Have You Ever Kippled?

When I recycled a 2004 post (the Kipling poem "Hymn of Breaking Strain"), Peni had this to say in response:

"Kipling is an excellent example of how impossible it is to label people accurately. He is often perceived - with reason - as a type of the racist right-wing bastard. Yet the man who wrote "The White Man's Burden" also wrote the stirring environmentalist anthem, "The Beaches of Lukannon" (See Jungle Book II). If he were alive today he might be a neoconservative, or he might not. The point is, he *isn't* alive today and can only be viewed in context of his own times and personality, not in the context of our times and preconceptions. Sorting people into limited categories gets us nowhere. Learning about the complexity of humanity by reading people like Kipling gets us the everywhere.

"Take what you need, and leave the rest."

I would go even further than that. Kipling was a racist by some criteria, but he was also steeped in a genuine multicultural tradition, and he had an obvious and sincere respect for non-English people, and for working-class English, for that matter. And, yes, for "lower animals".

Kipling wrote "If", which seems to say that all it takes is a stern will to carry on and not break, but he also wrote "Breaking Strain", which definitely said that there was such a thing as too much stress for a human being to bear, and each of us has a different breaking point.

Kipling wrote
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
but his next couplet shows that he meant the exact opposite of what most people think he meant:
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!
which is perhaps what he was referring to when he wrote
If you can bear to see the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools

Hmmmm. I hadn't intended it, but this post is now relevant to the discussion of misunderstood and misappropriated songs taking place at Pandagon, which I find interesting, although I think the case against "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" is overstated, when only one example of the controversial variant can be cited.

//The Magic 8-Ball says, "My lips say 'no', while my eyes say 'read my lips."\\