John Kerry and Langston Hughes

posted to www.marxmail.org on July 26, 2004

The neoliberals at Micro$oft's Slate Magazine are red-baiting John Kerry over his appropriation of a line from a Langston Hughes poem:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2104295/

Kerry's Lit Crit The soon-to-be nominee sanitizes a Stalinist poem. By Timothy Noah Posted Monday, July 26, 2004, at 6:08 AM PT

Last month, Chatterbox urged John Kerry to drop the campaign slogan, "Let America be America again." Instead, Kerry has wrapped his arms more tightly around the slogan's regrettable source.

As Chatterbox noted in the earlier column, "Let America be America again" comes from a poem published in 1938 by the Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes. But Hughes intended the line ironically. A black man living in the pre-Civil Rights Era would have had to be insane to look back to a golden age of freedom and equality in America, and Hughes was not insane. Hughes was, rather, an enthusiastic cheerleader for the Soviet Union at the time he wrote "Let America Be America Again," which explains the poem's agitprop tone. "I am the young man, full of strength and hope," Hughes writes in the poem:

Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!

Of grab the gold!

Of grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men!

Of take the pay!

Of owning everything for one's own greed!

Toil good, private ownership bad, etc. Hughes ends his poem on a more hopeful note ("America never was America to me/ And yet I swear this oath—/ America will be!"), but the future Hughes imagined for America when he wrote those words probably looked a lot like Stalinist Russia.

Before turning to the substance of Slate's red-baiting, it is worth pointing out how both Slate and Salon function in American political discourse. Slate's role is to push liberals to the right, as befits its New Republic lineage. The original editor was Michael Kinsley, who started his career at this DLC house organ. More recently, Kinsley has shifted to the left if his LA Times editorial attack on Kerry's prowar stance is any indication. On the other hand, Salon's mission is to push radicals to the right. As a watchdog for officially-sanctioned liberal precepts, it is constantly on the attack against Ramsey Clark, Ralph Nader or any other figure who strays too far to the left. Both publications are funded by the Silicon valley bourgeoisie, which was profiled in a very perceptive NY Times Magazine article yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/magazine/25DEMOCRATS.html. If they were not funded by rich people, they would probably go out of business immediately. This raises the interesting question of political culture in the USA. With so much of the soft left being sustained by the George Soros's and Paul Newman's of the world, one wonders what would happen if there was a huge crash that left such individuals in dire straits. If political opinion is published solely on the basis of volunteer labor, I suspect it would be weighted much more to the left.

Turning to John Kerry and Langston Hughes, it is obvious we are dealing with the sort of phenomenon that Thomas Frank honed in on in the pages of Baffler Magazine, namely the capitalist appropriation of countercultural themes. Kerry has about as much in common with this black radical's poetry as The Gap had with William S. Burroughs who modeled their trousers some years ago. Or Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" being used as the backdrop for Royal Caribean Cruise-Lines.

Just as they don't use these lyrics from "Lust for Life" in that cruise line commercial:

Here comes johnny yen again

With the liquor and drugs

And the flesh machine

He’s gonna do another strip tease.

I wouldn't expect Kerry to ever refer to the lines cited by Slate.

In fact, Kerry's attitude toward the sort of people championed by Langston Hughes has much more in common with Slate Magazine's. Their problem is that they are so uptight they won't allow one of their own to appropriate a catchy slogan, even if it was written by somebody who despised capitalism and racism.

Despite borrowing from Hughes, Kerry's outlook has much more in common with the Don Imus show, where he is a frequent guest. It was on the Imus show where Kerry made that crack about opponent Bill Weld "taking more vacations than people on welfare." Kerry often uses that show to make key announcements, such as his denial that he had an affair with an intern. Imus was the subject of a 60 Minutes profile a couple of years ago, where he admitted to Mike Wallace that he used the word nigger in private conversations. That any big-name politician would continue to appear on this venue is simply astonishing. But I guess if the goal is to remove Bush, it is okay if his replacement hangs out with cracker-barrel racists.

When Kerry accused Bill Weld of taking as many vacations as people on welfare, this wasn't just a racist jibe to endear himself to Don Imus's listeners. He competed with Bill Weld for the prize of sticking it to the poor. When he ran against Weld, he made sure to attract the votes of racist Boston suburbanites just as he is doing today with his attack on the right of undocumented workers to get a driver's license.

In 1995, the Boston Herald reported that "Bay State human services advocates yesterday accused Sen. John Kerry of turning his back on the poor by voting in favor of the GOP's sweeping welfare reform bill."

"Sen. Kerry has sunk to the lowest level of political expediency," said Betsy Wright, head of the Massachusetts Human Services Coalition. "He's abandoned the children of Massachusetts."

Jim Stewart, head of Cambridge's First Church Shelter, ridiculed Kerry for backing a "bigoted, ill-conceived and punitive" plan. Wright said many activists believe Kerry's vote was influenced by the looming shadow of a potential 1996 challenge from Gov. William F. Weld, who pushed a statewide welfare crackdown.

Wright charged that Kerry, a Democrat, backed the GOP plan in hopes of defusing criticism from Weld that he's too soft on welfare recipients.

"Kerry has one eye on Weld," said Wright. "It's disgusting. He's afraid to take the heat from Weld. Activists are horrified by Kerry."

I guess that the ABB crowd is all too willing to back him despite this record, since he is not as evil as Bush. I'll have lots more to say about this down the road, but this was basically how the German people ended up with Hitler. As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the bourgeois parties will continue to shift to the right. Unless the left constructs an alternative, we will end up not with the "lesser evil" but the "greater evil". That is what history reveals.