Beforee I answer you let me tell you that I am missing this bit below between the lines, it should be posted above somewhere, I will edit it in the sequence later.
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The Sins Of the Fathers.
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The kid was paying for the sins of his mother's fathers
She was a woman with issues
He was her son
maybe four or five years old
he used to love breakfast
he looked so happy when she gave him his bacon and eggs
He is in his twenties now and hardly ever eats breakfast
and I wonder if he rembers when he lost his appetite
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Okay now back to your question
Would I mind if you posted a poem here?
You must be joking, here is probably more information than you wanted.
The Generation of Vipers was a major book of the forties and fifties, none read anymore. It is mentioned in Plath's poem The BabySitters
O what has come over us, my sister!
On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get
We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups' icebox
And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read
Aloud, cross-legged on the stern seat, from the Generation of Vipers.
So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted ---
A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,
Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing
But ten years dead.
you can read the whole poem
Here
Here is a long scroll from an article about The Generation of Vipers from the Washington Post.
'Generation of Vipers' Loses Its Bite
By Jonathan Yardley
Saturday, July 30, 2005; Page C01
An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.
In the spring of 1942, a writer named Philip Wylie left Washington and went home to Miami Beach "after a stretch in 'government war information' -- ill, discouraged and frustrated." He sat at his typewriter and began to vent about the "cancer of the soul" with which he felt his fellow countrymen were afflicted. Fueled with anger -- and, one likes to imagine, several quarts of 100-proof Old Mencken -- he let fly. Here's a sample:
Nobody escaped Philip Wylie's howling wrath, not even moms. (By E. Allen Becker -- Doubleday)
"Washington is . . . 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 confusion 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."
On and on he rolled, a veritable Mississippi of bile, churning out word upon word to a total of some 100,000, just about every one of them quivering with rage -- though whether real or simulated rage remains unclear to this day. From May 12 to July 4 he hammered away, and by January 1943 the result was in the bookstores: "Generation of Vipers," published by Farrar and Rinehart in an edition of 4,000 copies, "a number commensurate with sales of my previous books and one I thought high for the current treatise." Those words were written by Wylie in December 1954 in his introduction to the book's 20th printing, by which time it had sold more than 180,000 copies and stirred a furious national debate.
Small wonder. If there was a single group that Wylie failed to offend, its name is not recorded. Businessmen, doctors, scientists, preachers, the military, boosters, statesmen, professors -- whack! whack! whack! He demolished each and every one. Most particularly, and most famously, he demolished "mom" and the "momism" that was his coinage for the worship accorded to her. Here's a tiny taste of what he did to her:
"Mom . . . is a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. She is about twenty-five pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a hard backhand which she does not regard as a foul but a womanly defense. In a thousand of her there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. She nonetheless spends several hundred dollars a year on permanents and transformations, pomades, cleansers, rouges, lipsticks, and the like -- and fools nobody except herself. If a man kisses her with any earnestness, it is time for mom to feel for her pocketbook, and this occasionally does happen."
Wylie was convinced that momism was yet one more manifestation of the madness into which America had descended by the 1940s, but he was a pretty wild and crazy guy himself. Born in 1902 in Massachusetts, educated for a while at Princeton, he seems to have been one of those WASPs who claim proprietary interest in the country and lament what everyone else has done to it; I know the type well because I'm the son of one. He was a successful screenwriter and novelist, specializing in science fiction. His two best-known novels, both published in the 1930s, are "When Worlds Collide" and "Gladiator"; the latter is commonly understood to have been a main influence on the Superman comic books, which shared Wylie's admiration for the superior being in a world of weak mediocrities. He worked away at fiction and nonfiction until his death in 1970, but though several of his novels are still in print and read by sci-fi enthusiasts, it is for "Generation of Vipers" that he is best known.
I first read it in the 1960s, when I was in my twenties. During the 1950s, like a great many other Americans, I had admired the many books that took a critical view of American society -- "The Lonely Crowd," by David Riesman and Nathan Glazer; "The Power Elite," by C. Wright Mills; "The Organization Man," by William H. Whyte; "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," by Sloan Wilson; "The Hidden Persuaders," by Vance Packard -- and eventually turned to "Generation of Vipers" because it promised to be in the same mold, albeit of an earlier period.
Picking it up again after four decades, I remembered little about it except (of course) mom and a general atmosphere of splenetic outrage. As it turned out, "Generation of Vipers" did not come through a second reading in very good shape. The spectacle of someone making an absolute fool of himself is always enjoyable, so watching Wylie put himself through these ridiculous paces was amusing, but "Generation of Vipers" is warmed-over H.L. Mencken with only occasional hints of Mencken's wit or perspicacity. Along the way Wylie says a few smart things, but give a chimpanzee 100,000 words and one or two of them are likely, against all odds, to make a bit of sense. Mostly the book is high-octane twaddle, fun to read but incapable of withstanding close scrutiny.
You can read the rest of it
here
The bit about the Yggdrassill I don't know why yet.