I was listening to the npr program "On The Media" yesterday while repairing and attaching a new table leg to my daughter's "special table," when Ari Fleischer was being interviewed by Brooke Gladstone about the Image Wars regarding the Iraq War.
Fleischer pulled out all the typical ad hominems and spins 1) about MoveOn.org--which performed its own ad hominems in their advertisement about General David Petraeus being a "General Betray Us" (a rhyme so pitifully obvious that it made me cringe to see it in print, even though I giggled over it when I thought of it myself), 2) about the peace movement, 3) about the left, 4) about the war in Iraq. Apparently, one ad (which you're welcome to watch and vomit in your mouth over), uses the typical rhetoric that essential blames the left in advance for making a guy feel like he's wasted his sacrifice...and he's lost both his legs in the war. But the sinister aspect of the ad, which Gladstone rightly confronts Fleischer on, is that ugly slippage in the "they" attacked us line. Really, Iraq attacked us?! WTF?!!!! I forgot, all of "them" are alike. Which leads me to Hal Johnson's "White Man's Burden," which is a phrase canonized by imperial poet Rudyard Kipling (who, incidentally, was quoted by General Petraeus in his address to Congress). Here's Kipling's poem, and then Johnson's.
White Man's Burden
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,
An 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 he 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 cloke 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 proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
***
We all need to help them ay-rabs get their act together and love freedom, right?
***
"Sonnet: White Man's Burden" by Halvard Johnson
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