TO FOREIGN LANDS
I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle of
the New World,
And to define America, her athletic democracy, Therefore I send
you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.
- Walt Whitman, in one of his “Inscriptions” to “Leaves of
Grass.”
The recent elections in the United States in which the both
candidates of the major parties were highly disliked has resulted in
immense uncertainty. No one knows what is going to happen. You could
see when the results started coming in on election night that the
professional commentators, “journalists,” pundits, media people –
with very few exceptions – had absolutely no clue. These
professionals made funny jokes with each other as it was happening,
witty and self-effacing remarks, but you could see that, underneath
all the phony wit, that they were adrift, and unworthy of their
paychecks.
One of my correspondents, a Mexican studying at a U.S. university,
recently wrote to me asking for my opinion of the elections, and all
I could write back to her at the time was that the only thing I can say with
certainty that there is deep uncertainty right now.
The place where I go next whenever I need to deepen my own sense and
understanding of the U.S. is the writings of Walt Whitman, rather
than any contemporary writer, or Alexis de Tocqueville or anyone in
between. Whitman “got it” comprehensively and in detail. I feel
safe in saying to a student or anyone outside the USA, that if you
can grasp what Walt Whitman is saying in Leaves of Grass and
in Collected Prose Works, you can understand the US. Both
books, incidentally, are available free to download from here
at the Gutenberg Project.
Sigmund
Freud, for all his
sophistication, said in
1909 that "America is a mistake; a
gigantic mistake, but a mistake,"
whereas Whitman really
knew the people
of the U.S. Whitman was
fired from his job at the
Department of the Interior in Washington
for publishing “Leaves
of Grass,” but you
have to go through that kind
of thing, deeply,
in order to understand
the essence of the U.S. The killings of Abraham Lincoln and Martin
Luther King, Jr. were very much central to the struggle in which the
US has always been engaged as
were the
struggles
to stop the Viet-Nam war and the invasion of Iraq.
So I have found myself reading a lot of Walt Whitman during the last
few weeks since the elections and here is the one passage that I
would share with you, from his “Democratic Vistas,”
written almost 150 years ago, in November 1868:
Once, before the war, (alas! I dare not say how many times the
mood has come!) I, too, was fill'd with doubt and gloom. A foreigner,
an acute and good man, had impressively said to me, that day—putting
in form, indeed, my own observations: "I have travel'd much in
the United States, and watch'd their politicians, and listen'd to the
speeches of the candidates, and read the journals, and gone into the
public houses, and heard the unguarded talk of men. And I have found
your vaunted America honeycomb'd from top to toe with infidelism,
even to itself and its own programme. I have mark'd the brazen
hell-faces of secession and slavery gazing defiantly from all the
windows and doorways. I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves and
scalliwags arranging the nominations to offices, and sometimes
filling the offices themselves. I have found the north just as full
of bad stuff as the south. Of the holders of public office in the
Nation or the States or their municipalities, I have found that not
one in a hundred has been chosen by any spontaneous selection of the
outsiders, the people, but all have been nominated and put through by
little or large caucuses of the politicians, and have got in by
corrupt rings and electioneering, not capacity or desert. I have
noticed how the millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are thus the
helpless supple-jacks of comparatively few politicians. And I have
noticed more and more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the
government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party
purposes."
Sad, serious, deep truths. Yet are there other, still deeper,
amply confronting, dominating truths. Over those politicians and
great and little rings, and over all their insolence and wiles, and
over the powerfulest parties, looms a power, too sluggish maybe, but
ever holding decisions and decrees in hand, ready, with stern
process, to execute them as soon as plainly needed—and at times,
indeed, summarily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in
the hour of their pride.
In saner hours far different are the amounts of these things from
what, at first sight, they appear. Though it is no doubt important
who is elected governor, mayor, or legislator, (and full of dismay
when incompetent or vile ones get elected, as they sometimes do,)
there are other, quieter contingencies, infinitely more important…
What is more dramatic than the spectacle we have seen repeated,
and doubtless long shall see—the popular judgment taking the
successful candidates on trial in the offices—standing off, as it
were, and observing them and their doings for a while, and always
giving, finally, the fit, exactly due reward? I think, after all, the
sublimest part of political history, and its culmination, is
currently issuing from the American people. I know nothing grander,
better exercise, better digestion, more positive proof of the past,
the triumphant result of faith in human-kind, than a well-contested
American national election.
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