In her article Barack Obama's desperate desire to belong *, British writer Janet Daley tries to understand Barak Obama's loyalty to Preacher Wright. In her opinion, like all Americans, Obama is lonely:

I would guess that Mr Obama, who had a personal genealogy even more dislocated and idiosyncratic than most, wanted to belong. He wanted a community that could enfold him and make him feel that he was part of something that was recognisable and self-affirming....

..and she comes to the conclusion that:

...Americans suffer from the collective insecurity that arises from rootlessness and the wilful abandonment of historical continuity. That longing for roots, and the emotional security that goes with them, divides Americans as surely and inevitably as their constitutional arrangements unite them. That is the perennial contradiction at the heart of national life.

Of course, it doesn't have to be ethnicity any more. You can find your communal identity through gender, or sexual orientation: you just have to be able to plant your feet on solid ground somewhere and find people to holds hands with, so as not to be swept away in the endless, terrifyingly anonymous void.

What a peculiar misinterpretation. If the reader responses are any indication, I'd guess that most Americans like our rootless, terrifyingly anonymous void. If we didn’t, there wouldn’t be such a market for Westerns, or songs about Route 66 and the open road.

I guess this kind of agoraphobia is the result of living on a little soggy island where people rarely move far from home. When I visit, I often hear Brits express this bizarre idea that Americans regret separating from the ‘mother’ country.

I never have the heart to tell them that we don’t.

* Link thanks to Alan Sullivan