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(‘Obviously sexist’ - because it doesn’t say ‘You’ll be a Man slash Woman my son slash daughter!’ ? Kipling had no daughter; the poem is addressed to his son.)The overpainting was an idiotic, smug, literature-hating and sinister act. I haven’t words to express my spluttering contempt for the action of those self-righteous, book-dodging Gauleiterlings who would thrive in Iran, or Cuba, or Mussolini’s Italy, or Mao’s China. I hope the poem is reinstated, and that the Angelou work - which is also meritorious - is displayed ‘officially’ as well, with similar prominence (ideally with the rude verse included). Then, formal notification should be given that anyone caught defacing either work will be expelled without right of appeal. If a university isn’t a place where literature is defended, then it deserves to go out of business.In a spinal reflex, the members of the indispensable self-appointed People’s Committee for Responsible and Healthful Literature. saw K-I-P-L-I-N-G and responded with F-A-S-C-I-S-T, and partied like it’s 1968–1974 (or 1933). Hooray! That’s one more of the bastards we don’t have to take the trouble to read!Have a look at If as though for the first time. It’s entirely bereft of muscular Christianity, or patriotic uplift, or endorsement of colonial robbery with violence. What it does is to advocate a slightly chilly emotional self-sufficiency, which it accomplishes with enormous skill - a quality desperately lacking in contemporary popular poetry. Being British, not American, I’m resistant to the homiletic in literature but this is a remarkably well-crafted and persuasive poem, not a cheap sermonette written for the improvement of salesmen. Interestingly (to me), I remember hearing a BBC radio programme years ago in which Christmas Humphreys - Wikipedia, a Buddhist judge, chose If as one of his favourite pieces of writing. This, he said, was a perfect distillation of the aim of Buddhist life and practice.But of course, what the poem says isn’t the point here. Kipling has been given The Black Spot. Informed critics consider his short stories worthy of consideration alongside those of Chekhov, but he was wrong about colonialism (and I think he really was), so he can’t be allowed to enter a public space any more - clueless, pompous nineteen-year-olds have spoken. Well, fuck that - let Kipling in, and let him duke it out with Derek Walcott and CLR James. and Frederick Douglass and Chinua Achebe and Maya Angelou and Jackie Kay.A more difficult (and especially interesting) case is The White Man’s Burden - a great poem that openly endorses a despicable enterprise. Tom Paulin - a man emphatically of the left - recognised the skill and power of this entirely wrongheaded work and included it in his anthology The Faber Book of Political Verse. Lacking Paulin’s ethical and literary intelligence, the Manchester students spotted an unobjectionable poem by an author they disapproved of and treated themselves to a gratifying text-lynching. Wretched.-Note to my fellow left-folk: ‘problematic’ is a disparagement favoured by wankers. And so is ‘unhelpful’. And so is ‘inappropriate’.

I wouldn’t say “almost everyone I know,” but, yes, support for Trump’s candidacy is quite present where I live. I know that feel.One evening last week, I’m on the way home from work. I take the off-ramp at the usual point and am about to change lanes to turn onto my street when an enormous white pickup truck comes barreling up behind me. It swerves around me, and screeches to a halt right in front of me.My old gray Volvo must not be allowed to take pole position, I reckon.The windows are tinted black, so I can’t see the driver. Definitely some ideas are churning upstairs, regardless. The exhaust is heavily modified, and it’s being revved while we wait for the light to change. The underbody’s all decked out in piercing white neon. And across the back window, done up in large, plain, white lettering:T R U M PAlso, a single bumper sticker is stuck on the back window. It’s centered perfectly below the lettering:Irrationally clinging to my Bible, my guns, and the rest of the Constitution.If I may, I’d like to quote a passage from David S. Rose's answer, which you should definitely read in full for context and because it’s a wonderful answer:In contrast, members of the latter group (regardless of age, gender or geography) find themselves barely hanging on in a world that seems to be getting more unfair every day. They are playing by the rules they were taught as children: work hard, follow the law, and rely on yourself. Do that, they were taught, and you will be able to live comfortably, and your children will live even better. But instead, they find that someone has changed the rules in the ninth inning. Their hard work can't pay the bills, millions of people who broke the law are taking their jobs, and large groups of ‘others’ are getting extra help, accommodation or protections. All of this is just not fair, and they are passionate about voting for the one person willing to call it like it is, who will reinstate the original rules and stand up to those people who changed them.That sums up, with admirable insight and concision, the overarching mindset of the many, many family members, friends, acquaintances, and business colleagues I know who are strong supporters of Trump, whether shrill or quiet.Things are all wrong in America, they say. The world has gone crazy. Everything is upside-down and bass-ackwards, the local