William Kristol says that "Democrats Should Read Kipling". He bases his recommendation on George Orwell's 1942 essay, "Rudyard Kipling". Kristol responds to the House Democrats' hesitation to sign-off on the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA), by taking a ludicrously bold position and advancing Orwell in support of the surveillance act.
He suggests that Orwell and Kipling would have approved the Bush administration's unfettered surveillance mission -- although more realistic reaction to the juxtaposition of Orwell and the Bush administration might be apoplectic brain stem activity -- 1984!1984! 1984!".
Kristol trots out the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Attorney General, a former federal judge, the director of national intelligence, and a retired Vice Admiral, who he says approve of surveillance. But the titles are identical to previous casts of discredited characters -- the ones who slam-dunked the US into Iraq, couldn't remember the facts and never meant to mislead Congress. And they're here to warn us blandly that "surveillance abilities are important to our national security"? Republican, Democrats and citizens agree. That's not the issue.
In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, Andrew P. Napolitano, a former New Jersey Superior Court judge and FOX commentator, wrote in "The Invasion of America", that since 1978, the government has been allowed 99% of its FISA applications. The current provisions would allow unfettered surveillance of phone or e-mail conversations if one of the people was a foreigner. He said:
"Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all "persons" and all "people" implicated by government behavior....If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?"
FISA was approved by the Senate and the House continues its debate. To address the controversy, Kristol tracked down Orwell's essay on Kipling (a response to T.S. Eliot's essay) "in a used-book store -- in the Milwaukee airport, of all places". Fortunately for readers, they need not venture to a used-book store in Milwaukee as our intrepid columnist did, they can read Orwell's essay on the internet ("the World Wide Web", as it were).
Orwell observed that Kipling was often used for "quotations parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning." Indeed, that seems to be Orwell's own plight as well. Kristol clips sentences from Orwell's essay to cobble together his threadbare argument: Democrats should support FISA because the Republican party has been in power so long that only they understand how to rule the country.
Kristol gets off to a rough start using Orwell's oft-quoted comment that Kipling's writing was '''morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting'''. He brazenly edits Orwell's sentence, which actually read: "jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting" (emphasis mine). Kristol says Democrats should be more like Kipling, who -- and he carefully selects another snippet of text -- "at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like".
So does Kristol intend to suggest that Democrats toady the administration with "jingo imperialism" like an early 20th century children's story writer -- or dare we suggest, like some columnists at the New York Times? Should Democrats kowtow to those who like to "think of themselves as the governing party "(emphasis mine)? Or are those in the "ruling power" the "jingo imperialists"? Quoting the sentence out of context as he does, Kristol leaves plenty of room for readers' interpretations, but distorts rather than elucidates Orwell on Kipling, (via T.S. Eliot, the impetus for Orwell's essay).
Kipling can't be scissored and dressed up like a little paper doll in patriotic neoliberal red white and blue trousers. Kipling was not some caricature scribe, but a paradoxical and contradictory writer whose views of England and its empire changed over time.
Edmund Wilson, Sara Suleri, W.H. Auden, Salman Rusdie, Edward Said, TS Eliot, and many more have studied Kipling's contradictions, nationalism, imperialism and racist attitudes. One biographer, David Gilmour wrote in "The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling, of "his early role as apostle of the empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline." Kristol lauded Kipling for "identif[ying] himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition." But this was not Kipling, who often wrote from the perspective of the non-rulers.
Christopher Hitchens wrote a review of Gilmour's political biography in the June, 2002 issue of The Atlantic, called "A Man of Permanent Contradictions". Hitchens characterized Kipling as a deft marketeer: "his entire success as a bard derived from the ability to shift between Low and High Church, so to speak." Hitchens quotes Kipling's poem "If", which seems to recognize of the need for political versatility:
If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same...
...If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings -- nor lose the common touch ...
In keeping with Kipling's literary fate of being widely adapted by all parties, the poem was a favorite of "José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spanish fascism, and of President Woodrow Wilson. It was apparently written in honor of Leander Starr Jameson, a British colonial pirate who led an aggressive raid into Boer territory, precipitating the horrible South African war", Hitchens points out. I suppose its a complementary tradition then, that Kristol adopt Kipling as a neoliberal mascot.
But jingo imperialist he may have been, Kipling also embodied a stoicism and sense of military duty that's unfamiliar to much of the ruling elite today. When his son was denied commission into the army, Kipling pulled strings so he could enlist. As Hitchens writes:
"Ultimately, Kipling's two greatest literary and emotional attainments - the ability to evoke childhood and the capacity to ennoble imperialism - contradicted themselves too flatly and painfully, and culminated in the shattering sacrifice of his beloved son, John, on the Western Front in 1915. This was enough inner contradiction for several lifetimes."2
For all the variably scathing and favorable analysis, the pondering, questioning, loathing and admiration, Kipling remains enigmatic. He celebrated the empire, but foresaw its decline. Writes Hitchens; "To those born or brought up in England after 1914, let alone 1945, the sense of a waning day is part of the assumed historical outcome. It was Kipling's achievement to have sounded this sad, admonishing note during the imperial midday, and to have conveyed the premonition among his hearers that dusk was nearer than they had thought." The poem "Recessional", as quoted by Hitchens, warns of the Empire's demise:
On dune and headland sinks the fire --
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!"
Orwell wrote that while Kipling celebrated empire, he chaffed at its failings, saying: "He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it...The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing."
Kristol blurs Orwell's meanings and Kipling's complexities and contradictions. He grasps at Kipling's legacy and crafts a familiar Republican myth for loyalists. Ever the party scribe, Kristol draws Democrats as "refined people who snigger at the sometimes inept and ungraceful ways of the Republicans". Adept himself at fiction, Kristol charges that Democrats, once they controlled the Congress, "ensured that [Bush] couldn't turn those failures [in Iraq] around." This brand of subterfuge masking as patriotism is not Kipling's, nor should any of us continue to embrace it.
Perhaps Kristol attempts to reach beyond 1980's history, the worn cowboy hat and stirrups of the Reagan figurehead, but the plot is the same. Whose nightmare/dream is this? I'm not drawing any parallels between the US and British empires -- an analogy that would be as perilous as Kristol's -- but it's no longer morning in America.
Kristol attempts to sketch, a lovable and omniscient administration, a clan of sometimes bumbling but honest and well meaning folks, bible loving people just like you and me, who know what's best for us and happened upon power by the love of God (and the Supreme Court). They do not exist. What Kristol hails is a cold, organized machine with profiteering corporate intentions for Iraq and frighteningly little regard for the Constitution, you or me.
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1 Here is the full text of Orwell's book about Big Brother, "1984".
2Hitchens himself seems to strive for the complexity of contradiction, especially since 2002 when he wrote this. Last year he penned an essay on the death of a 21 year old soldier killed by an IED in Iraq. The young soldier was persuaded to enlist by Hitchens' writings on the moral case for military service.---------------------------------------------------
Acronym Required previously wrote on immunity for telecoms, and FISA. We also wrote on Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and mongooses.
