Saturday Night Kipling

Six over at The Warrior Class has habitually been posting "Sunday Kipling" posts (which, as the title implies, consist of selected Rudyard Kipling poems and are posted on Sundays).  I have enjoyed Kipling's poetry and prose since I was old enough for my nursery school teacher to read me and my classmates his "Just So Stories" as a ruse to lull us to sleep for our afternoon naps.

I do not now purpose to usurp Six's function as the purveyor of Kipling poetry, but this Kipling piece came to mind this afternoon, as the discussion turned to the Obama Administration's practices regarding the funding and support of the military in particular, and the protection of American technology and know-how in general.

The implications are quite disturbing.

The Dutch in the Medway (1664-72)
by Rudyard Kipling

If wars were won by feasting,
Or victory by song,
Or safety found, by sleeping sound
How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion
Are not maintained so,
Threy’re only got by sword and shot
And this the Dutchmen know!

The moneys that should feed us
you spend on your delight,
How can you then, have sailor-men
To aid you in your fight?
Our fish and cheese are rotten,
Which makes the scurvy grow –
We cannot serve you if we starve,
And this the Dutchmen know!

Our ships in every harbour
Be neither whole nor sound,
And when we seek to mend a leak,
No Oakum can be found,
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
and carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,
And this the Dutch men know!

Mere powder, guns and bullets,
we scarce can get at all;
Their price was spent in merriment
and revel at Whitehall,
While we in tattered doublets
From ship to ship must row,
Beseeching friends for odds and ends –
And this the Dutchmen know!

No King will heed our warnings,
No Court will pay our claims –
Our King and Court for their disport
Do sell the very Thames!
For, now De Ruyter’s topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet –
And this the Dutchmen know!

Latest from the Kolokolo Bird:

I have enjoyed the works of Rudyard Kipling since before I could read.  I remember his "Just So Stories" being read to me and my nursery school classmates, just before nap time, by our teacher, Miss Suzy.  Since that time, I have read, and re-read, hundreds of his literary works over the years.

And, going through my father's papers and personal effects, I recently found that Dad had chosen a Kipling quotation for the epigraph on his college yearbook page.

Kipling was and is, in many ways, the antithesis of what today would be called the Liberal philosophy, and I have had, thus far, a few incidents of disapproval from some of my leftward-leaning colleagues at the University regarding my various invocations of Kipling quotations.

But I enjoy Kipling, and find him relevant in both the philosophical and literary sense.

The New York Times (which I will admit to reading on occasion, but which usually is put to better use as a birdcage liner) reports:

"15,000 Crocodiles Escape From South African Farm"

"About 15,000 crocodiles escaped from a South African reptile farm along the border with Botswana, a local newspaper reported Thursday."

"Driving rains forced the Limpopo River over its banks on Sunday morning near the Rakwena Crocodile Farm. The farm’s owners, fearing that the raging floodwaters would crush the walls of their house, opened the gates, springing the crocodiles, the report said. About half of the reptiles have been captured, with thousands still on the loose."

The Kipling angle on this one is quite obvious.  "The Elephant's Child" from his "Just So Stories!"

[For those of you raised on the late 1900's or early 2000's anti-Eurocentricity school curricula and thus deprived of Kipling's poetry and prose, the "Just So Stories" were composed by Kipling to answer (in a very nonscientific tall tale style) his very young daughter's questions as to how certain world phenomena came to be.  "The Elephant's Child" story explains how elephants came to have long trunks.

The overly-inquisitive Elephant's Child in Kipling's story wanted to know what crocodiles ate for dinner.  The kolokolo bird advised the Elephant's Child to "'Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out."  This was the set-up for the plot of the story.].

Well, now there are thousands crocodiles in the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River!  What would the kolokolo bird say about that?

And, given the real life dangerous propensities of crocodiles, it would not be surprising in the least if the next species to go swarming out on the loose were to be lawyers.

Not alligators, but Litigators!