Prince Barack of Indonesia and Hawaii speaks of Small Town, PA

Senator Barack Obama made these statements at a fundraiser in San Francisco when describing those pesky xenophobes in Pennsylvania.

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Town and towns between miles!
I was eighteen when I saw what was to me a phenomenon as I drove in the western part of that beautiful state. In other states, like eastern Kansas for instance where I grew up, a person could ride for fifteen, heck, probably even thirty miles before you got to another town. For a place to have a berg after every turn or hill in the road was just too strange. Pennsylvania, with its old towns and different sounding people and many cultures was a lovely new experience for me.

Though I didn't realize it then, I had Pennsylvania DNA all over me. Darn near all my American family began there many years ago. As I went through some genealogical research later in my life, I discovered many names of other families in census records who also had parents born in Pennsylvania. Lots and lots of them.

If individuals desired to get to Ohio and Indiana they had only a few "civilized" choices in 1812, such as they were: one had to go through Pennsylvania and many Indians to get to four or five traces (roads) if you lived in the Southern Atlantic area of the colonies, you could take the routes up through the Cumberland Gap out of North Carolina and across the Ohio River into Kentucky. Neither choice was exactly a super highway with a Motel 6 keepin' the light on for ya. The way through to the Northwest Territory from the Atlantic Coast was PA. There warn't no toher choice. If ya git ma drift.

Back to those cultural and elitist misspeaks from Obama, my American family's story is not very special or very unusual...by a long shot. I suppose that is why I'm so put off by this latest "missed" analysis by Obama.

There actually are American groups (black and white) who have kin who lived in PA for a century or so before they were able to come West. That, or they made it big and stayed; and others immigrated into PA for the reason of moving on. Amazing as it is, Pennsylvania has somehow handled it. These are data Senator Obama should know before he spews sociological opinions about the place, comparing them to the midwest.

It's a big old place and yes, somehow the state has survived, with guns and religion, from all the stress that strange and different looking people and cultures and immigrants have brought over and over and over again. It embarrasses me to see a presidential candidate make such a gigantic error in knowledge about a major force in our American history. It's astounding to me.

It would behoove Mr. Obama to pick up a few Pennsylvania history books plus 49 or so others, and actually read them. I have a few here in my own library, if he'd like to borrow them. Or he could ask his younger researchers to do it, if they could disconnect themselves from a rap song long enough.

The Keystone State
Back to my trip my first exposure to the bucolic part of beautiful PA was when I met and fell in love with my Aunt Jane's and Uncle William's beautiful four-story stone home built in the 1700s outside of Centerville. I had vowed to myself that I was to be married in that house someday. I'll never forget that lovely place and the feeling of "being at home." It sat on a working farm, above a lea with small lake, a spring house as I recall and among rolling hills. Washington, Pennsylvania, the home of a pretty fierce labor guy isn't far away.

And in the lowest depths of that same lovely home are hidden the secrets of the most compassionate, remarkable courage of some Pennsylvanians who carried out the Godly tasks of righting a few of the wrongs in our nation: a stop on the famed Underground Railroad--doubtlessly fortified with guns and religion. I don't even know their names. I think their clinging to guns and religions might have been a good thing.

It's on the other side of Pennsylvania that my Quaker grandfather was born on the Delaware River in 1670 in Chester, now Philadelphia, the birthplace of our Constitution. The Society of Friends members were abolitionists, and some even died for those unpopular beliefs. I guess that would be the "religion" Obama refers to so flippantly as part in his little offhanded remarks he made to elicit money from his supporters while they drank bad wine (and didn't know it).

I have to mention, if only to demonstrate the breadth of Pennsylvania's people and culture in their small towns, the Irish Protestants in my family who came to this country after losing their own ancestral homes to the British. They probably didn't have guns to cling to so they escaped with their lives and came to America to get away from the British.

They settled in the Parsippany area where many of my kin still live. One, my great grandfather many generations ago, lost a leg at the Battle of Yorktown. I can't imagine people like them being caught up in the bitterness this Mr. Obama speaks about. They've been through these downturns quite frequently in the past few hundred years.

I'm pretty sure sons and daughters of the Revolutionary war don't get bitter. They just go on with their lives and figure out other ways to get through. Cling to guns? I don't know about that. Maybe on a cold morning and if the deer haven't shown up yet.

Cling to religion? Yes, for sure. Admittedly, faith does mean quite a bit to families there or they probably would've quickly converted to keep the ole Irish barn.

There are millions of Americans like me whose roots are in Pennsylvania and like me, are spread across this country, a fact that is not lost on Mrs. Clinton. Nor on Senator McCain.

Guns and religion
Someone needs to tell Senator Obama that the steel industry's closings and rearranging of the state's economy probably has little to do with whether Pennsylvanians continue hang a gun over their doorways or go to church. When deer and other wild game become extinct and when God really is dead, we'll talk.

These new Democrats clamor they want someone who's been around, who's been somewhere. Well, Barack's been somewhere. He's grew up on an island that is predominantly Muslim for four years with his Mom and then went to be a Dude when he was ten in private schools in surfin' Hawaii on Waikiki. That's being somewhere. Then he was airlifted into Chicago to learn how to be black. That's being somewhere.

But he hasn't been to the places I've mentioned evidently for any quality time or anywhere else that does not have a vast ocean around it. In other words put this man on a Greyhound with a ticket across America and he's lost. He looks at a group and sees a labor union or a voting block or calls Reverend Wright or one of the over-the-hill NAACP pals in his fave fives in Atlanta and yells for help.

Back at the center of the universe in San Francisco
I could see him in my mind's eye as he's holding a nice Cuban cigar in one hand, highball in the other (he's learned from the con artists in Atlanta to expect good bourbon straight from a Waterford glass to get respect from the white man), speaking to a ring of sycophants; explaining these Pennsylvanian "natives," that he and Michelle actually lived among some quite like them in a place called Chicago, observed their mating habits, gathered and kept their "scat."

Mr. Obama's friends and he don't realize that others are listening while they ridicule the real people who have built this country, the very ones who have made them extremely rich.

"Damned xenophobes. Guess we'll just have to eliminate their guns and religion when we get our power. Good grief, what's next? Rain dancing? How charming. I'll have to tell my wife when she returns from freeing the Tibetans."

They (princes) talk like that, you know--the kind we Americans ran away from centuries ago.

Of course, what Mr. Obama hasn't got the experience or brains to know yet is this: big money goes away as fast as it seems to come in when you have these kinds of slips. I don't think he has another one in him. I heard Mrs. Clinton just gave the go ahead on that order of pastel pantsuits from the biggest department store in Pittsburgh.

Thanks for the read.