It's poetry review time, like it or not!

(Which means that it's time to analyze drivel -- which I tend to hate....)

An unfortunate truth about me is that I'm really not all that into poetry. But John Kerry came to Philadelphia yesterday and in a speech to the NAACP, singled out in a praiseworthy manner not one but two Stalin apologists. That offends my low standards. I might have been willing to overlook one. You know, nobody's perfect, and, of course, "mistakes were made."

But two? That's too many!

The two in question were W.E.B. DuBois and Langston Hughes. As to DuBois, his love of Stalin and Communism and his malevolent anti-Americanism are not open to serious dispute (see my previous post on the subject). Here's Kerry's reference to DuBois:

W.E.B. Du Bois talked about the two Americas years ago. He called it "a nation within a nation." John Edwards and I have talked about that divide for many years now.

Our job, between now and November is to end the division between the fortunate America and the forgotten America. We must come together to build one America.

Du Bois moved increasingly to the left in his political thinking, embracing a Marxist analysis of black labor in the United States and eventually advocating a "nation within a nation" form of black economic separatism or cooperation during the Great Depression. In 1944, in his mid-seventies, Du Bois declared that he would spend "the remaining years of [his] active life" in the fight against imperialism.

Here's more:

In contrast to Garvey, Du Bois believes in the existence of “a dual identity or ‘double consciousness’ that is both African and American, and, consequently rejects black nationalism proper.” Du Bois makes no suggestion that Black Americans should “return” to Africa, but that they actually have more right to call themselves American since they did the bulk of the work to build America. However, his nationalist ideas are similar to Garvey’s in relation to his beliefs of “origins” and the historical basis of modern Black identity. When he discusses beginnings “he makes a number of claims about the superiority of Africa,” and like Garvey “he professes that more so than other groups, Africans advanced ‘from animal savagery toward primitive civilization.’” Du Bois sees African Americans as a “protonation” not yet realized, a “nation within a nation,” and “privileges an African Gemeinschaft (an organic community based on kinship) over the European Gesellschaft (a rationalized, mechanistic community).”

Du Bois (1933) conceptualization of Pan Africanism was based on anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialism and for "the industrial and spiritual emancipation of Negro people (p. 247)." As Gbadegesin notes (1996), Pan Africanist movement took its roots from "the social heritage of insult in slavery and colonial exploitation (p. 233)." Du Bois organized five Pan-African conferences, in 1911, 1921, 1923, 1927 and in 1945 to emphasize the collective work of Africans, African Americans and the colonized people of the world. In order to combat colonialism, Du Bois urged people of African descent to put aside language, cultural, religious differences to unite for a common struggle. Within the context of Pan Africanism, Du Bois collaborated with Ghanaian leader Nkrumah in attempts to organize collective struggles of Africans and African Americans. As noted by Moses (1994), Du Bois’s political views were deeply grounded within Afrocentric thoughts, particular within African music, history, spirituality, etc. Du Bois viewed African communalism and collective nature of family useful within the African American context. For Du Bois, knowledge from the continent of Africa was important for Black resistance in the United States, which he called a "nation within a nation."

Again, I'd be a little more willing to trust Kerry if it weren't for the fact that he goes on to quote a second Stalin apologist, the poet Langston Hughes:

The great poet Langston Hughes put it this way:

Let America be America again...Let it be the dream it used to be...for those whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again.

With your help, in 2004, we can...we must...we will...bring back our mighty dream again.

But what does it mean? Here are some lines Kerry omitted:

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

.....From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

Aside from the Marxist sentiments, it's inherent in the poem that the word "again" is used mockingly -- for Hughes makes clear that America never was the way he wants to remake it; the reason for the word "again" is to give lie to the despicable and hypocritical American Dream (which fellow Stalin-lovers know to be a cruel myth).

Timothy Noah recently reminded the Kerry forces not only of the underlying Stalinist sentiments, but of the lie inherent in Langston Hughes' chorus of "Let America be America again." It's not nostalgia, as the poet makes abundantly clear by stating over and over again that it "never was." Rather, the poem's goal is to remake America into something it never was: a Stalinist workers' paradise:

Anyone who takes the time to read "Let America Be America Again" will quickly understand that its entire thrust is that nostalgia for a golden age of American freedom is a crock. In the poem, idealized paeans to "the dream [America] used to be" alternate with parenthetical responses exposing the harsher reality ("America never was America to me"). Who is this angry dissenter? Hughes answers in a voice that echoes Walt Whitman's:

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

and so on. Rather than pretend America ever was the land of the free (remember, this was written by a black man in the Jim Crow era), Hughes urges his heterogeneous countrymen to fulfill for the first time America's promise of freedom:

America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—America will be!

"Let America Be America Again," you may have noticed, is not one of Hughes' better efforts. Like a lot of poetry written during the Great Depression, it's didactic and influenced by naive admiration for the Soviet experiment.

I don't want to live in a workers' paradise where the state owns the means of production. This country is too close to that already.

The fortunate versus the forgotten?

I don't know how to analyze such phraseology; like much of what Kerry says it defies rational analysis. How, for example, does one determine whether one is "fortunate" or "forgotten"? Are these two words opposites? It strikes me as a waste of time to get into a lengthy discussion over whether one can be forgotten as well as fortunate. (Some are very fortunate to be forgotten, while others are very unfortunate to be remembered....)

But I will say this: Communism was unfortunate, and it should not be forgotten.

Why praise those who supported it?

UPDATE: Might the key to successful interpretation (of the Hughes poem and campaign theme) lie somewhere in Kerry's heart?

"The question, setting aside the campaign, is: Where is John Kerry's heart?" said Kagan, who has advocated a muscular U.S. approach to world affairs. "My sense is his heart is in the anti-Vietnam, '70s-'80s left." (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Yes Again! (Indeed.)

UPDATE (in reverse order): If you want more 70's nostalgia, you won't be disappointed. Just keep scrolling to the last post. Justin wrote it, and I think it's a real gem.