Arizona Daily Star: “President Bush’s re-election campaign insisted on knowing the race of an Arizona Daily Star journalist assigned to photograph Vice President Dick Cheney. The Star refused to provide the information.”

Great way to unify the votnig blocs, George! Now pass us all some of dem white trash sweetmeats!

In response to a request from Edith Wharton to produce a poem for her 1916 anthology, The Book of the Homeless, WB Yeats took the opportunity to issue a general put down to poets who get involved in politics. In On Being Asked For a War Poem, he advocates a policy of conscientious inaction, suggesting that “a poet’s mouth [should] be silent”, and claiming, rather bombastically, that “We have no gift to set a statesman right”. While there is scope for a charge of hypocrisy – a performance of Yeats’s nationalist play Cathleen ni Houlihan at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin was later credited with sparking the Easter Rising – Yeats’s message is clear: politics and poetry don’t mix.

John Kerry, apparently, does not agree. The presidential hopeful who yesterday gave his address to the Democratic national convention has adopted Let America Be America Again, the title of a 1938 poem by American poet Langston Hughes, as his official campaign trail slogan. What’s more, in case anyone missed the point, he has gone on to quote extensively from the poem in his campaign speeches. When announcing his choice of John Edwards as running mate at a rally in Pittsburgh, for example, he chose to round off his speech by proclaiming the association between his position and aims and those of the poet. To resounding cheers, he said:

“Langston Hughes was a poet, a black man and a poor man. And he wrote in the 1930s powerful words that apply to all of us today. He said ‘Let America be America again. Let it be the dream that it used to be for those whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, for those whose hand at the foundry – something Pittsburgh knows about – for those whose plough in the rain must bring back our mighty dream again.’ “

The Guardian on John Kerry & campaign trail poetry. Elsewhere, Slate‘s Timothy Noah is less than pleased with this adoption, saying that Kerry–in his preface to a newly published book featuring the poem–is willfully misreading and performing “a whitewash” (pun intended, you betcha) on the Stalinist vision Hughes was espousing. Here’s Kerry:

It was in that climate that Langston Hughes, Black America’s unofficial poet laureate, wrote his powerful poetic lament, “Let America Be America Again.” While it is the litany of the great promise of opportunity that has drawn so many of the world’s disaffected to our shores, the poem is also a call to make that promise real for all Americans—especially for the descendants of slaves.

Not unmindful of the duality of meanings, I was drawn to incorporate the words of the poem in my 2004 presidential campaign, because it reminds us that America is a nation always in the process of becoming, always striving to build “a more perfect union.” We must not forget that African Americans and women were written out of the Constitution before they were written in.

Now Noah:

Chatterbox applauds Kerry’s political message, but as lit crit, this is a whitewash. What “duality of meanings” is Kerry talking about? The poem has only one meaning: America’s golden promise is hooey. It’s hooey for blacks, it’s hooey for the farmer, it’s hooey for the Native Americans. It’s hooey for the entire proletariat. Time to seize the means of production!

Jeez, Noah. Trying switching to decaf or maybe looser underwear. You want to go back to the dark days of Reagan’s Born in the U.S.A.? Well?

The Rake has the scoop on the DFW essay in this month’s Gourmet. Apprently, it deals substantially with animal rights. And Rake says it kicketh ass.

[UPDATE: We somehow managed to pick it up while running from one meeting to another. We read it last night at some ungodly hour, shortly after watching a grainy feed of John Kerry’s speech (feels like 1956 again!), and laughed ourselves silly over Mr. Wallace’s solid thinking on the animal rights question (in part, because we too have avoided eating lobsters for the same reason — that and because of a real hellish childhood experience which we won’t go into). In short, we concur with the Rake. The essay is among one of DFW’s best and, as Carrie rightly suggests, it may represent a new direction in DFW’s writing. We also picked up the latest issue of The Believer, which we hope to respond to in depth under a new feature called BELIEVER WATCH, an effort to come to terms with our strange prejudice w/r/t the Eggers/Vida/Julavits question (though clearly not as bad as Clifton’s). Our immediate impression is that we approve of the ancillary details included with the book reviews. But we’ll weigh in probably several weeks from now with a more informed and thorough take. Perhaps too, because of the recent DFW read, we’re also taken with long update paragraphs in lieu of actual posts. Of course, there is only so much time. Q.E.D. We apologize for engaging in this pretentious and flagrant stylistic aside, but we’re damn giddy because things are coming together in the most amazing way, which strikes us as a fantastic final week with which to exit our twenties.]

[ALSO: Mark is a sexy MF. Please remind him of this posthaste.]

So Uncle Tony’s seen that pipsqueak’s latest column. Tony figures he can cut the column in half. So here’s the column without the bullshit:

Life. Shit happens. Something we’ve known for a while. Been meaning to write about Big Country. Today is Thursday.

Caught the band back in the ’80s, don’t know when. Loved the clip of ’em chasing chicks in Scotland. So I got me their first album. Distinctive sound. Guitars as bagpipes. Serious shit.

The lead singer Stuart Adamson wrote about Old Scotland, paying attention to old values. All the songs were panoramic, even the love song “1000 Stars.”

The inner sleeve kicked ass. Black and white. Cool compass. What was this? Songs about the land. I felt transported. Even the videos submerged you in another place. Big Country had balls. They were unapologetically corny, unlike U2.

Big Country came when synths put guitar gods on the dole. Spaceship rock. Corny music. Of course! Neat, polished, spoonfed, little, yellow, Nuprin. Order. Easy listening. Like fasces. But we like.

Fortunately, Big Country. Difference. Good times. The Epic Album. The Crossing. Nough said.

Became a fan. Black man with Scottish accent. Goofy! Forget the music. Consider their plaid-shirt image.

So I wore flannel, bitch. Was I Scottish? Years later, was I black?

Live shows good. “I just want to say…” over and over. Then music. Cute.

No more U.S. hits. Change of fashion. And nobody remembers Big Country, despite Adamson’s suicide. Former manager blew me off.

No moral here. Join us. And if you don’t, you’ll commit suicide like Adamson because you disagree with me.

Good stuff with Zoe Heller.