The Khaki Man's Burden

All you Masons out there, take heed! This Bud’s for you.

           

Outside – “Sergeant! Sir! Salute! Salaam!”

Inside – “Brother”, an’ it doesn’t do no ‘arm,

We met upon the Level an’ we parted on the Square,

An’ I was Junior Deacon in my Mother-Lodge out there!

So wrote the young Rudyard Kipling, pictured to the left.

I like to think that some good can come out of any disaster. That was certainly true for one Kipling-esque film. Anyone remember a cinematic bomb the size of Nagasaki called Heaven’s Gate? I won’t go there in detail. If you want the details, treat yourself to a copy of a spiffing book by the Medved brothers called Hollywood Hall of Shame and read the jaw-dropping details of the fiasco. But I was living in L.A. at the time, going to film school. I remember the t-shirts that started popping up that said, “Relax – you could be selling Heaven’s Gate.”

What’s relevant here is that the film was such a piece of crap, it left a couple thousand theatre owners across the nation literally holding their genitals in their hands, with nothing on the screen after it was pulled from release by United Artists following its disastrous premiere. I mean, film critics, grown men and women, were throwing food and making barfing noises. I’m talking disastrous premiere.

As fate would have it, a little indie film from Australia was making quite a splash then. It was called Breaker Morant. It deserved the splash it made. Suddenly those empty screens were showing a film worth seeing about a folk hero to the Australian people. And in the 1980’s, the era of Miles O’Keefe, a good film was newsworthy. 

It was a true story, based on the autobiography of one of the only survivors, Lieutenant George Witton, called appropriately enough Scapegoats of the Empire. For a long time after the movie came out, fans clamored for this book, which was expensive and difficult to lay hands on, though now I’m happy to say it’s more available; you can even get a Kindle copy for a lousy four bucks. It’s a heart-breaking film, a soul-searing examination of the ethics of war, and what constitutes a murder in that context. Do not make the assumption that it is either over your head or boring. It is neither. You’ll be having flashback memories from it for days.

It was a play before it was a film, and in all its incarnations it tapped into a deep vein of resentment of British rule in Australia. Aussies were rough riders when you needed them, and savages when you’d done with them. My father fought his way across the Pacific in World War II, in every hell-hole imaginable, and though he rarely spoke of the war, he often spoke of the huge contingent of Aussies with which he served. He loved them, and always dreamed of going to Australia. He spoke often of their down-to-earth goodness, their wit and their gallantry, but most of all of their complete contempt for the authority of their British officers, a thing the Amerians found shocking. Dad said the Americans were far more likely to obey one of their orders. Strange they never had a revolution, as we did.

The film also made the compelling British actor Edward Woodward a major star, as he deserved to be. He played the character of Harry “Breaker” Morant, soldier, horse-breaker, poet, Renaissance man. His poetry is read here and there throughout the film. It was at the time just becoming known, not only in Australia, but faraway Britain, as well. It simply reeks of Kipling, being of the same period, for the period in question was 1901, the war in question being the Boer War, two separate revolts of Dutch farmers in South Africa against British rule that occurred between 1880 and 1902. Another one of those “Just what in bloody hell are we doing here anyway?” wars so common in the last two centuries. It will make you turn to your Kipling again, and not just for his most beloved and remembered poem, If, still wonderful, still rich with beauty and truth. Over the course of the last century, when manhood was something expected of a man, little leather-bound copies of If were often tossed into Christmas boxes and birthday cards by parents and grandparents anxious for their boys to grow up with courage and an ethical framework for life. This is not to say that American men aren’t the greatest guys in the world, but the fact is, you don’t see it much nowadays.

But the other night, by chance, I turned to my Kipling for another reason. You see, Christopher and I happen to live in the Library of Congress. I have extrapolated the weight mathematically from our last move and concluded we are sitting on about 6.5 tons of books, on 27 bookcases. Christopher roused himself to go out of the house once during his last round of chemo. It was when he found out that the Borders up the street, where we had practically lived, was closing, and selling off their bookcases. Eyes alight with an Oxycontin glow, he bought an entire wall of them for a pittance, with ladder, and sign above that says “Literature,” then he hired the best carpenter in Indiana, Mike Kelly, to install them on either side of our fireplace. I had my misgivings, but God, it’s so cool. It comforts me for the loss. And for the first time in my adult life, I have more than enough bookcases for the books I own, a startling state of affairs.

And so, using my own Dewey Decimal System, I’ve been slowly rearranging our books by topic, room to room. Yesterday, unable to bear any more news of the Middle East, I did my poetry section, and came across my Kipling, sadly falling to pieces. Instead of finding a rubber band, I ordered a new copy, something I do rarely now, since we’re watching every penny in the Age of Obama. As I picked it up to put the broken spine back together, my eye fell on a poem that no one, and I mean no one, is allowed to read anymore. It’s called The White Man’s Burden. Need I say more? 

Actually, yes I do. Was Kipling a racist? No, he was not.

