“Whitman on Orthopraxy”

“Whitman on Orthopraxy”   May 19, 2019     Dr. Roger Ray

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"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".

- Walt Whitman (from the preface to Leaves of Grass)

We are obviously living through a very important and a very frightening time in American history when it seems that our nation is nearly hopelessly divided between conservatives and progressives and the conservatives are in charge; challenging the very nature of democracy and the integrity of our national character as well as our relationship with western democracies. In fact, this week,  German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said that “Europe must reposition itself to stand up to the challenges posed by its three big global rivals, China, Russia and the US.” Three years ago, no one would have dreamed of seeing the United States as a threat, let alone putting us on the list of global fascists states, but, no one less than Angela Merkel, whom many now refer to as being the leader of the free world, lists the United States with China and Russia. If that doesn’t break your heart, then I humbly submit, you just don’t understand how dire our circumstances have become. 

Still, I find myself talking back to TV news pundits who call this the worst, most polarized time in American history. It is bad. Maybe even the worst in a century. But it is not the worst. I say, over my morning coffee, to my unresponsive flat screen TV, “You guys have heard about the Civil War, haven’t you?” 

No matter how much hand-wringing we do over the humiliation of the Trump administration, the Civil War remains the high water mark for how bad things can get in the United States and I don’t think that we are headed for a Civil War because there doesn’t seem to be much organized resistance to this fall into depraved fascism that can sustain its attention and passion for more than a few days of outrage. 

I turned this week to a unique American voice who did live through the Civil War. Who was affected by scenes of the wounded and the piles of amputated limbs he saw when he went on a desperate journey to the battle front to find his own brother, who was, thankfully, only slightly wounded.  After the war, Walt Whitman held several government posts, dealing with Indian Affairs and then conducting interviews with Confederate soldiers for consideration for Presidential pardons. 

He wasn’t always a poet but he became a poet, as he tried to say what it was for America and Americans to be truly great. His seminal work, Leaves of Grass, was a collection he initially published out of his own wallet but, after it received the praise of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it became a classic, even though his brother, George, whom Whitman had risked everything to find in the midst of the war, reportedly described Leaves of Grassas not being worth reading. I feel ya, Walt, I have a couple of brothers like that. 

In the crucible of the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the transformation that resulted from the Industrial Revolution, Whitman made some important observations:

While we find ourselves shocked by the moral depravity and the embarrassing ignorance of our legislators taking away women’s rights, a federal executive who tweets out through humiliating bad grammar and childish misspelling, a constant stream of ignorant prejudice, Whitman realized that, as he writes: the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors  . . .  but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships—the freshness and candor of their physiognomy—the picturesque looseness of their carriage  . . .  their deathless attachment to freedom—their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean—the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states—the fierceness of their roused resentment—their Curiosity and welcome of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy.

Men and women, the Trump administration does not define who we are or what America is. The legislature of the state of Missouri does not define who we are or what Missouri is. Drawing on another genius whose insights were born in the crucible of war and unspeakable horror, the Jewish psychiatrist, Viktor Frankel, realized while in a Nazi concentration camp that:

 “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

I don’t really agree with Nancy Pelosi when she says that Donald Trump is not worth impeaching. Frankly, I’m not sure that he is good for anything else. 

If you cannot impeach someone like Donald Trump, what are we supposed to do with someone like that?

But I will tell you what Donald Trump is not, he is not important enough, he is not smart enough, he is not powerful enough, to change who I am, He cannot dictate to you who you are. Anger, cynicism, even surrender, morally present themselves to us almost every day, like the heroin, meth, or fentanyl, on the streets that people use to just check out of a reality they don’t want to be a part of. We are not in a Civil War and we are not locked into a concentration camp, but we are in the flow of a somewhat more insidious social evolution that has become a sewage ditch that we don’t want to swim in anymore. 

I hate that the legislatures in Georgia, Alabama, and Missouri are in a race to the bottom in taking away women’s most basic right, to manage their own bodies, but most of all that they are using the Christian religion, the crucible from which most of us emerged, they are using the Bible, the church, to justify the most vicious and dishonest legislative attack on women’s rights, but we will not be tarred by that bigoted and anti-science brush. But no matter how much they try to define, control, and dictate what it means to be people of faith, they cannot take away from us, who we are, what we believe, and what our spiritual identity is. 

This is, in part, the problem of orthodoxy over orthopraxy. . . of beliefs over practices. For every woman who voted in favor of these restrictive abortion laws, seven men voted for them. In all of these southern states, men maintain the overwhelming majority of seats. In Missouri, our legislature is 75% male, in some other southern states, it is more than 80%. Those these men are voting on their beliefs about women . . . many of whom have demonstrated that they know absolutely nothing about women’s physiology and have only a rudimentary understanding of where babies come from. 

Missouri always seems to take the cake when it comes to stupid, as we made 

national news again this week when Republican Rep. Barry Hovis, of Cape Girardeau, said in the chamber that most of the sexual assaults he handled before retiring from law enforcement weren't strangers "jumping out of the bushes"but instead "date rapes or consensual rapes."

Out of the shallowness of their character, they are voting their uninformed beliefs into law but let me be very clear about this point:  These white men are dictating their rights of women formally but they all know that it doesn’t apply to them and not just because they can’t get pregnant.

It is more that they know that they don’t have to play by the rules they lay down for others. Just this week, 65 year old, Pennsylvania Republican, Tim Murphy, resigned when his 32 year old mistress called him out on his anti-abortion votes when he insisted that she get an abortion to end a pregnancy that he caused. And it isn’t just Republican anti-abortion politicians. I am not going to name their names or show their pictures here because they are just too disgusting, but a quick Google search reveals dozens of cases of Catholic priests who constantly beat the anti-abortion drum, who pay for the abortions caused by their child molesting and romantic entanglements with nuns. 

Here is the final hypocrisy. If abortions are outlawed in the United States, the women who will not be able to obtain an abortion are the ones who cannot fly to Europe for the weekend or take a week off of work and drive to Canada. So, none of this applies to members of congress, or to the clergy, for that matter, not to anyone in the middle class or upper class. This only applies to women who can’t lay their hands on one or two thousand dollars. So these largely white, male, Christians can act pious in public but inside they are full of sewage. 

I can’t say it here, but someone say it for me, they are just full of . . . . 

As Mark Twain said: Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. 

I can’t tell you not to get mad, but I can implore you not to allow small people, people of low intelligence and even lower morality, to force you into becoming someone you don’t want to be and never chose to be. Now, they can have impact, but they can’t dictate who we are.

The last time I drove a young woman to an abortion clinic, it was a four-hour drive to Kansas City, Kansas. If I have to drive the next one to Montreal, I’ll do it. Because I will not allow the likes of Barry Hovis, nor any of his right-wing peers, to dictate unintended motherhood to any of our folks. 

A hundred and fifty years ago, Whitman predicted: There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. A new order shall arise, and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The new order Whitman refers to is, in a way, poets, but in a larger sense, it is thinking people . . . specifically, thinking Americans, who are not bound by ancient creeds of magical beliefs and values untethered to real life, but of a way of being that is honest, real, and full of virtue. 

I am inviting you to live above the swirling insanity of our time.

I will add my voice to Whitman’s and say:

"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 . . . "