Make America, America Again

By Ian C. Dawkins Moore

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian C. Dawkins Moore
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005441692

Ian C. Dawkins Moore

Ian C. Dawkins Moore was born under the sign of Aries in the year of the Tiger. He survived a British boarding school, the jock world of football hooliganism, hitch-hiking across the Sahara desert, and the two-tone culture of American racism. He is the published author of over 20 books, and he can still see the funny side of life- Be Well & Enjoy!

Book preview

The shining city on the hill, a concept borrowed from the British Colonialists, never sat particularly comfortably with the American Republic’s early days. Many advocates of that fine phrase were the first to abandon America at its independence and abscond to Canada. The succeeding 246 years have not seen that concept successfully applied to the sprawling continental nation that is America today.

For one thing, the nation of the United States has no mutual concept of nationhood. By that, I mean there is no singular national unifying concept or mutual sacrifice that binds the country together, except an idea.

America is a continental nation spanning contrasting climates, landscapes, cultures, and people. To identify a singular concept binding the landscapes and people of Alaska and New Orleans, Texas and New York, or Florida and Oregon, is to realize that this diverse collection of inhabitants has nothing in common except an idea.

The idea is that all men (and women) are created equal, and that (their) creator endows them with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No other nation in the world has such a bold statement as a part of its constitution. No other country dares to believe that every man and woman can and should be free.

America began as an experiment in human cohabitation. For it now to assume that only some of its citizens should be free and others are not flies in the face of its god-given historical role or, as Otto von Bismark put it: God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.

The following collection of essays, songs, and poems offers a cross-section of the sustaining ingredients of what makes America great. It’s cultural diversity. America’s outrageous historical experiment that began in the 18th century – fueled by the European enlightenment movement - has long since expired, as much because the caliber of characters that set our nation in motion no longer exists and the overwhelming abundance that this land has yielded, and the power it has given us to acquire more than 33% of the world’s resources, even though we are only 5% of the world’s population.

What has and does sustain America today is not our politics nor our institutions – although they continue to offer a practical way forward. No. The sustaining attribute, that will be remembered long after our current batch of narcissistic politicians is dead, will be our culture. The names of Muhammad Ali, Jim Reeves, Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, Katharine Hepburn, Louis Prima, Frank Sinatra, Paul Robeson, Marilyn Monroe, Billy Wilder, Serena Williams, Chuck Berry, Maya Angelou, The Mills Brothers, Miles Davis, and many, many, many more will long be remembered and revered as Americans who carried the torch of freedom.

All these artists flourished in America, like nowhere else, because of America’s diversity. The true American spirit is to give everyone a break and an encouraging hand if they want to contribute to the magnificent culture that has become America. We are currently engaged in a technological revolution transforming our daily lives. This revolution could only happen in America because it is so big, inclusive, and fueled by people with a vision for the future who want progress – not digression or devolution.

The following essays, songs, and poems express my hope that we will recognize the value of our ever-expanding national culture. Today's political tight-rope acts will soon be replaced by others, just as meaningless and self-serving. America’s true patriots understand that the beauty of America is in the richness of our diversity and our faith in our providence.

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

Langston Hughes (1938)

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.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed -

Let it be that great strong land of love

Where never kings connive nor tyrant’s scheme

That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,

Nor freedom in this homeland of the free.)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?

And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek -

And finding only the same old stupid plan

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,

Tangled in that ancient endless chain

Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!

Of grab the gold! O grab the ways of satisfying need!

Of work the men! Of take the pay!

Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.

I am the worker sold to the machine.

I am the Negro, servant to you all.

I am the people, humble, hungry, mean -

Hungry yet today despite the dream.

Beaten yet today -- O, Pioneers!

I am the man who never got ahead,

The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream

In that Old World, while still a serf of kings,

Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,

That even yet its mighty daring sings.

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned

That made America the land it has become!

O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas

In search of what I meant to be my home -

For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,

And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,

And torn from Black Africa’s strand, I came

To build a homeland of the free.

The free?

A dream still beckoning to me?

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, Indian, Negro, 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.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose -

The steel of freedom does not stain.

From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,

We must take back our land again,

America!

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 past,

The rape and rot of graft, the stealth, and lies that

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 great green states -

And make America again!

ISLANDER ASHORE

"Ships coming from a distance carry everyone’s dreams ashore.

For some, they slip in with the eddies of the tides. For others, they

crash against the rocks of poor fortune. Each brings their new song

of freedom, coming to America."

Zora Neale Hurston

When I first visited New York in 1981, stumbling over the stacks of garbage on the corner of Fifth Avenue, I was amazed by the cloying coexistence of poverty and wealth. I later discovered that the City was going broke and that New Yorkers were betting on the City’s demise.

Years later, when I flew into San Francisco, I was greeted by quite the opposite spectacle. My wife’s sister picked us up in her 500 SL Mercedes and ferried us through a kaleidoscope of dazzling billboards advertising everything from gambling in Reno to humanitarian aid in Darfur. My in-law deposited me at Lake Merritt, the pride of Oakland’s American-African bourgeoisie. I had to pinch myself to believe the opulence was real.