colloquialism goes.What I would like to emphasize is that many of these folks are not—well, they don’t all fit in that big white truck that sort of ruined my drive home the other night.It’s more a “Trump Train” here, with various cabins strung together, and some of the passengers—most of the ones I have occasion to encounter—are well-educated people, lawyers or engineers or executives with advanced degrees. A great many of them earn piles more than $55k annually.It is true that Trump in particular, and conservatism of the what the hell is wrong with the world, why has everything gone so bonkers variety, appeals strongly to uneducated white people. That’s demonstrable by statistics.But statistics can be deceiving, if you stare at them the wrong way. I’ve seen expressed across Quora, most often by people from New York or Illinois or California, the idea that no one who supports Donald Trump could possibly have half a brain. Anyone like that must not have been schooled good. They must be from Alabama, or something.The local culture here is one that is very friendly to authoritarianism. It’s a divine-right setup, and its grip is both subtle and absolute.God is on His throne. That’s first. Whoever is in the White House is either the anointed, or an impostor. And in the two-team sportsball of contemporary bipartisan politics, there’s always a fleecy-white anointed leader on one side, and an impostor on the other. Did you ever notice that? If you’re not from here, perhaps you wouldn’t imagine it like that.You may think such a worldview is the result of limited intelligence; I assure you it is not. It is the result of being brought up a certain way, of learning to survive a certain way.In a word, it is adaptation.It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that I’m a bit of a black sheep in my family, albeit in a fairly innocent and healthy sense. I’m the only one who is widely traveled, the only one who speaks other languages a little. I’m the only one who didn’t succeed in college right out of high school like I was supposed to. I’m the only one who made an ass out of myself as a young man, rebelling against my parents. And I’m the only one who doesn’t fully, enthusiastically support Donald Trump and who doesn’t refer to the opposition as That Bitch.But I’m not the only intelligent one, nor the only principled one. Not by a long shot. In a certain sense, in fact, I am the most unsettled and unhappy one. And I am among the least educated, formally, of my siblings.The culture isn’t entirely religious. I grew up in a highly conservative but almost completely secular household. Alabama is not a theocracy, although old-fashioned Protestantism is more ubiquitous here than in other parts. The hold it has over even our irreligious folks is maybe impossible to fathom if you live in Mountain View or the Hamptons. It seems worlds away when I’m in Portland or Vienna.The heavenly order reigns because there is a culture of conformity: if you aren’t a believer, you have to act close enough to one to avoid suspicion and remain respectable. The longer you pretend, the more invested in it you become. It’s bizarre; it’s an ancient aspect of the human social dynamic, actually. It’s not an essentially religious problem, in my opinion, though conformist culture and organized religion do look very much like a matching pair of clasped hands when they’re placed one right beside the other.Not everything about the heavenly order is good all the time. It has its unfortunacies and its victims. Its unspeakable crimes. People solemnly mutter prayers for forgiveness of their shortcomings and their fallen natures in church nearly every single Sunday morning of the year. But, He works in mysterious ways. And Thine is the kingdom.This keeps social responsibility at a celestial distance, much of the time.Most of the vociferous Trumpites I encounter in the day-to-day are, in fact, not having trouble making ends meet. They’re not under threat of violence in daily life, and they’re not clueless gun-toting automatons with no job prospects. They’re real people, charming folks—they’re neighbors, brothers, mothers, nurses, and schoolteachers. Some of them are rocket scientists, even.But they’re angry and disoriented. Their resting posture is uneasy, like a tractor trying to negotiate a hillside. Irrationally clinging. They live in a world that is changing more rapidly than ever before.There is no occupation of Paris, no firebombing of Dresden in their history to clue them into the fact that the heavenly order might be … unreliable. There hasn’t been notable immigration, even, until recently, and you see how they’ve taken to that. The falling sky is very real to them—again, I stress, even to some of the irreligious ones with doctoral degrees, hard as that is to understand—and the society is under attack by an impostor, and the impostor has the support of the government, which is on the wrong shoulders.They hear about it on television constantly. It comes with their cable package, and then their friends and cousins ’n’em perpetually discuss the horrible state of things on social media, world without end.