#rudyard kipling

“I know you alright. You're Shere Khan”

“Precisely. And you should know that everyone runs from Shere Khan”

Do you ever think about how “If” is a Western Colonizer’s thesis on what makes a man?

Do you ever think about how the poem argues that the highest form of manliness is self-sufficient indifference to emotion, indifference to fear, indifference to pain, indifference to suffering? How the poem argues that to be a man is to be unchanged - in purpose and in person - by even the worst horrors?

Do you ever think about how the first time Hawkeye sees BJ—really sees him—is when Hawkeye deliberately makes fun of this poem and BJ without missing a beat picks up the thread and makes fun of it too.

Do you ever think about how by the end of the day, BJ is throwing up in a field, dirty, drunk, missing parts of his uniform, completely wrecked by Korea, already (literally) changed by it? Do you think about how Hawkeye is there to hold his head, and help him up, and get through it with him?

Do you ever think about how a central thesis of the show is actually the antithesis of "If" -- that real manliness is remaining soft in the face of everything hard about the world, that the only way to get through something horrible is to get through it together, that being changed by horror is far less monstrous than being indifferent to it.

Yeah.

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