Obama Related to Brad Pitt ... and six presidents

The news this week is that geneaologists, some of whom have been working on this for three years, have discovered a buncha nifty distant relations for each of the presidential candidates.

What's more interesting, though, is which distant relations each news story chose to highlight. There are a few possible--and very strong--narrative threads that can be pulled out of this story.

The first is that Obama is related to Brad Pitt (they're ninth cousins), which would be cool, but not that fascinating ... until you find out that Hillary Clinton is related to Angelina Jolie. No, this doesn't sexualize the Obama/Clinton relationship, but rather highlight how symmetrical we found their opposition. Symmetrical because of how symmetrical Pitt and Jolie are: two celebrities of equal beauty and stature forming the most intimate partnership. We love this shit!

And now it turns out these representative of essential male/female archetypes are each related to the political representatives of the female/white and male/black principles. No, Obama and Clinton are neither of them archetypes. That's why they've been having such trouble making their images stick ... and why they've been greeted with so much hope by progressives: they're something new on the Platonic ideal landscape.

Not being archetypes, Clinton/Obama have gone even deeper and become embodied principles: in Clinton, female and white go well together, since we feminize whiteness in comparison to blackness; so Obama is the "natural" black and male principle, which makes these two people opposite principles. Linking them then to quintessential male/female erotic archetypes that are in a relationship with each other satisfies our deep longing for validation of our core values and principles in connecting them to myth. It's as if we were in ancient Greece and the local priests found out that the princess just brought in to marry our king is a descendant of Aphrodite, while our king is a descendant of Ares.

Then there's the story that Clinton is also related to Madonna, Celine Dion, and Alanis Morrisette. Aside from pleasing our celeb-obsessed media, this simply takes heat off of Obama, who has been compared to lightweight celebrities against Clinton's more serious image.

And yet another fascinating--and much more relevant--story is getting glossed over as a result of the Obama/Pitt relationship: Obama is actually also related to six (count 'em, SIX) presidents (plus Winston Churchill and Robert E. Lee)! These were: Ford, Johnson, Truman, Madison and ... you ready? ... Bushes HW and W. That's right, he's distantly related to Papa Hawk and Baby Hawk.

Guess who else he's related to. I'll give you a hint: the "real axis of evil" ... that's right, Dick Cheney! Yeah!

No one seems to be teasing out this thread yet, but so far, Obama has the most presidential, leaderly lineage of all the candidates. This story also has the potential to lay some real fears of Obama's blackness and outsiderness to rest. Yes, he's black, and half African, but he's also related to Robert E. Lee! Yes, he's a community organizer, but he shares blood with the Bushes and Cheney! Yes, he wants to pull out of Iraq and his middle name is Hussein. But he's flesh of Winston Churchill's flesh. He's one of us!

McCain's lineage has been difficult to decipher, which probably means not that many luminaries there, because wealthy and powerful families tend to leave behind much documentation. What records there are, are of military folk, of course. Biden, likewise, turned up no interesting connections so far.  (I guess maybe the elitist tag is more appropriate for Obama than we thought!) Palin has, according to the newsmongers, only two interesting connections: FDR (arguably our most socialist and inarguably our most Big Government president) and Princess Diana (a woman famous for marrying royalty and being hounded by paparazzi.) She can't possibly get much of a boost from either of those.

Ancestry.com also did an unscientific survey of its users and found that "Americans would choose to be a member of the Obama family more than any other prominent political family." I guess it's because his family is the most interesting.

My most satisfying distant relation is Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley. What's yours?