In fact, being what he called Anglo-Indian, just as Swift called himself Anglo-Irish, Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent most of his life in India, was a huge admirer of their culture, and wrote many of his best stories about it, including The Jungle Book. But try convincing a knee-jerk reactionary teacher of our arid, oppressive PC age that when he said “white man’s burden,” he was speaking metaphorically. Of course he lived in a world of general ofay dominance; what idiot would argue otherwise? But he was talking about The West.

He no more meant white skin than he meant Viking when he wrote this line from another famous, and still painfully relevant political poem: “We’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.” Another poem Mr. Obama and the Congress might take a peek at.  

For many a Freemason, Kipling is the Fountainhead, the artist who wrote The Man Who Would be King, and this is enough. My Christopher has fallen a bit behind the typical Mason, having only screened the epic John Huston film version with Sean Connery and Michael Caine 47 times. But he’ll catch up. 

However, if nothing else proves Kipling’s high ideals on race, it was his Masonry. His poem The Mother Lodge, quoted above, is a love letter to the racial, religious and class freedom of Freemasonry. The whole point of the lines is that what one is outside the Lodge is one thing, but inside he’s simply Brother. Of course, PC’ers would have to dig for this info, and in fairness the poem is tough slogging in places, riddled with that individual British slang sometimes incomprehensible even to the British, for it was the slang of those who’d served in India, and it came thick, fast and constant.

But the theme of the poem, even without a copy in your hand of the Oxford English Dictionary, (Praised Be Its Name) is easily understood. It begins as he walks through the town, greeting brothers of every race and religion, “Bola Nath, Accountant, An’ Saul the Aden Jew, An’ din Mohammed, draughtsman, of the Survey Office, too.” He doesn’t miss Amir Singh the Sikh or Castro the Roman Catholic, either. Meanwhile he reminisces poignantly, “I wish that I might see them, My Brethren black and brown, With the trichies smellin’ pleasant an the hog-darn passin’ down.” You see what I mean about the slang. “Trichies” were cigars, and though “hog” was slang for a shilling, in this case “hog-darn” means the lighter. The dropped h’s don’t help.

But you don’t need a degree in linguistics to understand this part:

We ‘adn’t good regalia,

An’ our Lodge was old an’ bare,

But we knew the Ancient Landmarks,

An’ we kep’ ‘em to a hair;

An’ lookin’ on it backwards

It often strikes me thus,

There ain’t such things as infidels,

Exep’, per’aps, it’s us.

Obviously a close-minded racist bastard. Another dead white guy with his foot on my neck!

Sorry. I had a Sandra Fluke moment there.

What most people don’t know is that the poem White Man’s Burden was addressed, not to his fellow Englishmen, but to America, one more argument against its being racist, since he was fully aware of our melting-pot status. In fact he married an American, and lived in Vermont for a few years. The poem was a warning over our interference in the affairs of the Phillipines. It was a flashing neon sign cautioning us not to become the world’s policeman, the saps of the globe, for it would gain us nought but hatred.

Sitting on my step stool, I read it once more, for the first time in decades. And whether you credit this or not, I began to cry. I saw our dead soldiers in Afghanistan, murdered by the very people they hoped to aid. Anyone remember the sorry joke from the first Gulf War? How do you get a thousand Republican Guards in the back of a van? Throw in a peanut butter sandwich! Once the initial push was over, our troops spent more time feeding and giving medical aid to the Iraqis than they did killing them. Not to mention the roads, schools and mosques we’ve built in Afghanistan, while our own roads and highway bridges crumble. Or the hundreds of billions that Bush the Plentiful poured on Africa to fight AIDS, and later malaria and TB, saving untold millions of lives. 

I saw the Towers falling. I saw the Arabs in Gaza, on whom we’ve dumped billions, dancing in the streets afterwards, handing out candy. I saw the sad remains of the Pentagon, across the street from my hotel when I attended that September’s Bouchercon convention with three hundred other idiotic writers, flying two days after the ban was lifted. Picture Reagan airport absolutely empty. I saw the images of Egyptian thugs carrying anti-American signs, in English (does that strike anyone else out there?) screaming their vile hatred, burning our flag with the matches we paid for. And along with the tears, I shook with rage. It was all so true, and so damned inescapable. It will doubtless remain true, until the American Age passes. By then I’m sure their civil war will be over, and we can let Sudan pick up the ball.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

Send forth the best ye breed –

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild –

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

And hundred times made plain,

To seek another’s profit,

And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

The savage wars of peace –

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch Sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

No tawdry rule of kings,

But toil of serf and sweeper –

The tale of common things.

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go make them with your living,

And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard –

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah, slowly) toward the light:

‘Why brought ye us from bondage,

Our loved Egyptian night?’

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

Ye dare not stoop to less –

Nor call too loud on Freedom

To cloak your weariness;

By all ye cry or whisper,

By all ye leave or do,

The silent, sullen peoples

Shall weigh your Gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s Burden –

Have done with childish days –

The lightly proffered laurel,

The easy, ungrudged praise.

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgement of your peers!

But we brought democracy to Iraq. Didn’t we?