PhilPaine.com

And I did indeed read some Whit­man, just at mid­night. The first sec­tion of Leaves of Grass, “Inscrip­tions”, which of course starts with “One’s-Self I Sing”, and con­tains famil­iar poems such as “In Cab­in’d Ships at Sea”, “I Hear Amer­i­ca Singing”, “Start­ing from Pau­manok” and the superb “Song of Myself”. But among them I rel­ished one rarely cit­ed, and which I had for­got­ten: “To a His­to­ri­an”. To some­one like me, who con­sid­ers him­self both a his­to­ri­an and a Sci­ence Fic­tion writer, this one is par­tic­u­lar­ly appropriate.

You who cel­e­brate bygones,
Who have explored the out­ward, the sur­faces of the races,
the life that has exhib­it­ed itself,
Who have treat­ed of man as the crea­ture of pol­i­tics,
aggre­gates, rulers and priests,
I, habi­tan of the Allegha­nies, treat­ing of him as he is in
him­self in his own rights,
Press­ing the pulse of the life that has sel­dom exhib­it­ed itself,
(the great pride of man in him­self,)
Chanter of Per­son­al­i­ty, out­lin­ing what is yet to be,
I project the his­to­ry of the future.

Steve Muhlberg­er’s blog Muhlberg­er’s Ear­ly His­to­rylinked to this mov­ing pho­to arti­clein the Dai­ly Kos. For decades I’ve argued with peo­ple who thought they are being clever by not vot­ing, and who sub­se­quent­ly won­dered why they woke up in a world con­trolled by reli­gious wack­os and sleazy haters of free­dom. Well, it’s because they nev­er showed up at the polls, and the haters of free­dom made sure their min­ions did. The lame log­ic behind the “don’t vote, it only encour­ages them” notion was basi­cal­ly that, if your only weapon is a bow and arrow, and you are being hunt­ed by a some­one with a gun, you should throw away the bow and arrow. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty may not be a shin­ing bas­tion of rea­son and free­dom, but at the moment, the dif­fer­ence between it and the Repub­li­can Par­ty is rough­ly equiv­a­lent to the dif­fer­ence between the post-WWII democ­ra­cies and the Sovi­et Union. Remem­ber the nitwits who, back then, liked to talk as if the two were “moral­ly equiv­a­lent”? His­to­ry has turned them into jokes. Right now the last thing in the world a sane human being can claim is that the Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can par­ties are moral­ly equiv­a­lent. The con­trast is stark and irrefutable. Read more »