Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

The January selection for our book club is Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901). I'm finding it very interesting, and Kipling's knowledge of the country of his birth which he left at a young age is amazing. Also enlightening are the notes and introduction in my used paperback copy (Penguin, 1987) by Edward Said, probably read by thousands of high school and college students in the last 25 years. Dinesh D'Sousa calls Edward Said Obama's founding father.... "One of Obama’s founding fathers who remains relatively unknown is the Palestinian radical Edward Said. Prior to his death in 2003, Said was the leading anti-colonial thinker in the United States. Obama studied with Said at Columbia University and the two maintained a relationship over the next two decades."

Said is actually an excellent writer, and I’m thankful to have his critical analysis of a novel 110 years old.  But as a man without a country, a U.S. immigrant always unhappy with his adopted home, he reminds me so much of all the transient (in soul and sometimes body) faculty and foreign students I knew at the University of Illinois in the 1950s-60s. Because I was a foreign language major many of my instructors were emigres—driven from homeland by politics or war.  First degree relatives shot, burned or imprisoned, never to be seen again.  The cultural heritage of centuries ripped away.  Many of my classmates came to the U.S. as “displaced persons” as toddlers or children after WWII--grateful for their lives, but always mourning what had been lost to Stalin, or Mao, or Hitler, or Tito, etc.  Some had been ethnic Chinese whose families had lived for years outside China, sort of double displacement.

No matter what is good in the novel Kim, Said can't get past British imperialism, as Obama can't get past what he calls American imperialism. One can substitute Said's situation for what he says about colonial powers/Kim's: "For what one cannot do in one's own [homeland--anywhere in the middle east or Asia] where to try to live out the grand dream of a successful quest is only to keep coming up against one's own mediocrity and the world's corruption and degradation, one can do abroad." (p. 42 introduction, Penguin ed.) I think Said enjoyed his tiny celebrity status as the ultimate anti-colonialist, and he would have been a nobody in any other country without the give and take and freedom of speech he was allowed in the U.S. and classrooms filled with adoring disciples ready to deny anything good in Western civilization.

A patriot's history of the United States

History hasn’t been this interesting since 5th-6th grade in Miss Michael’s class in little Forreston, Illinois. My husband and I are thoroughly enjoying A patriot’s history of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. And I’m still in the pre-USA days of New Spain, New France and New England, a period longer than our post-revolution years. An excellent reminder of how the colonial powers that searched for wealth and sent settlers all had very different systems. I love becoming reacquainted with all those names of the conquistadores we had to memorize and their incredible explorations, visions and dreams of wealth that lead them nowhere. Even the Italian Columbus died in poverty.

Spain stole gold mined by the Indians for their rulers and kept it all in the hands of the government. Spain was vastly outnumbered by the Indians, but it was able to defeat them through advanced technology and a superior social/cultural/political system which wasn‘t dependent of a rigid hierarchy of power. France too searched for a passage to wealth, but ended up bartering with the Indians for another kind, furs--so apparently even Indians could be influenced by greed (shock and awe!)--but didn’t do the hard work except for exploration and founding a few outposts along rivers. Also, France’s peasants were better off than those in England or Spain, so they had little interest in relocating to the unknown, difficult wilds of New France.  The few French Protestants that crossed seeking religious freedom were slaughtered by the Spanish even after founding colonies.

England got in the game late, and English pirates (I think in school these were called by the nicer term “privateers”) stole from the Spanish what they’d already stolen from the Indians. The authors don’t say it that way--that’s my interpretation. But the English had a different idea of wealth than the Spanish--grow it. They only of the colonial powers understood that wealth could be increased and developed, that it wasn’t a fixed commodity to be hoarded by the royal family. Hmm. Isn’t that interesting. Everyone’s wealth belongs to the government and don‘t take risks--a failed colonial (European) system except for a tiny island of entrepreneurs and investors that saw wealth differently.

From the publisher‘s page: “For at least thirty years, high school and college students have been taught to be embarrassed by American history. Required readings have become skewed toward a relentless focus on our country’s darkest moments, from slavery to McCarthyism. As a result, many history books devote more space to Harriet Tubman than to Abraham Lincoln; more to My Lai than to the American Revolution; more to the internment of Japanese Americans than to the liberation of Europe in World War II.”

Yes, since the 1970s when the homegrown, anti-American faculty wonks began to take over the college humanities and social science departments with the media and entertainment culture of TV and movies adding the icing, U.S. young people have been fed a steady diet of guilt, shame and lies. Marxists and socialists had been down this road in the 1930s and had to pause to fight the common enemy in WWII to save the Soviet Union.  But they had a vision, and it's coming to fruition today.  No wonder this book is a best seller and used by home-schooling parents whose children go on to out perform public school graduates. It’s a breath of fresh air.

If Europe wants to continue paying guilt money

And that's what Copenhagen-Hopenchangen is about. Be my guest. European countries had colonies all over the world, including North America, South America, Africa and Asia. The guilt money that France and the UK have poured into the various corrupt African dictatorships could sink a fleet of Somali pirate ships, but it hasn't done a thing for the people. There are many books on this topic, written mostly by liberals--government, non-profits, and NGO officials. All the money does is prop up goosestepping, military regimes. And we aren't much better. Our own environmentalists have been killing Africans for years through our misguided, misdirected anti-DDT programs. Far more Africans have lost lives and livelihood through bleeding heart (for animals and insects) liberal-environmentalists than ever made it through the swamps and jungles to the coastal areas with their African captors and on to the slave ships owned by Europeans to be sold in the Islands and the future United States. And now they are about to do it again, only to all of us this time.

If Obama wants to help some Africans, let him begin with his own extended family. The Obama Diaspora. Although one brother is following in his footsteps and will write about book about. . . nothing except being an Obama.