Friday, June 04, 2004

The McCarthyist Roots of Timothy Noah

Timothy Noah in Slate criticizes John Kerry for his adoption of a Langston Hughes line (from his poem of the same name) for a campaign slogan: “Let America be America Again.” It’s certainly fair game to question whether the Kerry campaign understood Hughes’ poem to be what it actually is: an indictment of American history and an invitation for this country to live up to its idealism. I’ll grant Noah that (and the fact that the writing is a bit didactic.) But the poem is not “influenced by naive admiration for the Soviet experiment,” unless “we the people” is some code word for the Communist Manifesto. But the last time I checked, it was the basis of our government.
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!
Such yellow journalism is unjust, but yellow literary criticism is just unseemly.

2 comments:

Reen said...

I still can't believe Langston Hughes attended a show trial. Hello, Langston! Wake up and smell the oppression!

But yeah. Noah's taking his interpretation a bit far.

2:37 PM
Dr J said...

Notice, too, the rather snide assumption in Noah's article that as soon as he'd "seen the light" after the show trials, he not only "came to his senses" but "regained his artistry." Just a wee bit of polemical associating there, n'est-ce pas?

Noah's rather defensive remarks about America "still being America" with or without Bush are more true to semantics than the spirit of the phrasing. I imagine Noah would read lines like Mark Strand's "Wherever I am / I am what is missing" with absolutely no sense of their more complicating and paradoxical informations. Noah's is a pretty typical response, though, these days.

That said, I don't this a good choice for Kerry's slogan. Not so much the Hughes-baggage, but it figures Kerry as a kind of deliverer, and I think Kerry would be wise to avoid all forms of Messianic association, direct, indirect, or accidental. Even taken more cautiously, I don't think Kerry wants to cast himself as a restorer of even a Clinton-like America, let alone a Kennedyean America, or a Rockwellian one. The Bushies can then tag him as a backward-looking president rather than a forward-looking one.

Cheers.

8:59 PM

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