I’ve admired Walt Whitman as a poet par excellence; all the more because he conformed to my strong bias towards Emerson. Origins of Attempted Secession is a nice reflective piece of political literature; always contemporary, it contains something for societies residing in any turn of time.

The essay is Whitman’s contemplation of the American War of 1860-65 as not–as is commonly perceived–the South Vs North war but

…a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity—perhaps the only terms on which that identity could really become fused, homogeneous and lasting.

The contemporaneity of especially these lines is stark.

Let me give a … list, of one of these representative conventions for a long time before, and inclusive of, that which nominated Buchanan. [..] One of these conventions, from 1840 to ’60, exhibited a spectacle such as could never be seen except in our own age and in these States. The members who composed it were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-train’d to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruin’d sports, expell’d gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal’d weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr’d inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlots’ money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.

A more or less accurate description of the “leaders” that comprise our Parliament. Writes Whitman:

I say that the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth terms of the American Presidency have shown that the villainy and shallowness of rulers (back’d by the machinery of great parties) are just as eligible to these States as to any foreign despotism, kingdom, or empire—there is not a bit of difference.

Whitman must have met or heard about the likes of Lalu, Shahbuddin, and Jayalalithaa. On the issue of social problems:

The perfect equality of slavery with freedom was flauntingly preach’d in the north—nay, the superiority of slavery. The slave trade was proposed to be renew’d.

In much the same way as our present day worthies scream about the evil caste system but go back to their constituencies and win precisely on a caste plank.

Read the whole piece.