5 day forecast
Santorum slogan an odd choice of words
Share with others:
As part of the settlement of a $1 million copyright infringement suit, former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist recently apologized to musician David Byrne for the unauthorized use of the song "Road to Nowhere" during his unsuccessful U.S. Senate race last year.
Mr. Crist's groveling went viral on the Internet last week, sending chills down the backs of politicians tempted to snatch bits of cultural relevance for their often doomed campaigns without securing permission from the artists or compensating them.
Perhaps that explains the faster-than-light-speed with which former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum disavowed his own presidential campaign slogan. That was after its similarity to Langston Hughes' poem "Let America Be America Again" was pointed out to the conservative Republican by a mischievous literary scholar in the press pool.
Lee Fang, a young reporter for the progressive Internet blog Think Progress, had the following exchange in New Hampshire with Mr. Santorum, who was famous for bashing homosexual rights when representing Pennsylvania in the Senate:
Fang: Today you unveiled your new campaign slogan "Fighting to Make America America Again." But was it intentional that this line was borrowed from the pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes?
Santorum: No, because I had nothing to do with that so --
Fang: Oh, all right, thanks. Wait, did you have a clarification there? Was it just a coincidence?
Santorum: I didn't know that. The folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that that's where it came from, if in fact, it came from that.
Fang: Do you like Langston Hughes? Is he a favorite poet?
Santorum: I've read some of his poems. I'm not a big poetry guy, so I can't say I have a favorite poet, sorry.
Although Mr. Santorum missed an obvious opportunity to name-check Jesus as his favorite wordsmith, he lost no time in putting as much distance between himself and the suspicious world of poetry and the Harlem Renaissance as he possibly could.
When asked by another reporter about the slogan, Mr. Santorum gave Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl a run for his money as most hapless Republican of the week: "Well, I'm not too sure that's my campaign slogan," Mr. Santorum said. "I think it's on a website."
You think it's on a website? As of Monday, the slogan was still on Mr. Santorum's main site -- the same site potential donors access to send cash to his doomed presidential campaign.
Because dead poets like Langston Hughes aren't as vengeful as live rock stars, what accounts for Mr. Santorum breaking land-speed records in denying he had anything to do with the selection of his own campaign theme?
It couldn't be something as picayune as the "gay" thing, could it? After all, literary scholars are still divided over whether Hughes, who died in 1967, was gay despite having written plenty of homoerotic verse in his day.
Mr. Santorum wasn't aware of that when he was asked about the slogan in New Hampshire last week. Still, he responded like someone who was about to come into contact with another kid's "cooties" when told his campaign slogan might be descended from a dead, black, left-wing, union-sympathizing (and possibly) gay poet. He was really freaked out by it.
Still, Mr. Santorum admits to having read some of Hughes' poems in the past. Perhaps it isn't unthinkable to imagine that he's come across this excerpt from Hughes' 1938 poem in his wanderings:
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 green states --
And make America again!
I'm no literary scholar, but this sounds like something a conservative Republican could support, too.
First Published April 19, 2011 12:00 am
