Word: kindness
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...first name was actually Samuel. But you can see why he made such an attractive campaign mascot. Joe the Software Consultant or Joe the Staples Manager would not tick off nearly as many populist boxes as Joe the Plumber: beefy, hails from the heartland, works with his hands. The kind of guy Chris Matthews, Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough lionize as "regular" and "real." If you can't convince Joe, then you, sir, are an élitist wuss...
...more pundits romanticize a definition of "working people"--like Discovery's Alaskan-crab fishermen--that is largely small town or rural, traditionally blue collar and white. The press spends months at the outset of each election at the independent diners and pancake breakfasts of Iowa and New Hampshire, a kind of museum-preserved Americana. Yet in 2000, according to U.S. Census data, only 59 million Americans lived in rural areas, and 30 million lived in small towns of fewer than 50,000 residents, compared with 192 million in cities and suburbs. Most of us, it seems, are unreal...
Which is not to say that Palin is any less real than Obama either. But she represents a kind of life--well-paid blue collar folks living close to the land--that has become rare and far removed from the American median. An élite, if you will...
There's nothing unusual about writers recycling material. They're a larcenous bunch; literature is an economy based almost entirely on theft. But when a writer steals from him- or herself, something quite different is going on. This kind of revisiting is a way for older writers to make contact with their younger selves across the abyss of time--to engage themselves in conversation, to argue over what they missed and what they got wrong and, above all, to register the ways that time has altered their understanding of the world--to get, by means of triangulation, some perspective...
Morrison's vision has never been much in need of this kind of enlarging. Her work has always been epic in scope. In Beloved, Morrison told the story of Sethe, a woman who murdered her own child rather than see her sold into slavery. Early on in A Mercy, we watch a mother do the opposite--she puts her daughter Florens up for sale: "Please, Senhor. Not me. Take her. Take my daughter." It's a less bloody moment, but in its way it's no less chilling. A Mercy is that daughter's tale...