Thanks for pointing out this defect!

“Since inequality of income is greater now in the U.S. than at any time since the ferocious 1890′s; since the executive branch is arrogating more and more powers to

it muster the forces to aid the victims of natural disaster in our own country, having so squandered our resources else where and for lies, it seems

appropriate to quote these lines from Whitman’s DEMOCRATIC VISTAS, published in 1871:

‘I would alarm and caution even the political and business reader, and to the utmost extent, against the prevailing delusion that the establishment of free political institutions, and plentiful intellectual smartness, with general good order, physical plenty, industry, etc….do,of themselves, determine and yield to our experiment of democracy the fruitage of success…Society, in these States, is canker’d,crude, superstitious and rotten. In any vigor, the element of the moral conscience, the most important, the verteber to State or man, seems to me either entirely lacking or seriously enfeebled or ungrown.

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 of 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 appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. …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, etc., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage…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, maladministration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashonable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims , or no aims at

all, 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 today sole master of the

field. The best class we show, is but a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulagarians…’

Whitman knew what he was talking about. He worked in government offices in Washing D.C. from 1865 until he was incapacitated by a stroke in 1873. Maybe it’s time we took a good look at ourselves.”

Rosanna Warren

….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… – Walt Whitman

“This is what you shall do:

Love this earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone 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”……..Walt Whitman

I believe in you, my Soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you;

And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat;

Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best;

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning;

How you settled your head athwart my hips, and gently turn’d over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth;

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own;

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers;

And that a kelson of the creation is love;

And limitless are leaves, stiff or drooping in the fields;

And brown ants in the little wells beneath them;

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, and heap’d stones, elder, mullen and poke-weed.

I like this, thank you.