East is East

My brother passed along two quotes from Rudyard Kipling that he thinks might be apropos, so I thought I'd post them here. He came across the first one right after one of Baby Bush's rare press conferences last spring. Here they are:

       "For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of state,
        They arrive at their conclusions---largely inarticulate.
        Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none;
        But sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things
        were done.

        OF THE ENGLISH by Rudyard Kipling

I also found the other quote I was talking about  "hustling the east' .  Both of these exerpts came out of a quotation dictionary.

       "Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle
              the Aryan brown,
        For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and it
              wearth the Christian down;
        And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the
               name of the late deceased,
        And the epitaph drear: `A Fool lies here who tried to
              hustle the East.`

Rudyard Kipling  "THE NAULAHKA "(1892) heading of ch. 5      

These "Brown Aryans" he refers to may be some of the folks that the administration is trying to save from themselves.

My addition: Kipling, of course, was writing about the relationships of the British Raj to the aryans of northern India and to the Afghans. He had no real love, apparently for his fellow English, although I believe he supported their efforts. And we might be reminded that the English were eventually forced out of Asia.