It was real. The American-African community of Oakland, California, is probably one of the wealthiest Black communities in the world. The skyline houses that look down from the redwood hills of the East Bay are not the exclusive preserve of whites, as is often the case in many neo-colonial lands.

The sun-drenched Mediterranean climate hosts one of the most diverse communities in America. Yet beyond the mortar and bricks of their homes, American Africans own very little of the wealth of this fertile region.

On my arrival in Oakland, I learned that the City scorned the City on the other side of the bay. Oakland’s population used to be more than sixty percent American-African, but that number has now shrunk by almost half. The racial tag is stuck, condemning Oakland to second-class citizenship.

This abuse only highlights the cruel irony of history; Oakland was the celebrated start of the Trans-Continental railway, which brought Easterners to the gold of the Sierra Mountains. The fame of the whoring town of ‘Frisco had spread too wide for the truth to be known—that San Francisco was just a stop-over on the way to far more rewarding adventures elsewhere.

However, it was not until I began working with Americans that I saw the people behind their facades. Stripped of a reason to care, people often don’t. Settled people become addicted to their immediate gratifications, and their interest in others becomes disturbingly absent.

The perfect lifestyle of the American public persona is a veneer that fools nobody, at least someone new to the country, eager to dig beneath the surface. The American lifestyle, tied to credit and debit, and the obsession with crime make coming to America a feast on dreams of fabled opportunities and harsh, demoralizing realities.

My first encounter with authentic Americana came after I pounded the streets for a month looking for a position comparable to that of an engineer, which I’d been in London. An agency interviewer told me in no uncertain terms that I could not hope to get a position that would allow for vertical mobility as a black man.

American racism strikes foreigners with such bold frankness that, on first impression, it comes as a relief from the hypocrisy of the British class system. Yet, the acceptance of conflicts among racial groups in America is so prevalent and reveals an attitude of bitterness that it chokes every fiber of the nation’s structure with its mutual detachment. Nowhere is disdain for one’s fellow citizens, a fundamental part of the American psyche.

Most startlingly, it is the attitude of victimhood American Africans pride themselves on being history’s most prominent victims. As if no other group—of any color—could Have suffered as much. Explaining the thousand-year-old war between the Scottish and the English to an American African is to be reduced to absurdity.

I was finally saved from the grip of this consuming racism by the guiding hand of patronage; in the land of the brave and the free, it’s not what you know but who. My wife’s cousin just happened to be on the local school board. He found me a position as a janitor at a junior college, where I eventually worked for four years.

During my apprenticeship, my African American supervisors took more than two years to summon the nerve to have a conversation with me beyond What’s ‘appenin’? It took me some time to realize that, as a black Englishman, I frustrated most African Americans I met because I didn’t fit neatly into any of their boxes of cultural identity.

The confusion I was causing reminded me of when I first filled out a visa form to come to the USA. I grappled with questions of ancestry and religion and wondered if any of my distant relatives committed crimes for which they escaped conviction. Finally, what was my race? I resisted this attempt to be made a racist until compelled by the American bureaucracy to view myself as a one-dimensional human being.

My accent set me apart, and my attitude upset my supervisors. In social interactions, too, the accent drew attention. I found myself subject to a wide range of responses: people staring at me, mouths agape, people storming out of the room, muttering, who is that nigger, women approaching me and asking me to just say something. In the former, I lost no sleep; in the latter, I learned to live with it.

After these teething times of acculturation, a process everyone goes through in learning another culture, the vibrancy of American-African life in Oakland swept me up. The bubbly familiarity of American-Africans is an intoxicant to the newcomer, mainly when that newcomer has come from European tradition and considers any display of emotions uncivilized. For a black man who had lived in isolation and cultural persecution in England, America represented a land flowing with milk and honey.

Seeing prosperous black people strolling the streets was enough to get my heart pumping with feelings of pride and self-worth. The daily acknowledgment of American-Africans for each other in the streets introduced me to a brotherhood I’d not known before.

The encouraging expressions of warmth in the language instilled an emotional bond that resurrected my wounded soul. It seemed that the American-African world of the East Bay was just a kiss away from paradise. Yet, as a black individual who traveled around Europe, and the Middle East, and lived in Africa, I found my assimilation into American-African culture complex.

Firstly, it seemed that America binds all people of color to its knee-jerk fight for survival without necessarily knowing what was in the best interest of a given individual. This prejudice has left American-Africans blind to a global consciousness and other alternative solutions to individual liberation.

People of color understand that they are the victims of discrimination worldwide. It is understood that those who discriminate (The Man, The Whites, Them, etc.) are heartlessly seeking the one thing they can never possess— the humanity of their victims.

When American Africans play their game of hate and bitterness, they deliver what they seek and ensure their slavery to their oppressors. Thus, when American-Africans use derogatory words to describe each other, they are not inventing a unique cultural language; instead, they