Steve Sailer has an interesting excerpt from Dreams From My Father about Obama’s encounter with one of his half-brothers.  I thought the most telling moment in their exchange was when Obama asks if his half-brother has any desire to settle back in Kenya, and the half-brother matter-of-factly answers, “No, I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.”  This answer was perfectly reasonable, but showed how completely differently the two men viewed one of their ancestral countries. 

At the same time, the exchange shows a remarkable difference between two mixed-race men from the same family, one of whom has no real interest in “finding” or reconnecting with his Kenyan heritage and one of whom defines himself to some large degree by that heritage.  Of course, it’s possible to find that difference in any family, but the two really were equal and opposite.  What struck me reading the exchange is how much more I could identify with Obama’s perspective than I could with his half-brother’s.  Then again, the half-brother had to grow up with the drunken Barack Obama Sr., and Obama never did, so it’s a little more understandable that the former would have fewer fond associations with his ancestry and the old country. 

All the same, people basically uninterested in who they are and where they are from make no sense to me–if that were really who Obama was and what he represented, I would probably dislike him even more than I do.  To be cut off from your ancestors and to feel as if you owe them nothing seems to me to make a person somehow less complete.