Walt
Whitman is thought by some to be the US's greatest poet, certainly
the most acclaimed expression of the nation's better spirit. What
follows is a fictional interview with Whitman, with the quotes drawn
from his 1871 Democratic
Vistas
(http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/whitman/vistas/vistas.html).
Obviously liberty is taken with the context, though not with the
text.
Mr.
Whitman, would you care to comment on the current state of affairs
existing in the US?
I
say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face,
like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there,
perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the
United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying
principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this
hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity
itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see
through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere
of hypocrisy throughout.
What,
in your opinion, stands behind the “hollowness at heart”?
From
deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is
already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue
department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment
to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate
frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity
of the business classes of our country is not less than has been
supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America,
national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and
departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption,
bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted.
The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable
robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid
amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill
time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the
one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's
serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making
is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.
Our
country seems bent on expanding its influence far and wide, imposing
its will on others. How do you view this?
I
say that our New World democracy, however great a success in
uplifting the masses out of their sloughs, in materialistic
development, products, and in a certain highly-deceptive superficial
popular intellectuality, is, so far, an almost complete failure in
its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary,
and esthetic results. In vain do we march with unprecedented strides
to empire so colossal, outvying the antique, beyond Alexander's,
beyond the proudest sway of Rome. In vain have we annex'd Texas,
California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It
is as if we were somehow being endow'd with a vast and more and more
thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.
And
your vision for the US?
The
true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a
more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general
comfort -- a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth. As the human
frame, or, indeed, any object in this manifold universe, is best kept
together by the simple miracle of its own cohesion, and the
necessity, exercise and profit thereof, so a great and varied
nationality, occupying millions of square miles, were firmest held
and knit by the principle of the safety and endurance of the
aggregate of its middling property owners.
But
surely other writers and thinkers share your vision of more
“universal ownership” and the “safety and endurance of the
aggregate”...
But
at present, (judged by any higher scale than that which finds the
chief ends of existence to be to feverishly make money during
one-half of it, and by some "amusement," or perhaps foreign
travel, flippantly kill time, the other half,) and consider'd with
reference to purposes of patriotism, health, a noble personality,
religion, and the democratic adjustments, all these swarms of poems,
literary magazines, dramatic plays, resultant so far from American
intellect, and the formation of our best ideas, are useless and a
mockery. They strengthen and nourish no one, express nothing
characteristic, give decision and purpose to no one, and suffice only
the lowest level of vacant minds.
Is
your vision attainable? Can it be more than a vista?
It
is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that
fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative
love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond
it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our
materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the
spiritualization thereof. Many will say it is a dream, and will not
follow my inferences: but I confidently expect a time when there will
be seen, running like a half-hid warp through all the myriad audible
and visible worldly interests of America, threads of manly
friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet, strong and life-long,
carried to degrees hitherto unknown -- not only giving tone to
individual character, and making it unprecedently emotional,
muscular, heroic, and refined, but having the deepest relations to
general politics. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as
its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be
incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.
But
the people do not seem attuned to your vision. They seem absorbed in
other matters. Do you envision a change of disposition?
It
really seems to me the condition, not only of our future national and
democratic development, but of our perpetuation. In the highly
artificial and materialistic bases of modern civilization, with the
corresponding arrangements and methods of living, the force-infusion
of intellect alone, the depraving influences of riches just as much
as poverty, the absence of all high ideals in character -- with the
long series of tendencies, shapings, which few are strong enough to
resist, and which now seem, with steam-engine speed, to be everywhere
turning out the generations of humanity like uniform iron castings --
all of which, as compared with the feudal ages, we can yet do nothing
better than accept, make the best of, and even welcome, upon the
whole, for their oceanic practical grandeur, and their restless
wholesale kneading of the masses -- I say of all this tremendous and
dominant play of solely materialistic bearings upon current life in
the United States, with the results as already seen, accumulating,
and reaching far into the future, that they must either be confronted
and met by at least an equally subtle and tremendous force-infusion
for purposes of spiritualization, for the pure conscience, for
genuine esthetics, and for absolute and primal manliness and
womanliness -- or else our modern civilization, with all its
improvements, is in vain, and we are on the road to a destiny, a
status, equivalent, in its real world, to that of the fabled damned.
You
seem wary of destiny, empire, and indifference to a common identity.
