"Wait a minute... This sounds like Rock and/or Roll..."

In my readings about The Oneida Community I resisted the urge to drink any Kool-Aid and continued along with my research of this tantalizing cult. Rather that mimic what my wonderful and brilliant fellow students have already explained about The Oneida Community, I will take this opportunity to jump straight into my thoughts about it. I was baffled by their ideas of Jesus' return having already happened and their Garden of Eden that was to be created. They were just about 120 years to early for In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida to be their theme song. Creating Heaven on Earth or something even better? You'd need to be something out of this world to think that you could achieve that. All of my reading left me with bad tastes in my mouth as I read about Complex Marriages and the attempts to breed "perfect" children. I was wickedly reminded of Warren Jeffs, Jim Jones, and all of the other Religious commune, cult, "for-the-good-of-man" leaders out there. And I posed the same question that I always ask... Why would anyone in their right mind follow along with this?

Today, this question has gravitationally pulled me in the direction of Walt Whitman. As I swam through my thoughts and re-examined various lines of Song of Myself I came to my own conclusion that Whitman would have been disgusted with The Oneida Community. WHile I couldn' find any definite answers for myself on the internet I stand by my own views that Walt Whitman would have set himself apart from this community. While he may have agreed with some of its views such as free love and being free of sins in a perfect type of world, he would have been against various other views in the community. One  view being the one that grosses me out the most: the introduction of sex to immature males and females by overly matured males and females. I Don't believe this would have been cool with Whitman as he would have seen the obvious wrongness in this. This was something very impure and most certainly would have repulsed someone as self-proclaimingly pure as Whitman. While the idea of being married in a large group as a joined one would have been captivating to a man of the world like Walt, the fact that the marriages were only between man and woman would have thrown Walt off. This does not signify unity and oneness, but rather adds to the divide between male and female. I think this would have been a major turn-off to Whitman.

And so as I close another blog post and close my various opened tabs on my browser I say to you that while Whitman wrote of purity of mind and soul and being one with nature and one with each other, the ways of The Oneida Community are not what he meant. Had Whitman been alive throughout the decades from his time and ours he might be telling us to "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" and sang about A-Gadda-Da-Vida rather than his triumphant Song of Himself. Perhaps Whitman's idea of Paradise contrasts The Oneida Community's and his writing of Song of Myself is his way to display this. 

Iron Butterfly even seemed to have a cult following with their hit as can be seen by the sweating and manic citizens of Springfield. Their cult: I-Ron Butterfly!