Jingo revisionism?

Michael Dirda, The Washington Post:

But should Kipling’s various prejudices, however deplorable, keep us from experiencing the real and lasting pleasure of his best stories? Defending his own admiration for Kipling, Neil Gaiman once said, “It would be a poor sort of world if one were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with people who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place. Kipling was many things that I am not, and I like that in my authors.” To which I would add further that the very point of reading fiction is to see through eyes other than one’s own. In time this leads to an enlargement of perspective and forestalls any rush to simplistic judgments. The sign of an educated person, it’s been said, is the ability to offer assent or dissent in nuanced, graduated terms.