Even
to-day, amid these whirls, incredible flippancy, and blind fury of
parties, infidelity, entire lack of first-class captains and leaders,
added to the plentiful meanness and vulgarity of the ostensible
masses -- that problem, the labor question, beginning to open like a
yawning gulf, rapidly widening every year -- what prospect have we?
We sail a dangerous sea of seething currents, cross and
under-currents, vortices -- all so dark, untried -- and whither shall
we turn? It seems as if the Almighty had spread before this nation
charts of imperial destinies, dazzling as the sun, yet with many a
deep intestine difficulty, and human aggregate of cankerous
imperfection, -- saying, lo! the roads, the only plans of
development, long and varied with all terrible balks and ebullitions.
You said in your soul, I will be empire of empires, overshadowing all
else, past and present, putting the history of old-world dynasties,
conquests behind me, as of no account -- making a new history, a
history of democracy, making old history a dwarf -- I alone
inaugurating largeness, culminating time. If these, O lands of
America, are indeed the prizes, the determinations of your soul, be
it so. But behold the cost, and already specimens of the cost.
Thought you greatness was to ripen for you like a pear? If you would
have greatness, know that you must conquer it through ages, centuries
-- must pay for it with a proportionate price. For you too, as for
all lands, the struggle, the traitor, the wily person in office,
scrofulous wealth, the surfeit of prosperity, the demonism of greed,
the hell of passion, the decay of faith, the long postponement, the
fossil-like lethargy, the ceaseless need of revolutions, prophets,
thunderstorms, deaths, births, new projections and invigorations of
ideas and men.
So
you fear arrogance and locate greatness in humane values and a
renewal of ideas. Does not our electoral system, our system of checks
and balances give us some guarantee that we will not succumb to
willful arrogance and ensure the emergence of new ideas?
Did
you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for
politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there
that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in
the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs -- in
religion, literature, colleges, and schools -- democracy in all
public and private life... I have intimated that, as a paramount
scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. I do not
see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propagandists
or champions, or has been essentially help'd, though often harm'd, by
them. It has been and is carried on by all the moral forces, and by
trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all
the developments of history, and can no more be stopp'd than the
tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude
and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the
American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is
not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-receiv'd, the fervid, the
absolute faith.
So
you think...
For
America, type of progress, and of essential faith in man, above all
his errors and wickedness -- few suspect how deep, how deep it really
strikes. The world evidently supposes, and we have evidently supposed
so too, that the States are merely to achieve the equal franchise, an
elective government -- to inaugurate the respectability of labor, and
become a nation of practical operatives, law-abiding, orderly and
well off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task of America; but
they not only do not exhaust the progressive conception, but rather
arise, teeming with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher progress.
Do
you find this progress embedded in those steering the ship of state,
directing our institutions, or commanding our economy?
The
best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress'd speculators
and vulgarians. True, indeed, behind this fantastic farce, enacted on
the visible stage of society, solid things and stupendous labors are
to be discover'd, existing crudely and going on in the background, to
advance and tell themselves in time. Yet the truths are none the less
terrible.
Is
it possible that a better world lies ahead? Perhaps one more
democratic and-- in your words-- a
world with “a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth”?
We
see, as in the universes of the material kosmos, after
meteorological, vegetable, and animal cycles, man at last arises,
born through them, to prove them, concentrate them, to turn upon them
with wonder and love -- to command them, adorn them, and carry them
upward into superior realms -- so, out of the series of the preceding
social and political universes, now arise these States. We see that
while many were supposing things established and completed, really
the grandest things always remain; and discover that the work of the
New World is not ended, but only fairly begun.
******************
Whitman's
Democratic Vistas is a collection of rambling, often
disjointed observations about the US and democracy made nearly a
century and a half ago. While it hopes for future progress toward
noble goals, it well anticipates a process of decay, democratic
erosion, and the ill-effects of “the demonism of greed” fostered
by “business.”
His
expression of mindless conformity-- “generations of humanity like
uniform iron castings”-- is a memorable turn-of-phrase. His term
“scrofulous wealth” leaves little doubt of his contempt for
accumulation. And the wonderful words “hollowness of heart” are
arguably a counterpart to the idea of “alienation.”
Is
there any doubt that “universal ownership” and “safety and
endurance of the aggregate” count as an approach toward the idea of
socialism?
Yes,
the interview is fake. Yes, it rips quotes out of context. But it
highlights thoughts that demonstrate the unfortunate continuity of US
decadence, the course of a young nation traveling on the rails of
capitalism. Whitman's fears have been unfortunately exceeded today.
Zoltan
Zigedy
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