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.