There Will Be Full-Bloodedness
So ladies and gentlemen, if I say I am an Americanist you will agree. ~There Will Be Blood (modified)
A few days ago, I saw the original story that reported the remark of one Josh Fry of West Virginia, which has since been widely discussed:
He would just be more comfortable with “someone who is a full-blooded American as president.”
Now there are ways to understand the word “full-blooded” that do not exactly involve references to someone’s actual physical descent. “Full-blooded” applies the language of lineage metaphorically to describe whether something or someone is genuine or possesses authenticity in a certain role. As we are tirelessly lectured by mavens of propositionalism, American nationalism is civic, and not ethnic, and so is not tied to lineage or blood, but exists ethereally on the plane of ideas, and it is supposedly a nationality without ties of blood, whether real or imagined, that can nonetheless have “full-blooded” members in this other sense of complete, entire, full.
Of course, the statement can be read more plainly to refer directly to ancestry, and I’m not sure that this isn’t what Mr. Fry meant when he said this (and what if it was?), but I would suggest a different reading that is in some ways much worse that has nothing to do with Kathleen Parker’s “blood equity,” whatever that may be. We have another word that is often used interchangeably with “full-blooded,” and this is the slightly more neutral “red-blooded,” as in “every good, red-blooded American believes...,” and this has the effect of contrasting the people whom you are praising from some presumably “bloodless” set you mean to put down, but this term does not make the distinction clearly enough since everyone on the planet is “red-blooded.” Because full-bloodedness implies completeness or wholeness, something less or other than this implies deficiency. So what I’d like to suggest is that this phrase “full-blooded American” should be read as “Americanist,” and that what Mr. Fry was saying was that the President ought to be an Americanist. This is, of course, exactly what legions of Obama’s critics have been saying for months whenever they tie him to those espousing “anti-Americanism” or berate him for his allegedly “America-hating” wife and his insufficient flag pin zeal, but which Fry and Parker made the mistake of expressing this in terms that were not dripping with saccharine rhetoric about equality and the proposition nation. Parker made the mistake of arguing that there was some content and substance to Americanism that was non-negotiable and used the dreaded word “heritage.” For this she is being excoriated as a racist and many other things besides, when I feel fairly confident that she meant nothing of the kind. Nonetheless, I would press the point and say that it would be worse to reject Obama because he does not live up to the standards of Americanism, which has scarcely ever been good for the actual United States of America, than because his father came from somewhere else. The latter instinct, whatever else we might say about it, is normal and human enough; the former strikes me as deeply confused and unhealthy.
Comments
Full blooded means full blooded…
Does any word in the English language retain a distinct meaning nowadays?
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I’m sorry. I thought that readers here could actually make use of links. My mistake. Words have a number of meanings, depending on how they are used. Full-blooded can mean different things. My apologies if this conflicts with some drab, limited understanding of language.
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I wasn’t actually complaining about your altering the definition, I realise you didn’t, but about the word having multiple meanings.
What I said doesn’t make sense, as I read it, if applying to you - for you could not redefine a word on your own.
I do wish for a drab, clear language… One that allows for… communication.
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My mistake. My apologies for reading your comment the wrong way.
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What I can’t understand is that Americans will elect someone whose life
was so totally outside the course of lives of ordinary Americans. Mr.
Obama never attended an ordinary American school. How can he have a reasonable
opinion about the American school system? he probably never was sitting in
the waiting room of a general practicioner among people of the lower or the
middle class. How can he judge the American health system? He never rode to work
in a commuter train every morning. He never did military service with other
ordinary Americans. I am a German, and there is one good thing about the compulsory
school system in Germany: the first 4 years, you visit the basic school (Grundschule)
together with children from all social classes. My family lived in a village of about
3000 inhabitants in a half rural, half industrial county. The children in my class were the sons and daughters of coal miners, industrial workers and small-scale farmers, all of them decent playmates.
I still have contact with them when we meet once a year, and I always learn a lot about
how these people feel.
What I said about Mr. Obama may be true for other presidential candidates; if they come from a multimillionaire family, visited only private schools and elite universities, always had private and special appointments with doctors, never earned their money in an ordinary profession like e.g. Ron Paul, then
they shouldn’t be considered eligible for president.
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Excuse me, I forgot the conclusion: Being a full-blooded American does nit mean, in my opinion, somethimh with race, but it means having lived, at least for some time, the life of an ordinary Americam among ordinary Americans.
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As Josh Fry used the word, the meaning of “full-blooded” is clear. Obama’s mother is American, but his father is not. Therefore, Obama is not a full-blooded American.
Full-bloodedness has nothing to do with race.
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As I have written before, the tests for me in considering Presidential candidates is: 1)On a desert island among a lost group of people, would the candidate rise to be a leader of that group? 2) Most importantly, is the candidate imbued with a deep feeling of gratitude and love of the West so that his first instinct is the survival of its traditions and civilization?
Obama is not a leader in the Senate, and had not been known for any leadership traits as a Social Worker back in Chicago. Given his background and temperament, it doesn’t seem that he is a “natural patriot” as one would associate with a Reagan or Buchanan. Normally, for a minority to honestly rise to the position of national political leadership, he would have to be perceived as being even more true to the traditions of a country than most of the majority.
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full-blooded can also mean vigorous and healthy or virile and male. It can also be hereditary, but I dont think we really want some kind of royalty in America, its bad enough with the $green$-blooded class.
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BTW Senators have never made good presidents and its really odd that this year we have 3 senators running for president [at this time]
Washington, D.C. -
Here’s a bit of amazing trivia for the historic election of 2008: It’s the first time two sitting senators will run against each other as their party’s nominee for president.
In fact, only two sitting senators have ever been elected president--John F. Kennedy, who ran against then Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1960, and Warren G. Harding, an Ohio Republican who beat the Democratic governor from his home state to win the 1920 election. -Forbes
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