From Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers, the 1955 edition from Pocket Books,
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.
* * *
This was written in 1942 by a young man of brilliant words, a brilliant thinker in the genre of Gore Vidal, another writer who can think things out with passionate and barbic words that should sting home a message, though obviously Philip's words were thrown in the trash and his "Momism" theory put up on a witness stand and grilled endlessly ignoring the true meaning of this viperish little book on a whole generation of vipers.
On this Memorial Day, we sit and are amazed at the pathetic tributes being forced upon us by the patriots of this country, men who draft-dodged and got their daddy's to keep them from having to do what they are forcing our young men and women to do in all of our names. I am ashamed to be an American today. You should be too. The "president" and all the male sluts in Washington that rule us are bent on a dictatorship, just like Philip Wylie warned in the last paragraph of the above reprint. Wylie's "Footnote on Mecca" asks why we can't move the seat of the government out of Washington, District of Corruption, where he says all the government buildings and momuments look like tombs in a rich man's cemetery. Hear! Hear! sayeth The Daily Growler. You know, have it like a moveable feast.
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