn in at about noon today as the 44th President of the United States of America.

It's a ceremony to be sure. Despite the economic times, much money is being spent to make sure this is a ceremony people will remember. People say it's the worst economic times since the Great Depression, but the depression has unemployment rates of 25% and another 25% were partly employed. The US is maybe 7-8% unemployed right now, which is high, but not like the Great Depression.

I was talking to an elderly Indian (from India) who felt that the significance of Obama being the first African American president was not that great since, in his mind, blacks and whites were pretty much equal now. Even if that were so, and it's hard to claim that for a variety of reasons, it's still significant that an African American is being elected given that none have been elected before.

The funny thing is this. Everyone knows he has a white mother. Everyone knows he was raised by his white grandparents. His father abandoned him. But many whites and even many African Americans look at Barack as African American. He simply has the facial features of someone African American, even if his values were shaped as much by growing up in white America as the next person.

Obama has, of course, embraced the African American culture. He moved to Chicago. He married someone with strong ties to Chicago in Michelle Obama. He joined an African American church before he left it. But it is as much an adopted culture as anything.

In the end, does it matter? Obama embodies this notion of unification of white America and black America, but he was elected by mostly ignoring the issue of race or to emphasize his white roots, given that he visually appears black.

And even if he is half-white, does it matter? As long as we perceive him to be African American, then he is.

One fascinating aspect of his Presidency is how he used Abraham Lincoln as inspiration. He started his campaign in Springfield. He took a train ride from Philadelphia to Washington much like Lincoln. Perhaps there's a bit of irony that it was Lincoln who was in far greater danger of being assassinated on his route to DC. We have reached a time where most people wouldn't even think of it, though I suppose it only takes a small number to carry out such a nasty act.

When FDR assumed the Presidency, he reassured Americans through radio, then a brand-new technology. In those days, citizens still respected the Presidency, and they were reassured by his words. These days, Americans are far more savvy, so far more cynical. They aren't swayed as much by words, and often feel a dissenting voice is their right. And this means conservatives! Bush would have been happy if he could have squelched dissent much like old time Soviet propagandists.

It's funny, but as well read as Obama is, surely he's read the Lincoln-Douglas debates with two candidates running for the Illinois senate (although Obama won, and Lincoln lost). In these debates, Lincoln was accused of being sympathetic with slaves and blacks which he vigorously denied. He felt that, in the forseeable future, blacks would not stand equal with whites.

Now that could have been political talk designed to get him elected. He could have changed his mind over the years as he became President and was President. But at least at one point in his career, he wasn't that noble person, that mythological figure. Obama knows, of course, that Americans view Lincoln as a myth and know very little about him.

Despite the accessibility of the Internet, the desire to read about Lincoln is far less than reading the latest installment of Harry Potter. We prefer to think of Lincoln as the man that freed the slaves, the President that presided over a Civil War, as Honest Abe, and finally as the President assassinated by a Southerner.

Would Lincoln have thought, some 145 years after his Presidency that the United States would have suffered a Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and elected a man born of an immigrant would be President? Perhaps he would have.

But we don't have to dream that. On the day after Martin Luther King's observed birthday, it's reality.