Bill Kristol today - "Democrats should read Kipling"

Bill Kristol's basis for decreeing thus? He "browsed" a 1942 Orwell essay about a T. S. Eliot edited anthology of Kipling's poetry.

So first thing to say is that there is no evidence Kristol himself has in fact read any Kipling. He's just read Orwell who is critiquing someone else's sampling of Kipling's ouvre.

Good start.

Helpfully, however, Orwell's essay is available on-line. And this is where Kristol's shallowness is plain to see.

On the understanding that Kristol "browsed" this essay, I take it he did not read the essay front to finish. In fact, given he quotes from only the first and final paragraphs of a 5,000+ word essay - indeed an eminently quoteable essay - this assumption seems rather well founded.

But anyway, let's play Kristol's game and "substitute Republicans for Kipling and Democrats for the opposition", and see where this leads. (Athough, seeing as throughout the piece Kristol is quoting Orwell as opposed to Kipling, there's a obviously question as to whether Kristol ought to be imploring Democrats to read Orwell...)

Orwell has plenty of unkind words for "the opposition" (this phrase is used as a catch-all to describe anti-establishment, anti-imperialist British opinion). But here's what he has to say about Kipling -

1. "Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting." [Note how Kristol deftly slices off the clause of the sentence, yet retains the last clause despite the fact this is an opinion on Kipling's literary stylings, and wholly irrelevant to Kristol's argument.]

2. Of the Kipling poem, "Recessional", Orwell writes, this "is a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German."

3. He summarizes Kipling as "the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase".

4. He points to Kipling's naivety - "It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize [...] that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you establish 'the Law', which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it."

5. He describes Kipling's coverage of Anglo-India as "tawdry and shallow".

6. But best of all, he explains Kipling's popularity as follows: "The mass of the people, in the [eighteen] nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling's official admirers are and were the 'service' middle class, the people who read BLACKWOOD'S [think Limbaugh, in Britain, circa 1900]. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as 'If', were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot."

Of Orwell's many qualities, his aptitude as an equal opportunity offender was one of his best. And this commentary on Kipling is typically critical of Kipling and numerous others.

So anyways, whilst Bill Kristol suggests that Democrats read Kipling, Orwell pretty clearly suggests you should read Kipling whilst bearing in mind he is a "gutter patriot" and his commentary is "tawdry and shallow". And, he's not very self-aware.

Which begs the obvious question - would it be wrong for us to read Kristol as Orwell read Kipling?