In writing Last Whiteman, as Robert E. Howard doing a 1968 rewrite of the unsold short Last White Man, set in 2068 Baltimore City, I used the idea that had peak moral currency during Howard’s lifetime and also throughout my lifetime, with my entire family [often including me] cheering on white man’s burden wars to “be a force for good” “make the world safe for democracy” and “win hearts and minds” by dropping jellied gasoline on women and children, as a central theme of that hero tale. The tale replaced the artifice of the Conan the Barbarian and Solomon Kane stories with the gunfighter artifice of Howard’s home state, and replaced the sorcery elements of those yarns with rapid technological advances of the 1950s and 60s.

There are two possible ways to look rationally and heroically at The White Man’s Burden, that idea from some 120 years ago that justified worldwide acquisition of natural resources for use by European and American Industry. These are not the only ideas, but the two that leaped to my mind as opposites in a polarity. And since the entire American Cultural Mindset of Anti-Heroic collectivism, of good guys versus bad guys, cops and robbers, is arrayed along an axis of false polarity, I thought that using both of the following would net an American flavor for a future that will obviously be post-American in many ways.

-1. The white man is morally superior and is duty bound to impose his superior morality upon other races FOR THEIR OWN GOOD. Conservative values embodied I such movies as the Magnificent Seven, The Alamo, The Green Berets, etc.

-2. The white man is morally inferior, a kind of accidental genetic golem [0] who is bound by fate to lay down his life in the service of saving morally superior races from themselves, nature and his own evil, unnatural kind. Progressive values embodied in such movies as Blood Diamond, Drive and Gordon of Khartoum.

In writing the story of a racially ghettoized Baltimore arrayed upon a very cosmopolitan model, I used Howard’s sketch of Man Eaters of Zamboula, a Conan story, which painted a medieval technology level city with the exact same night life and multi-racial politics as Baltimore had in my lifetime.

The characters were all based on Baltimoreans I had known and encountered and the story occurred only on streets and in buildings which I had frequented often over many years. My other personal touch, was to give Howard some of my insight, as if in a dream, of what my life would be, born in Baltimore 5 years before his visit, as a man of off-white appearance, with no economic prospects as a working man, in an inwardly turning and decaying America suffering from the legacy of the white man’s burden: for instance, depending upon Nigerian mercenaries as “watchmen” just like the Baltimore City and NYPD do in 2021.

The cultural backwash of the lie that is The White Man’s Burden, is chiefly that such a dastardly proposition, that worldwide rapes of nations by rapacious elites in the name of “whites” [1] saving colored folks from themselves hammers the last nail in the coffin that holds the remnant ideals of honor.

Honor is the enemy of the merchant, the banker, the corporation and the politician. Thus honor must be killed in a manner that foils possibilities of resurrection of the Sacred Ideal. The first step is to replace the word and the hand shake with a document, a treaty, a check, a law. From there on out honor is stricken with necrosis.

It was obvious to anyone with a brain in 1968 that Baltimore would devolve into not just a none-white but anti-white city. Ironically, whites love this and think it is great in every day life, on the news, in drama on TV and in movies and politics. Those whites without the means to live in a secure penthouse or enclave in the midst of the utopia of color they have built, flee to the rural areas or succumb to drug addiction, suicide and human trafficking, as in Baltimore today, where 90% of the homeless population is white men, who make up only 10% of the entire population. White people like this, because there is know one they hate and fear more than white people. [0]

Metaphysically, I think this is baked into the cake of the invention of the white person in the mid 1600s, the gradual use of white identity in the mid 1700s and the dominant use of white identity to supplant real racial and Christian identity in America and Europe by the mid 1800s. By the mid 1900s whites were annihilating each other by the tens of millions while most of the rest of the world looked on. Howard would have been appalled at this last turn, particularly the MAD Cold War doctrine.

I think, based on Howard’s view of the subject and his visceral hatred for civilization, that he would have arrived at this conclusion by April of 1968. Howard was a man who knew, even in his youth, people of various races closely, quite unlike the postmodern white progressive of suburban America. Howard and I had this in common. So I used my experiences dealing with Africans, African Americans, Hebrews, Hispanics, West Indians and Middle Eastern folk in Baltimore, to build characters that night approximate a caste that Howard might have cobbled together from New Orleans, Texas, Arkansas and a visit to Baltimore and Philadelphia in 1967 and 68.

The unifying characteristic that I have noted among people of the above named ethnic groups in Baltimore, and which Howard used in his fiction based on tales from a black woman and a mixed race woman in his childhood, which are congruent with what I see as Kipling’s depraved ideal of The White Man’s Burden is this.

Although, as a lone man thought to be the mythic absence of color and hated for the crimes of great men who would have spat on him, I was attacked dozens of times by whites, dozens of times by blues [police] and hundreds of times by blacks in Baltimore over some 40 years. The blacks who did not attack me, and the Asians and Latinos, Africans and Middle Easterners and Pikesville Hebrews have almost always, reflexively, sought me, the lone white man on foot—despite my obvious wretched condition—as an ally, a guide, a judge and even a savior.

...I have had two strange black men come up to me and asked me to hear their side of an argument and to pass judgment so that they would not have to fight.

...I have been in a mixed race bar reading a book, and when black men began yelling and threatening more serious discord with one another, the call went out across the bar, “White man in the house—with a book!” I was thence promoted to slave judge, not permitted to leave until the inquests were done! [2]

...In 2017, almost unable to walk, in a ghetto in Wilmington Delaware, a black man, half my age and twice my strength, came to me for protection against three big buck Bantus who were hunting him in the street…

… “Ask the Whiteman!” echoes in my mind from a dozen bus stops, work places and bars...and me a small, older, often wounded soul. All I needed to do to pull off Robert E. Howard’s version of “the man with no name” [3] was to place my friends Tattoo Rick, Sensie Steve, Big Ron, or The Colonel, or Buffalo Bob, to put anyone of these formidable men, who indeed served as the template for the character, in my little shoes. If a worn-out stock clerk and D-list boxing coach has, merely due to his cool demeanor, seemed to offer himself naturally as a confessor, guide, counselor and even savior in the minds of so many post-white Baltimoreans, confident at a glance that he can somehow tender the answer to their dire situation, then it would have been oh so easy for Howard, the master of heroic fiction, had he lived another 32 years, to composite some of his heroes into a man who would naturally and even easily command the respect of the sacred man of color, even as he walked as the last of his damned and colorless kind.

…

Notes

-0. It is only logical, that the golem, or unnatural creation, will hate itself, which is the fate of any large grouping of races such as Irish, Scottish and other Europeans adopting a generic macro-identity which serves no purpose other than economy of racial scale.

1. The racial designation of “white” is a purely modern adaptation of the Semitic, Berber and Bantu designation of a domestic sex slave of European origin kept in doors to avoid the tan of the bride of Solomon, to replace the early modern common term of Christian. This seems to have been a practical consideration for the protection of non-Christian Europeans involved in the large scale transport of Christian European and heathen African cargo, conducted with the help of small crews of Christian Europeans. See Cracker-Boy. I think, that at the terminal arc of the “White” experiment in racial amalgamation, that such concerns will resurface and that Howard, a historian of the servile South, would naturally grasp this and in fact did in his highly nuanced Kane stories.

-2. The GQ Mugging Inquest

-3. I suspect that Clint Eastwood’s depiction of his character was somewhat influenced by Howard’s Solomon Kane, particularly in the movie High Planes Drifter.