Saturday, April 16, 2011

Rick Santorum Hearts Langston Hughes

By Miss Kubelik

See, this is what happens when you home-school: You don't know jack about anybody except people who look and act and think like you.

How do we cats know? Because ThinkProgress has caught right-wing Republican has-been Rick Santorum, who thinks he should be President, cribbing from Langston Hughes.

Ricky and his ignorant team of wet-behind-the-ears Christian campaign nobodies decided that it would be really neat if he adopted the slogan "Fighting to Make America America Again" for 2012. Gee, we thought. That's offensive. It sounds so much like the perennial teabagger whine of "We want our country back!" Or that Ricky thinks the U.S. needs to be snatched out of the evil, grubby hands of a mixed-race (and decisively elected) Democratic President — before the nation is irretrievably despoiled and besmirched.

But guess what? That "slogan" takes a whole 'nuther meaning when you consider its original context — a brilliant poem by Hughes, who was African-American, a sometime Communist, and probably gay. Here's part of it (emphasis added):

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America
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...

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

Hm. Doesn't sound like the kind of sentiment Rick Santorum would go for, does it? And clearly it's not — since he's spent most of the past two days trying to disassociate himself from his own slogan. "I had nothing to do with that," he lamely protested.

Oh, Ricky, Ricky, Ricky... As Tom Coburn would say, you got some 'splainin' to do.

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