From the back cover of Isaac Gewirtz's I Am With You: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass: 1855-2005

"...the golden thread of Whitman’s intention: that a new American man and woman might join him on a 'perpetual journey' of self-realization, discovering along the way that 'All truths wait in all things.'"

This "golden thread" is the deep charter of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic--not what Mr. Springsteen has termed the "Badlands" (i.e., the country we live in), but what he has termed the "Promised land" (i.e., the "America we hold in our hearts"). The country we must continually struggle to "achieve," as Richard Rorty so sagely expressed it (alluding to James Baldwin).

The perpetual journey of self-realization is the soul-craft that will continually re-invent the American experiment. The two journeys are, as a practical matter, intimately inter-related. And as we continue to limp along with an out-dated 18th century Federal Constitution and a self-defeating two-party system that is securely in the hands of the Plutocratic War Party, determined (as it is) to "naturalize" the permanent war economy, we must heed N. O. Brown's call to abandon politics (as usual) in favor of "metapolitics"--the Whitmanian road to soul-craft, and soul-craft to nationhood.

With each passing year I become more and more convinced that Leaves of Grass is the reason for America (USA). I am teaching myself how to live Whitman. How to cultivate a large sense of life. How to reach out to others--to be expansive as it were. To achieve "love's body" hoping for the day when that body becomes the body-politic.

And whoever has been blind in this life, will be blind in the next (Q 17:72). Whoever is incapable of finding their way clear of the culture of fear induced by the governmental and corporate purveyors of "soft" terror shall wander endlessly in the wilderness and be barred from entering the longed-for Canaan-land.

Why Lawrence?

Because D. H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, wrote what may be the single most insightful essay on Walt Whitman yet composed. Next to Lawrence, I place Roger Asselineau's 2 volume study, The Evolution of Walt Whitman, and next to Asselineau, Henry Miller's brief essay "Walt Whitman," collected in Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.

Mirabile dictu, it took an Englishman to appreciate Whitman's great struggle to read Emerson aright and, in the process, to re-invent the American experiment as "soul-craft"--where "soul" is none other than the body "accomplishing herself" as what Norman O. Brown would later term "love's body."

Of Whitman, Miller would write: "He is worldly through and through, yet serene, detached, the enemy of no man, the friend of all. He possesses a magic armor against wanton intrusion, against violation of his being. In many ways he reminds one of the 'resurrected' Christ" (Miller, 108).

And so he does. He is Lawrence's "escaped cock," the "man who died," and "the Risen Lord." And he is pre-figured in the Qur'an as ibn as-sabilah, the "son of the road," the "wayfarer," the "passer-by," and in all Gnostic speculation that claims the resurrection has already occurred for those who have eyes to see.

The African-American Muslim intellectual Sherman A. Jackson offered a very interesting twist on these themes in his book Islam and the Blackamerican (see his notion of "immanent spirituality" in that book).

By collecting these broken threads, one can begin to imagine a way forward for an original American religiosity that looks beyond the present impasse of sect and creed. But we are a long way from that.

The Invisible Whitmanian Republic Recognizes 9/11 as an International Holiday

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at what is now 8a Victoria Street, Eastwood, near Nottingham, the fourth of the five children of Arthur John Lawrence (1846-1924) and his wife Lydia (1851-1910).

Architects of Native Radicalism

In addition to its "founding fathers," the Invisible Whitmanian Republic stands on the shoulders of intellectual giants whose writings inform the critical tradition that Professor Rick Tilman has termed "native radicalism" (see Tilman's 1984 intellectual biography of Wright Mills published by Penn State University Press: C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and his American Intellectual Roots). The IWR looks to a broader (and more eclectic) group of thinkers than Tilman includes in his "school," but the Whitmanian republic is not a sect: it is an intellectually promiscuous and robust attempt to revitalize the tradition of native dissent under the present American regime of a perpetual war economy and the world empire it seeks to establish.

Pictured from top left: Thorstein Veblen, Economist; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Historian; G. H. Mead, Philosophical psychologist; Emma Goldman, Essayist and activist; Richard Rorty, Public intellectual; John Dewey, Educator and public intellectual; C. Wright Mills, Sociologist and theoretician.

Founding Fathers of the Invisible Whitmanian Republic

From top to bottom: Walt Whitman, Bard; Martin Van Buren, Jacksonian democrat; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wise man; Norman O. Brown, Psychologist; Seymour Melman, Economist; George S. McGovern, Jacksonian democrat; Thomas Jefferson, Enlightened aristocrat; Andrew Jackson, Flawed giant; Noam Chomsky, Linguist.