Obama is waiting
Joanne - I have often commented that had George W. Bush served in the Peace Corps our world would be…
The current issue of The Atlantic has a long article by Nicholas Dames entitled “The New Fiction of Solitude” where, according to Dames, “For an influential group of writers, the purpose of novels is to bear witness to the spectacle of aloneness.”
Marilynne Robinson and President Obama
In this article, Dames refers to a long, long conversation that the novelist Marilynne Robinson had with President Obama last September which was published a few months ago in The New York Review of Books. That “conversation” touched on a number of topics, from troubled relationship between Christianity and democracy to the fragility of public institutions.
Dames (as did others) wondered why Obama focused time and attention on a novelist, such as Robinson, and Dames linked the Obama conversation–some of you might remember–that took place at Hyannis Port in 1960 when JFK, then running for president, met with Norman Mailer, according to Dames, “in order to rouse the discouraged liberal elites who were Mailer’s audience.”
At one point in the Obama/Robinson conversation the president focused on the value of novelists and what they write, saying,
Are you somebody who worries about people not reading novels
anymore? And do you think that has an impact on the culture?
When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting
aside being president, and the most important set of understandings
that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think
I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with
being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full
of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive
for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect
with some [one] else even though they’ve very different from you.
So, get back to writing your book. President Obama (and others) are waiting to read what you have to say!
Wkipedia describes a certain category of people called Third Culture Kids – “Third culture kid (TCK) is a term used to refer to children who were raised in a culture outside of their parents’ culture for a significant part of their development years.[1] The definition is not constrained to describing only children, but can also be used to describe adults who have had the experience of being an ATCK (Adult Third Culture Kid)” ( Google “Third Culture Kid”and read the Wikipedia description for the citations.)
President Obama is a famous example of a TCK and shows some of what have been called the characteristics of such people, specifically an ability to see a situation from different cultural perspectives and to relate cross culturally. Sound familiar? There are those who might argue, myself included, that the cross cultural experience of Peace Corps Volunteers leaves them with an unique global cultural perspective comparable to TCKs-Never again to be quite at home in one’s parent culture. All the more reason to write the memoir and send a copy to the President.
Joanne – I have often commented that had George W. Bush served in the Peace Corps our world would be a better place.