Horizon

Here's further coverage from yesterday's SF Chron.

That's a perfectly damn well appropriate, hopeful and inspiring poem, and calling it "Stalinist" is about as fair as using that tired epithet for the 40-hour work week or the shocking practice of teaching poor people how to read and write. Good ideas don't become bad ones just because people who also had bad ideas might have once shared them. This is a nasty article, exhuming old guilt-by-association nonsense that I thought we'd left behind in the moldy graves of inquisitors like Cartha DeLoach. I'm frankly sick of attempts to revive the worst of the 1950s, and apparently so is the Kerry campaign.

Artistic considerations aside, any citizen of a democracy who has a problem with a poem being in favor of social equality has a little explaining to do. Since when was the happy endorsement of social stratification an admitted American founding principle? I grew up being told that the advantage of fresh new America over cruel ossified Europe was our "classless society." So was I in the jakes when suddenly the celebration of Victorian-scale class differences became the governing principle of my country? Frankly, the more Americans criticize this poem, the more they prove its criticisms true, and the more they show that those closing lines are right in inviting us to hope for better.

I'll add a little advice of my own to John Kerry and the Democrats -- don't accept any "helpful advice" from commentators who pretend to wish you well but want you to be scared, pinched little bureaucrats running away from the strong old main flow of American democracy for fear that being in favor of democracy might sound too scarily Jacobin to the Tories at Fox News.

Leaving the higher moral issues aside, I do have to wonder - given the sentimental patriotism of the average American voter - whether it's politically wise to associate oneself with a poem that summarizes the last 200 years of US history as "the rack and ruin of our gangster death, the rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies." I mean, even you can't help but slip in something about the 'strong old main flow of American democracy', something Hughes' poem arguably rejects.

It's not new news that things aren't as good as they might be. Seems a pretty obvious & hence unobjectionable sentiment, in fact.

The poem doesn't say that. It says that things have never been any good at all.

Ridiculous. Anyone inclined to accuse Kerry of cozying with Stalin for using that line would never have voted for him in the first place. Tim Noah needs to find a hobby.