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Little Kings & Local Affinities by Louis R. Tarsitano  Little
Kings & Local Affinities  Louis R. Tarsitano on Identity
Politics & the Christian  The all-sufficient question for most
intellectuals, asked in splendid existential isolation, is: Who
am I? They answer this question, along with their fellow members
of the planning class, as if from a burning bush: “I am who I
am.” The world, then, is only a stage for the self-expression of
an identity rooted only in themselves.  In contrast, ordinary
people ask at least one other question: What am I? They identify
themselves by the blood and the land and the culture that
produced them. Life for them has a more subtle texture than can
be adequately described by an abstract appeal to “humankind” and
to “spaceship earth.” They not only need, they also demand roots
in something besides themselves, and the deeper the better.
When ordinary people lose their roots, they experience an
anxiety, an itch impossible t