Of presidential candidates and Langston Hughes

There's an irony behind the irony of Rick Santorum accidentally borrowing a campaign slogan from Langston Hughes:

Santorum by and large stayed on message but was tripped up a bit when a student asked him if he knew that the choice of his slogan, "Fighting to make America America again," was borrowed from the "pro-union poem by the gay poet Langston Hughes."

"No I had nothing to do with that," Santorum said. "I didn't know that. And the folks who worked on that slogan for me didn't inform me that it came from that, if it in fact came from that."

The really funny part is that Obama's favorite trope about America, his constant recourse to the paradox inherent in the phrase "a more perfect union," is embodied, in a bitterer vein, in Hughes' poem.

Let America be America Again. is a poem of fathomless pain, an anthem of the excluded. It begins with a pious, nostalgic wish that meets a harsh (anonymous) counterpoint:

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)