Carrol citing, Generations of Vipers, " again?
<URL: http://www.centerforbookculture.org/dalkey/backlist/wylie.html >
> ...Perhaps the most vitriolic attack ever launched on the American way of
> living--from politicians to professors to businessmen to Mom to sexual
> mores to religion--Generation of Vipersranks with the works of De
> Tocqueville and Emerson in defining the American character and malaise.
> Wylie's classic, written with devastating wit and a pen as sharp as a
> barber's razor, wages war on all forms of American hypocrisy. Remarkably,
> or perhaps not so, what Philip Wylie has to say rings as true today as
> when he first wrote Vipersin 1942, and no doubt it will continue to
> offend and outrage both the Left and Right. Harsh, bitter, and filled
> with venom toward those who have corrupted the America that "could have
> been," Generation of Viperswill be read with pleasure and indignation a
> century from now.
"A raging set of lay sermons about the human predicament as examined in
terms of 'you--your home and kiddies, mom and the loved ones, old Doc Smith
and the preacher, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Star-Spangled Banner--in
short, the American scene' plus the still uglier clutter backstage. Wylie's
high desire is to save the human race from its own worst enemy--itself."--
Time
"Wylie is a good showman, and he cracks his prose over his opinions like a
bull whip. His chapters on the common man and the common woman, sex,
science, professors, 'mom,' Cinderella and education are tumultuous
reading. Each reader will find a place where he will wince, but that will
be made up for by the places where he can laugh at his neighbor and read
passages aloud to his wife. . . . A helter-skelter book that is as full of
things that provoke laughter as it is packed with pages that induce
thought. Mr. Wylie wrote the whole thing at the top of his voice."--New
York Herald Tribune
"[Wylie] could give H.L. Mencken a run for his money as the most
opinionated person of the 20th century. Considering the world hasn't
improved much in the last 50 years, much of what he says has great
relevance today."--Library Journal
Excerpt>"Congressmen—with a Footnote on Mecca" from Generation of Vipers Philip Wylie
The colleges send to Washington little that has meaning to help govern the land. The people send even less. It is a waste of words here to berate Congress. The people are doing the job. In doing it, the people are indicting themselves, of course, for the men in our Senate and the men in our House of Representatives are, indeed, the representatives of the people. Each ribald hoot at the selfishness, the arrogance, the stupidity of our elected statesmen does not ricochet into nowhere, but bounces straight back, burning and sharp with inescapable consequence, into the bodies of the hooters: the citizens themselves, the voting public. The withered emasculation of our democratic statesmanship is the withered emasculation of America. The witch-hunting savagery of pompous male sluts in our national halls is that quality of all the people. The petty greed and relentless solicitation of these quasi males is our own. The sacrifice of power, of dignity, or responsibility, of national security and interest to a little patronage or the achievement of a trivial local profit is the measure of our universal loss of aim, purpose, moral worth, view, vision, integrity, and common cause. The appalling stupidity of these men, highlighted by the ferocious peril of these hours, is the exact measure of the stupidity of the people in our states, cities, towns, and villages. When we condemn them, which we rightly do with nearly every dispatch concerning their multifarious and nonsensical agenda, we condemn ourselves. When we say these men have abandoned their strength to the administration, because of pressure, we state how great has been our own eagerness to lay down the chore of civic duty and let an administration--or nobody--pick up and exploit our united strength. When we perceive that they are talking without knowing what they are talking about and doing without being able to guess the results of their acts, ignorantly busy giving unearned pensions and collecting unjust taxes, digging canals and having to fill them in, we are saying how little we, also, know or care about these matters. When we describe their pompous vanity and take exquisite pleasure in putting calipers on the immense littleness of their avarice, we are making records of our own littleness and avariciousness. When we see them knuckle to lobbies, abandon sense to the demand of minority blocs, weasel, quibble, and fail, we are watching the progress of a disease in ourselves, a democratic sickness, metastatic, and so far advanced that democracy may yet die of it--not because democracy was a mistaken plan for living together, but because the people have eschewed it out of their own greed and attached themselves to a bloc, to labor, to farms, to capital, to legionnaires, to pensioneers, to states, to congressional districts, to any of a thousand gangs within our democracy-- but only rarely to democracy. By putting this small mob fealty ahead of allegiance to all of ourselves, we have steadily moved closer toward the place when mobs will fight openly to rule us, and one of them, or a group of them, may win the foray. Then they will take to fighting among each other until it becomes necessary to appoint a dictator. If that is done, the wheel will have come a full turn and democratic man will again have lost his liberty, having spat upon it, abused it, laughed at it, neglected it, and so given it up because each individual man of him was not yet good enough for liberty. * * *
