Hypocrisy And Vice Poem by gershon hepner

Hypocrisy, the homage virtue pays to vice,
is less offensive than the dark insidious ways
of vice disguised as virtue trying to entice
the innocent to go where sheep should safely graze.


Stephen Vizinczey, author of “In Praise of Older Women” writes an article about Goethe in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 12,2000. He says that Goethe’s Faust tells a wickedly false story. Having made a pact with Mephistopheles, Faust takes everything but ends up in heaven. “This notion, ” says Vizinczey, “had more to do with the educated classes’ support for Hitler than all the works of Nietzsche….Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Dr. Faustus’ makes pact with the Devil and in the end is carried off to hell. And that ahs made a difference for the subsequent development of English and later American literature and perhaps even of politic. Marlowe’s point has become a truism in our culture.” Goethe’s vilest crime was denigrating Heinrich von Kleist, “the young genius whose eight stories say more than in fewer words than any other work in Western literature”. Kleist committed suicide at the age of 34. When Vizinczey was asked whether he would have preferred Goethe to die young rather than survive to ripe old age as a result of his mendacity and hypocrisy he replied: “Well, yes.”

11/12/00