Dear Friends,

As part of my Living Dialogues programs freely archived and available for listening or download 24/7 on the Internet at www.tinyurl.com/2jkuna, my new Youthful Elder Dialogues series beginning August 1, 2008 features a new dialogue going up on Friday every week, including my timely dialogues with:

• Ted Sorensen (Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History),
• Robert Thurman (Why the Dalai Lama Matters: His Act of Truth as the Solution for China, Tibet, and the World),
• Pulitzer-prize winner David Maraniss (Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World),
  former U.S. Senator David Boren (A Letter to America),
• George Lakoff (The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21^st Century American Politics with an 18^th Century Brain),
• liberal historian Sean Wilsey (The Reagan Era: 1974-2008), and more.

These will be supplemented with other such programs from now through the election season on my Living Dialogues weekly broadcasts on Sundays from 12:30-1pm and two Connections programs on Fridays September 12 (with George Lakoff) and September 26 from 8:30-9:30am on KGNU radio, 88.5FM and 1390AM in Front Range Colorado and simulcast www.kgnu.org worldwide on the Web.

In connection with this announcement, I am including below some of my thoughts on the August 5, 2008 Op-Ed piece of David Brooks in the New York Times (reproduced in full below).

In a recent dialogue I had with George Lakoff (with another to follow live on Sept. 12), we both talked about how Americans vote their “identity”, not based on issues (e.g., Thomas Frank’s book What’s The Matter With Kansas), and do so to the degree they “trust” and feel connected to the “authenticity” of the candidate. Clearly race will play a dominant factor in the minds and choice of a significant number of voters in the 2008 U.S. election — how many we will only be able to guess after the election — but David Brooks’ take in his 8-5-08 Op-Ed on the generational divide is also interesting, because it suggests to me that younger voters (who polls show do not have trust issues connected with Obama’s race, nor do the new generations worldwide) may share with Barack not only an emerging sense of a more fluid individual identity, but, in my sense, a wider planetary citizen identity as well.

In my view Barack himself, despite his own obvious individuality (similar to multi-racial Tiger Woods), is not in fact simply a unique Other (and as such impliedly untrustworthy) as Republicans are painting him, but a representative and member of an emerging generation and generations to come. This accounts in significant measure for the excitement of both young people and “youthful elders” such as ourselves about Obama’s candidacy.

It reminds me of Goethe’s words I had over my desk all through college: “The destiny of any given nation at any given time depends on the thoughts of its youth under five and twenty“, and the crucial importance of what psychological historian Erik Erikson (Gandhi’s Truth and Youth: Identity and Crisis) called the “ethical dialogue between mutually respectful and energizing youth and elders” he deemed necessary for any civilization to survive and thrive.

George Will in his 8-3-05 column in the Washington Post mocked Barack’s reference in his Berlin speech to being a “citizen of the world” and “global citizenship” as “silly” and “strictly speaking, nonsense”, since George asserted citizenship by definition means an identity with a specific group, a specific nation and “neither the world nor the globe is such an entity”. Will praised “America’s vibrant and very un-European patriotism, which is grounded in a sense of virtuous exceptionalism”, and opined that “cosmopolitanism is not an political asset for American presidential candidates”. While this fits and reflects the psychic underpinning and unconscious hubris of the neoconservative view of the world (see the Project for a New American Century position paper of the late 1990s and the disastrous outcome of its imposition/enactment for the economy and moral standing of the U.S. in the past few years), it is clearly out of step with the 21st century zeitgeist as expressed by exponentially growing numbers of people worldwide.

In contrast to Will and the diehard and shrinking, self-identified American exceptionalists, a number of the rest of us — including Fareed Zakaria in his recent book The Post American World calling the U.S. to a collaborative leadership role, not seeking dominance but celebrating the unique gifts of “the rise of the rest” as well as those of America – are realizing that our individual consciousness in the 21st century needs to keep up with evolution itself and expand beyond our gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality-based identities to a larger human identity — and as I say in my Living Dialogues programs, beyond even that to be a responsible coparticipant in a fully alive universe, beyond modern mind anthropocentrism altogether, connecting consciously to the natural world and sustainable New Energy in many dimensions.

(See David Brooks NYTimes 8-5-08 Op-Ed below)

August 5, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Where’s the Landslide?

By DAVID BROOKS

Why isn’t Barack Obama doing better? Why, after all that has happened, does he have only a slim two- or three-point lead over John McCain, according to an average of the recent polls? Why is he basically tied with his opponent when his party is so far ahead?

His age probably has something to do with it. So does his race. But the polls and focus groups suggest that people aren’t dismissive of Obama or hostile to him. Instead, they’re wary and uncertain.

And the root of it is probably this: Obama has been a sojourner. He opened his book “Dreams From My Father” with a quotation from Chronicles: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers.”

There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded.

Last week Jodi Kantor of The Times described Obama’s 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. “The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count,” Kantor wrote.

He was a popular and charismatic professor, but he rarely took part in faculty conversations or discussions about the future of the institution. He had a supple grasp of legal ideas, but he never committed those ideas to paper by publishing a piece of scholarship.

He was in the law school, but not of it.

This has been a consistent pattern throughout his odyssey. His childhood was a peripatetic journey through Kansas, Indonesia, Hawaii and beyond. He absorbed things from those diverse places but was not fully of them.

His college years were spent on both coasts. He was a community organizer for three years but left before he could be truly effective. He became a state legislator, but he was in the Legislature, not of it. He had some accomplishments, but as Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker wrote, he was famously bored by the institution and used it as a stepping stone to higher things.

He was in Trinity United Church of Christ, but not of it, not sharing the liberation theology that energized Jeremiah Wright Jr. He is in the United States Senate, but not of it. He has not had the time nor the inclination to throw himself into Senate mores, or really get to know more than a handful of his colleagues. His Democratic supporters there speak of him fondly, but vaguely.

And so it goes. He is a liberal, but not fully liberal. He has sometimes opposed the Chicago political establishment, but is also part of it. He spoke at a rally against the Iraq war, while distancing himself from many antiwar activists.

This ability to stand apart accounts for his fantastic powers of observation, and his skills as a writer and thinker. It means that people on almost all sides of any issue can see parts of themselves reflected in Obama’s eyes. But it does make him hard to place.

When we’re judging candidates (or friends), we don’t just judge the individuals but the milieus that produced them. We judge them by the connections that exist beyond choice and the ground where they will go home to be laid to rest. Andrew Jackson was a backwoodsman. John Kennedy had his clan. Ronald Reagan was forever associated with the small-town virtues of Dixon and Jimmy Carter with Plains.

It is hard to plant Obama. Both he and his opponent have written coming-of-age tales about their fathers, but they are different in important ways. McCain’s “Faith of My Fathers” is a story of a prodigal son. It is about an immature boy who suffers and discovers his place in the long line of warriors that produced him. Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” is a journey forward, about a man who took the disparate parts of his past and constructed an identity of his own.

If you grew up in the 1950s, you were inclined to regard your identity as something you were born with. If you grew up in the 1970s, you were more likely to regard your identity as something you created.

If Obama is fully a member of any club — and perhaps he isn’t — it is the club of smart post-boomer meritocrats. We now have a cohort of rising leaders, Obama’s age and younger, who climbed quickly through elite schools and now ascend from job to job. They are conscientious and idealistic while also being coldly clever and self-aware. It’s not clear what the rest of America makes of them.

So, cautiously, the country watches. This should be a Democratic wipeout. But voters seem to be slow to trust a sojourner they cannot place.

Tags: commentary, energy, NY OpEd