I have a good education. I got it at a state university, at a suburban high school, and, most importantly, from the Sisters of the Holy Union of the Sacred Heart, at a red brick, square grade school with two-family houses across the street. So, I read, because one of the ways you can tell you have a good education is that you continue to read even after you're all done with school.
I like all kinds of authors. Willa Cather. Jack Kerouac. Francis Parkman. Roger Crowley. Sholem Aleichem. Snoop Dogg. Byron.
It's a long list because I've been reading for a long time, and it includes, along with the above, the works of Rudyard Kipling, the British imperialist poet of the 19th century who coined the phrase "white man's burden" without cracking a smile.
Not one college English professor ever encouraged me to read Kipling. In fact, I was often berated by professors just for enjoying Kipling's rhyming, heavy-footed poems that cheered on the British Army's conquest of every place occupied by darker-skinned people (and the Irish).
Maybe I like Kipling because I am a rhyming, heavy-footed white man, but that is to reinforce several stereotypes at the same time.
No, call it a quirk, the way some people will eat only mayonnaise, and others will eat only Miracle Whip.
Dealing with Bill Cosby, dealing with Brett Kavanaugh, dealing indeed with Donald Trump, the parade float cartoon character who became president of a failing United Sates, why wouldn't I betray all of my deconstructionist, state-employed Marxist professors and pick up a volume of Kipling's poems?
The poem is "Gentlemen Rankers," about well-born British men who ran through the family fortune until, at last, they joined the army as mere enlisted men.
I was well-born in the sense that I was born into the most powerful nation in the world, the monitor of peace from pole to pole, the maker of the world's best cars. Let other, genetically inferior people kill each other over religion and political party, we thought back then. We were Americans. We reasoned.
I watched my country dribble all that away, high on heroin, crap-shooting on the stock market, writing bad mortgages, printing bad money, freeing ourselves from even the most minor of sexual constraints and binding ourselves to credit card debt, always restless, always spending and, at the end, when the money ran out, tuning on each other like starving dogs.
Behold government by investigation, by innuendo! Watch the rise of the snake-handling churches as a political party! See reality mix with reality television until the mixture has a sick, oily look.
"To the legion of the lost ones," Kipling wrote, "to the cohort of the damned,
"To my brethren in their sorrow overseas... "
The British had their troops in Afghanistan, too, fighting for a wage.
He wrote of pride brought low, the way the steady pride of my childhood America has had its mouth stuffed with the rags of inflated controversy and the filth of second rate rhetoric.
"We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth.
"We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung."
Who today, in America, could write the word "Honour" and use the capital letter?
To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, inspired and disgusted by the rise of Pres. Donald J. Trump, is called "The Land of Trumpin'." It is available in paperback from Nook, Kindle, iBooks and GooglePlay.
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