Birther Mantra -- "Yes We Can!"

I want to try something with a slogan we all remember from the '08 campaign.

"Yes we can." Let's say it over and over, "Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!"

Whenever you say something over and over very soon it starts to run together and by now you're not pronouncing the words clearly. You can see how this could work with "Yes we can!" We used to do it when trying to say "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" or "Rubber baby buggy bumpers," definite tongue twisters.

With "Yes we can," when slurred together and then separated out, you can see numerous permutations. "Yes we can! Yeah we can! Ya we kin!" And then to take it a step further, if you were saying it for 20 minutes straight, let's say, the rhythm could fluctuate and you wouldn't even necessarily be saying the "Ya" word first, but it'd be out of its normal order.

This could happen so much, with such mispronouncing, that eventually you could be saying, "Can Ya We! Kin Ya We!" To the point that it spells out "Ken-ya-we!" At first it reminds you of Kanye West, but look at that again!

It says, "Kenya We."

Now, I remember years ago when I was in grade school studying some of the various Kenyan languages, going for extra credit. The other kids were out exploding 2-liter Coke bottles with Mentos (This was the mid-'60s. Check it out, there's no anachronisms here), but I was inside studiously poring over African language websites.

And as I recall, and I confess I'm a little rusty, having not spoken Kenyan since winning the Kenyan version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" in 1981, the first person plural can always be translated as a first person singular when expressing someone's occupation, birthplace, town, or country of residence. (Instead of individualism, which we consider normal, in Kenya they relate more in a dyadic way*.) So we in English would say, "I am from America." But Kenyan grammar leaves out the "to be" verb form, with the words "Kenya We" then usually translating, "I am from Kenya."

Was Barack Obama trying to tell us something during the campaign?

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* "A dyadic personality is one who simply needs another continually in order to know who he or she really is," Bruce J. Malina writes in "The New Testament World -- Insights from Cultural Anthropology," John Knox Press, 1981, p. 55.

As an aside, ask yourself, when is the last time you saw a Kenyan by himself? Then ask yourself, Isn't Barack Obama always surrounded by other people?