David Brooks on America's pluralist identity, etc.

...In a world of radical pluralism, we are all Jews. We have no choice but to build a mass multicultural democracy, a society that has no dominant center but is a collection of creative minorities.

Nearly 200 years ago, Tocqueville wrote that democracy was creating a new sort of man. Pluralism today is creating a new sort of person, especially among the young. They don’t just relish diversity; they embody it. Many have mixed roots — say, half-French/half-Dominican. Many are border stalkers; they live between cultures, switch back and forth, and work hard to build a multiplicity of influences into a single coherent life. They’re Whitmanesque, containing multitudes, holding opposite ideas in their minds at the same time.

Radical pluralism also necessitates retelling the nation’s history. We’ve always been a universal nation, a crossroads nation, a nation whose very identity is defined by the fact that it is a hub for a dense network of minorities and subgroups, and the distinct way of life they fashion to interact and flourish together.

I used to think that America had to find a new unifying national narrative. Now I wonder if not having a single national narrative will become our national narrative. nyt
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And speaking of Walt Whitman...

The Song of a Nation
Whitman at 200

This year we celebrate the two-hundredth birthday of Walt Whitman; and by “we” I mean all of us who take conscious pleasure in speaking American English. Whitman invented a poetry specific to this language and open to the kinds of experience, peculiar to democracy in a polyethnic society on a vast continent, that might otherwise be mute. Public events commemorating the bicentennial include three summer shows in New York—at the Morgan Library, the New York Public Library, and the Grolier Club—that touch on the story of his life. There are books, manuscripts, prints, photographs, audio and video elements, and relics—at the Public Library, a lock of his hair, and, at the Grolier, snips that may be from his beard. The shows are excellent of their kind: informational and evocative, about remembering. But I don’t much care for them. They have unavoidably cultish auras, akin to celebrity worship; not that Whitman would have minded, he having been a shame-free self-promoter who ghosted rave reviews of “Leaves of Grass” and played to his sappy popular image as “the Good Gray Poet” (less good if brunet, less gray if bad?). Such exhibits are to poetry as museum wall texts are to art works—supposedly enhancing but often displacing aesthetic adventure.

I recommend observing the occasion at home, or on vacation. Sit down with a loved one and read aloud two poems: the miraculous “The Sleepers” (1855), in which Whitman eavesdrops on the slumber of multitudes, alive and dead, and interweaves dreams of his own—at one point joining a merry company of spirits, of whom he says, “I reckon I am their boss, and they make me a pet besides”—and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865), his epic elegy for Abraham Lincoln, in which the President isn’t named, even as his loss interpenetrates nature, symbolized by the unearthly song of “the gray-brown bird,” a hermit thrush. (I’ve gone online to hear its call: a melancholy arpeggio, repeated at different pitches.) In either case, see how far you get before you’re in tears, then pull yourself together and continue to the end. Reading Whitman silently enriches, but hearing your own or a partner’s voice luxuriate in the verse’s unhurried, insinuating cadences, drawn along on waves of alternately rough and delicate feeling, can quite overwhelm. That’s because your voice, if you are fluent in American, is anticipated, pre-wired into the declarative but intimate, easy-flowing lines. It’s as if you were a phonograph needle dropped into a vinyl groove... (continues)