Rudyard Kipling, updated.

Posted on by

(the following doesn’t quite scan, compared to the original.  This is on purpose).

Take up the Liberal Mormon’s burden, Send forth the best with degrees
Go risk your fates to excommunication, to serve your lessers’ needs;
To wait in heavy harness, On un-nuanced folk and mild–
Your orthodox, hide-bound Mormons, Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the Liberal Mormon’s burden, In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of Peterson And check his show of pride;
By open speech and academic, An hundred times made nuanced
To seek progressive profit, And work against the prophet

Take up the Liberal Mormon’s burden, The blessed Bloggernacle–
Fill full the realm with PhDs And bid the unlearned scramble;
And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought,
Watch patriarchy and Folly Bring all your hopes to naught.

Take up the Liberal Mormon’s burden, No tawdry rule of GAs,
But words from prof and lawyer, The tales of learned one’s days .
Of temples ye shall complain, The sexist roads they tread,
Go teach them with your learning, And teach them with your head.

Take up the Liberal Mormon’s burden And reap the old reprise:
The blame of those who are lesser, The hate of those you despise–
The cry of hosts ye humor (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
“Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved orthodox night?”

Take up the Liberal Mormon’s burden, Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Big Tent-ism To cloak your hubris;
By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen Mormons Shall weigh your blogs and you.

Take up the Liberal Mormon’s burden, Have done with childish days–
The lightly modest Laurel, The easy, self-congratulatory praise.
Comes now, to search your gender neutral personhood, through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers!

16 thoughts on “Rudyard Kipling, updated.”

  1. Nice verse,
    I’m with you on many points, I’m not sure why liberal Mormons don’t just leave and get a life of their own. I enjoy debate but for heaven sake not everyone has to agree with me. Mormonism is conservative. Take it or leave it.
    liberal Mormon’s to me are just crybabies.

  4. I love how you deconstruct Kipling by positioning him in a meta-narrative of contemporary religious anxiety. I assume that you are a credentialed poet with an advanced degree in pastiche.

  5. I see myself more as transgressing the dialectical imperative inherent in post-colonial narratives of socio-politico-religious uncertainties brought about by a unifying yet dichotomous structural flaw that emerges from the Marxian base and expressed most fully in the Kiplingesque superstructure.

    As for credentials – I transcend your bourgeoisie credentials.

  6. Please forgive me: the foregoing made me think of the old saying, “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, baffle ’em with B.S.” (You may well be brilliant [I certainly can’t match your credentials]; I, meanwhile, am baffled.) Perhaps that was the idea? ;-D

  7. Pretty much.

    (Oops, I mean: in a meta-textual sense, your post-Hegelian insight approximates the generalized sense-perception implied by our communicative endeavors).

  8. I’m sorry, but this is the most long-winded, ineptly written haiku I’ve ever encountered.

  11. What blogs are you reading where this view comes out? Because the “liberal” blogs that I follow aren’t like this. Nor are the liberal Mormons that I know. I like the Millennial Star, but there suddenly seems to be a lot of recent posts attacking a caricature of liberal Mormons. I don’t think mockery is a helpful way of building up the “orthodox” part of the Bloggernacle, as a previous post here was discussing.

  12. There are those in the Church who speak of themselves as liberals who, as one of our former presidents has said, “read by the lamp of their own conceit.” (Joseph F. Smith, Gospel Doctrine [Deseret Book Co., 1939], p. 373.) One time I asked one of our Church educational leaders how he would define a liberal in the Church. He answered in one sentence: “A liberal in the Church is merely one who does not have a testimony.”

  13. Hmmm. I suppose if that were your definition of “liberal Mormon” then this poem would work. But I don’t think that’s a universal definition. Or at least, it’s not in my experience, given that people like Neylan McBaine are called liberal Mormons.

Comments are closed.