Walt Whitman

Whitman said “Resist much, obey little.” And, “Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.” And,

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

He said not to argue about God, but I read this on a Whitman t-shirt too: “God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.”
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What Holds America Together

David Brooks, 3.19.18

Last week I went to Houston to see the rodeo. That rodeo is not like other rodeos. It’s gigantic. It goes for 20 days. There can be up to 185,000 people on the grounds in a single day and they are of all human types — rural ranchers, Latino families, African immigrants, drunken suburban housewives out for a night on the town.

When you are lost in that sea of varied humanity, you think: What on earth holds this nation together? The answer can be only this: Despite our differences, we devote our lives to the same experiment, the American experiment to draw people from around the world and to create the best society ever, to serve as a model for all humankind.

Unity can come only from a common dedication to this experiment. The American consciousness can be formed only by the lab reports we give one another about that experiment — the jeremiads, speeches, songs and conversations that describe what the experiment is for, where it has failed and how it should proceed now.

One of my favorites of these lab reports is Walt Whitman’s essay “Democratic Vistas,” published in 1871. The purpose of democracy, Whitman wrote, is not wealth, or even equality; it is the full flowering of individuals. By dispersing responsibility to all adults, democracy “supplies a training school for making first class men.” It is “life’s gymnasium.” It forges “freedom’s athletes” — strong and equal women, courageous men, deep-souled people capable of governing themselves.

Whitman had hoped that the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s sacrificial death would bring the nation together. But instead there was corruption, division, demoralization and inequality. For Whitman, America’s great foe was feudalism, the caste structure of Europe that Americans had rebelled against, but that always threatened to grow back: “Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.”

Whitman feared economic and social feudalism, but above all he detested cultural and moral feudalism. He believed that writers, artists, musicians, poets and preachers were the real legislators of mankind, and in America they were detached from the nitty-gritty American experience. They still looked back to Europe — to the parlor, the perfumed courtier and the spirit of gentility — for their models of character, manners and education. They looked down on America’s democratic mass... (continues)