(I wouldn’t qualify much of it as discussion, on second thought. Not any more. It’s mostly Windows Paint memes and the sorts of slice-of-life viral anecdotes that keep Snopes running. It’s self-reinforcing imagery and cartoonish solipsism. Even distinguished alums of Yale can buy into this sort of thing from time to time, if it reinforces what they were taught at Yale. It’s how we trend, all of us, when we’re not paying very close attention.)The aid of the anointed is required. How will we recognize the coming of the anointed? Lo, he shall be white. And he shall be rich. He shall speak repeatedly the words “law and order,” and thereby the crooked shall be made straight. Verily, he shall identify the enemy and declare war on them perpetually. Surely he shall appeal to our sense of principled subsistence as, to quote Steinbeck’s apt phrase, “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”Now the anointed might also be a real sleazebag, a self-aggrandizing reality TV star with no relevant accomplishments to speak of and a questionable record. But Lean not on thine own understanding.You don’t have to endorse this picture. Good grief, please don’t. I wouldn’t ask you to sympathize, for that matter. But you do need to be cognizant of it to understand much of the fractiousness in this country.You would probably call it maladaptive instead of adaptive. And, from your perspective, you’d be exactly right.The political campaigns are quite attuned to these conditions. In fact, they encourage them. They are masters at turning dim embers into entirely new bonfires, and they do it because they understand how electoral politics work. The state of the nation is quite secondary to winning.The only cast required are an anointed and an impostor, and for the set piece we roll in a broken heavenly order. And it doesn’t really matter—this is the point we are forever missing—it doesn’t matter how much of this morality play people actually live and breathe.Alabama is not full of nutjobs, though we do have our problems, to say the least. Most of the people decorating their driveways with TRUMP/PENCE signs today remember Donald from the ‘80s, before he had been anointed. And not fondly. Back then, to them, he was a loud Manhattanite playboy whose face wouldn’t stay off the tabloids at the supermarket checkouts. They haven’t forgotten this; their heads are not full of air. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all about suspension of disbelief during the big show.What matters is that it’s a climate in which a particular narrative sells like hotcakes, and I don’t think that has as much to do with poverty and education levels as the charts show. I think correlation is not causation in this case — or at least that they’ve been mixed up a little. It’s a much older, societally engrained problem. Our way of dealing with the American experience is pretty damned weird, to be honest. We haven’t gotten past it because the essence of our drama is, if not exactly antagonism, then resistance by default.Trump knows about identifying stories and selling fantasies. He knows about closing the deal and may be better at it than any political candidate in history, even if he is hardly an artist otherwise.When the electoral game has more to gain from creating participators than from selling maladaptive fantasies, you won’t see this tactic so much any more. Then we will be in a much better position to talk about what the statistics are saying.

There are two forces working hard to rewrite history in the 21st century:A yearn for authoritarian leadership - expressed in some for or another all over the world, from the U.S. through Europe to India and the Philippines - you get the resurgence of the strong leader, one who delivers results so don’t look too closely into his methods and morals.The resurgence of nationalism - After several decades where popular support was for multi-national and multi-cultural models (i.e. - the EU, globalization etc.) that disrupted many traditional power and social structures, the push back attached itself to two main drivers of traditionalism - religion and national identity.Both forces have recognized the power of cyberspace to influence the minds of huge segments of the population, and the inherent nature of the Internet that allows you to make almost unchecked versions of the facts and propagate them.So, what you get is a massive drive to rewrite history, making it more palatable for these causes. These drives promote the aspects they like in past repressive regimes, and minimize or don’t discuss at all the things unsavory that were the paramount reasons people were happy those regimes perished.Such us thew case of Hitler, and similar drives are seen online to reinstate Stalin, Mussolini and several other figures that local nationalist or alt-right factions admire but need to cleanse for the general palate.You see people rephrasing the economic ‘miracle’ of the 1930’s by hiding the fact that Hitler was essentially playing a huge Ponzi scheme on the German people, and the only way he could pay the huge debts he racked up to reignite the economy was by war.You see people hiding the fact that Hitler began incarcerating opposing Germans, Jews and anyone else in his way right from the start. The Dachao concentration camp opened up in 1933, after his rise to power. You see equations to concentration camps used by the British and Americans, but those were during wars, Hitler’s was during internal peace.You see people hiding the facts that so many other nations in Europe and the world got out of the Depression without resorting to strong men - the U.S. had it way worse than Germany, with the Depression coupled with the Dust Bowls. They never allowed democracy to collapse.In short, it’s historic revisionism, and you should see the signs and regard it for what it is - rewriting history to better suits current interests of political factions.