It’s not enough that Barack Obama is the nation’s first black president. It’s not enough that he’s the first president since JFK with urban roots. It’s not enough that he is the first to be from a northern state since Gerry Ford. That’s not enough for New York. Typically, the Big Apple demands more. And New York Magazine had the audacity to declare among its “Reasons to Love New York 2008” article that “Obama Is One of Us, Despite All That Business About Chicago.”
Barack Obama, on the other hand, deliberately chose New York as a young man, transferring his junior year from Occidental College to Columbia, and all one has to do is crack the binding of Dreams From My Father to appreciate the authenticity of his experience. It’s all right there in chapter one, paragraph one, sentence four. “The apartment was small,” he writes, “with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.” Before readers have even turned the page, he’s mentioned his stoop, his fire escape, and the Knicks.
Great. Sounds like a wonderful formative “authentic” experience. The article goes on to point out all the NYers who will be in Obama’s cabinet, including Park Forest’s and Little Rock’s own Hillary Clinton.
Sorry, you mugs. Your native son Rudy ran for president, and if not for a few strategic gaffes (like not running in any crummy little states like Iowa and NH) might have brought his “authentic” style of integrity and personal magnetism to the White House.
This is just another instance of NY parochialism, which I’ve found is as strong there as it is in small town Wisconsin. NYers find it hard to believe that any worthy person would choose to live anywhere but The City So Nice They Named It Twice (In Case The First Plaque Gets Lifted). A John Updike quote I use most often comes from one of my favorite satires, Bech is Back: Being a New Yorker, “She assumed everyone who lived west of the Hudson was kind of kidding.”
Tough rugelach, NYers. Obama is ours, for better and for worse. The South Side is the new Kennebunkport, the White Sox are now the Nation’s Team, and we can all put away our Louis L’Amour books and break out the Saul Bellow.
No, wait, Bellow cut out of here at the end of his career to get stroked in Boston. Bleep him. Start reading Nelson Algren and Alexsandr Hemon.