Last winter, in the first precious weeks of war, our Senate used three of them to argue the moral turpitude of one member. That is as sad a sight as this democracy has seen in a century. Many men in Washington know these things and are trying to lead the people out of them. But the people will have to be instructed out of them, if this is to remain a free state and a world where any freedom can exist. Otherwise there will come a benevolent despotism of bureaucracy and, since benevolence cannot be maintained by bureaucracy, but only by the will and vigilance of all the people, that, too, will fade away. Whoever uses power unwisely will be shorn of power. If we cannot elect men with sufficient education and honor even to try to be wise, we can number in a few score the years in which the elective power will remain ours. Liberty lives by morality alone--scientific morality, if you will. A country without complete candor is already enslaved. As a start, we might raise the pay of senators and representative high enough so that competition for the posts will be entered into by men who understand one of our symbols: money, and who are at the least able enough to get their share of money from this society, which, God knows, is not necessarily very able. Certainly the men who make our laws should be paid as much as the men who run our banks--since income is our first standard of excellence and since low-paid representatives lose such small values of prestige and respect as accrue to good pay, and more especially since our bankers can only break us, but our legislators can abolish the nation. We might also postulate minimal standards of factual education for our candidates so that government of ignoramuses would be impossible. Colleges being what they are, it would be asking precious little to require that a senator or a representative must have a college education, or its provable equivalent. But the educators still permit the display of maps in high schools; we might ask that much schooling. As it is, problems involving every science and every industry are being decided by men who cannot recite the multiplication tables. Small wonder our government has evolved into administration by appointed bureaucrats and away from government by the people's choices, since they have often shown themselves to be unable to attempt the task. The bureaucrats were necessary because government had to go on. But the only way by which the people can avoid a final passage of their powers and their rights into the hands of a person or a group of persons, now discernible only as inevitabilities and not in terms of names or titles, will be to elect representatives of their various political units who have the will, the knowledge, and the skill to govern all the people. There is, at present, no sign that any such fundamental premise exists in the heads of the electorate. Recent primaries for seats in the House and Senate have been neglected by as much as two- thirds of the registered voters in some states. It is asinine to presume that we can offer freedom of any sort to the world outside America, when we are steadily abdicating the basis of all freedom in our own communities. This, again, is a fact which has not been made apparent, evidently, to the Washington sachems, who continue to design great and statesmenlike plans for liberty and, at the same time, to usurp American liberty at every turn, not by any will of their own but because of public default. * * *
Washington itself, indeed, might be abolished where it is, and transferred to a new place. Sensible men everywhere in this land might well hope--and earnestly pray--that an enemy bomber flight would reduce it to sudden rubble and compel the move. The mere necessity of a physical regeneration of the government plant would so illuminate the present multiboggles and sophisma of our central government that changes for the better might be expected on a new site. The people who have been crying that government should be given back to them would thereby have one more chance to takeback the government, for the powers of government are always seized--either by the people for their own purposes or by tyrants, whether malevolent or delightful. The loss of the physical city of Washington would be a benefit not only to government, but to aesthetics, because it is unquestionably the ugliest city of any pretensions that a human civilization has yet raised up to scar and blemish the countenance of the planet. Here is a city without a plan that has reference to modern life, a city filled with every classical incubus of architecture, with a hundred brown boxes of buildings that grow like fungus in the midst of its proudest and most highly marbleized environs, a city without proportion or color or quality, a city from which lurch dingy thoroughfares strewn with staggering edifices that present every sullen, rococo, snarling, sick, noxious, and absurd form of vainglorious house and apartment architecture designed in the long decades of Victorian false front and the subsequent age of atrabilious brick to assuage the cheap passions of the middle class and the Middle West. Washington is in this, also, the stone symbol of rapacity converted to smugness, of tawdry imitation which is a condemnation of America as unoriginal and servile, as well as a revelation of the ghastly turn of our subconscious minds. This orgiastic claptrap has no honest meaning or no open purpose, and it is not livable. It is, rather, a smothering of the soul or a gallows boast, perfervid and florid--an unwitting confession of peewee excesses, of niggling lavishnesses, and of misapprehensions of the phony for the real and the swinish for the good. To abide in it composedly is to be either a lama beyond reach of all earthly things or perilously mistaken in the acceptance of slack composure as inviting, when it is hell's latchstring. All the topographical and physical dreadfulness of America is lumped here, with only the relief of a few façades, a dome or two, and the sterile square obelisk dedicated to the founder. It is a forever dug-up city on a dirty river, unrelated in position to other cities, detached from trade and science, and ridden with the most dank and melancholy climate on the continent. As cities must, it expresses the approach to life of most of those who stay in it, and sensitive men who get there are consumed with a will to find excuses for getting away. Only the center of this sepulcher is whited; the necrosis of the rest shows forth shamelessly all the yellows, greens, browns, putrid reds, and indecipherable purples which are the colors of decay. Without refinement, dignity, or a sense of itself either as an entity or a necessary expression of other than America's worst, it is a painted boneyard.* ***
*This portrait of our capital does seem a shade roguish, in retrospect. The reader will reflect that I had just left off working for the government and living in Washington. The portrait of congressmen given in this chapter, on the other hand, may seem to the reader extraordinarily accurate, timely, even prophetic--or as if written only yesterday. Let him consider then, that there's no miracle about it: the same words would have been appropriate to Congress in the administration of Lincoln, of Van Buren, of George Washington; and they must be the approximate substance of Eisenhower's last thought before he drops off to sleep each night.
-- Michael Pugliese
I got an axe-handle pistol with a graveyard frame. It shoots tombstone bullets wearing balls and chains. I'm drinking TNT. I'm smokin' dynamite. I hope some screwball start's a fight, 'cause I'm ready, ready, ready
Muddy Waters, "I'm Ready."