Books Worth Reading: Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas

Does this sound familiar?

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. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. 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....

To me, the description is not unfamiliar even if the phrasing is a bit askew. Walt Whitman wrote his Democratic Vistas after the Civil War. I read it after college, I was twenty-two (if my dilapidated memory serves me correctly) and it has been in the back of mind ever since.

I suppose someone can argue that Whitman's vision for American democracy can find itself reflected in the neo-con view of American power adopted by George W. Bush. I will say any such connection between Whitman and the neo-cons is the same between wine and vinegar.

Take the time to hunt it down and read it. I doubt there was ever another so enthusiastic about America's potential who refused to allow us to become the neighborhood bully.

You can find a copy online here and at Democratic Vistas: And Other Papers.