Killing Camelot Again and Again?
Could it be a hate-fest of Politico/Religious Fascists?
I’m a sucker for musicals and today I’ve watched Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot, the 1967 movie with Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave again. No Fascists there? Sorry, if you think so, you are wrong. The worms are everywhere.
Now, a 1967 musical dates me, but the music is great and so too is the dream. I watched it with a 93-year-old client I have supported for 11 years. He’s been a difficult man with complex psychology. For some reason when others found they couldn’t work with him, I hit it off with him from day one and we have become friends. I’ll miss him when he’s gone. Now, his age dementia means he remembers little of yesterday, doesn’t know his age, but remembers a lot from 50+ years ago. He’s deaf, so I have to explain the movie loudly to him step by step. Oh, but he loves the music.
WE NEED OUR MYTHS AND DREAMS
Camelot was such a dream built on the stories of the 6th Century Anglo-Saxon King, Arthur, his magician, Merlin, a French knight Sir Lancelot, his love Guenevere, and his nephew and mortal enemy Mordred (he’s the fascist) who in one story steals his wife and throne. Mordred and Arthur are reported in the 12th Century Annales Cambriae (Welsh Annals) to have killed each other in the Battle of Camlan 537–539 AD.
No-one is really sure Arthur and his round table existed. The story of Camelot has no original and verified source. A bit like the New Testament Gospels where various manuscripts exist, copies of copies, but no originals.
Now the dream of Camelot is enticing. A good king who was an ordinary boy until he is the one divinely chosen to remove the sword Excalibur from the stone. Many tried, but the boy prevailed and became King. What boy wouldn’t love that? One of his purported accomplishments was to establish the round table where his knights would sit with him to discuss battles, management of the kingdom and maybe life in general, in a democratic arrangement that exalted none.
JEALOUSY AND GREED IN CAMELOT
In the movie, it all comes undone with the jealousy and greed of Mordred and the infidelity of Guenevere and Lancelot. Arthur is in a terrible bind as the film depicts the self-centred and greedy Mordred as his illegitimate son who he wants to love, and his wife and his best friend, who he does love dearly.
Life can be so complex, even without myth.
America had a Camelot when it was led by possibly the only President who was seen as a good “King”, John F Kennedy. In his inaugural address, he spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” He asked the nations of the world to join to fight what he called the “common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself”.
THE BEACHHEAD OF COOPERATION
He was President through the cold war between the USSR and the West. A time when each eyed and spied on each other with absolute distrust. In calling for peace and hope Kennedy said in his address:
“And if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.”
Now that’s a great dream and a terrific sentence! Wish I’d written it.
But it was his call for global cooperation that set the stage for the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is celebrated each December 10th. The document calls on all nations to recognize and respect fundamental human rights. A kind of global Camelot. It is a call to action that has been echoed by real leaders around the world since Kennedy first made his plea.
THE ASSASSINATION OF A PRESIDENT
What’s even more remarkable though is that he was assassinated less than a year after delivering this speech. He was felled in Dallas, Texas by the bullets of Lee Harvey Oswald, a man with motivations still unknown to this day as Oswald was killed by a policeman’s bullet.
When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 I was a 9-year-old boy living in the NSW border town of Corowa. Watching news of the assassination on our small black and white television was the first time an international news event brought me to tears. I guess I swallowed the dream too without knowing it.
Kennedy’s administration was first described as a Camelot by his grieving widow Jackie. It was in a Life magazine interview after she invited the journalist Theodore H. White to the White House just days after the assassination. Jackie referred to the Broadway musical, Camelot, which her husband apparently listened to often. The interview was finished with her using the lines from the song:
“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot. There’ll be great presidents again… but there will never be another Camelot.”
The myth of peaceful Camelot for America actually was there in the nation from its founding. It just took the death of a President and the eulogy of his widow to give it a name. The power of America when at its zenith made it the greatest nation in the world generated a patriotism that elevated the good old USA to a kind of divinity, the “foremost democracy in the world”. Such national pride that to cynical Australians is hard to understand, took precedence to the extent that education and understanding about the rest of the world were often lacking.
UNBRIDLED PATRIOTISM DESTROYING THE DREAM
Is it possible that the great patriotism encouraged by America, has been its undoing? Camelot destroying Camelot.
Watching the somewhat dated Camelot movie yet again and enjoying the wonderful music, I couldn’t help but think about what the world would be like if our dreams of equality and respect were achieved. The world has made great strides in some places. For me, Marriage Equality in many countries is a significant recognition of an often despised and misunderstood minority. Why should we deny love and happiness to anyone? Why should we demand that people conform to the image we have of what it is to be human?
In countries like Uganda, you can be imprisoned for “feeding the poor” or “giving a cup of water” to the despised LGBTIQ community. Not exactly “Christian”, yet preached by so-called Christian leaders! Their efforts against the LGBTIQ community at the cost of making the world a better place for the poor instead of continuing the cycle of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer on an epic scale.
HOMELESSNESS AND HUNGER, SHAMES US
In Australia, shortage of housing means that this highly developed economy sees young people living with their parents, some “couch surfing” and others in tents, whilst for many the dream of owning their own home is an unachievable nightmare. A civilised society with a dream of any kind of Camelot for themselves should have no homeless people and no children going to school without food in their stomachs. Yet we have failed our Camelot too.
In America, it is as if it never was and the dreams of Washington, Lincoln, the Founding Fathers, and yes, Kennedy and others, are muddied beyond recognition.
The Trump years highlighted a rise of fascism that was beyond belief a generation or two ago. Hatred of minorities — building Walls of separation — and so-called Christians who sided with the pussy grabbing Donald as their Messiah. You couldn’t make it up. Not interested in the many charges against Trump of financial and other improprieties he was their man for all seasons. Even for ordinary folk struggling to survive in an economy that didn’t value them, the man who assumed wealth greater than any other, whether he had it or not, but then gave them nothing of value in return, was the one to save them.
Not even an avalanche of legal charges against him can sway the loyalty of many — although it seems there is an awakening coming for the first-ever former president to face criminal charges, including being ordered to pay millions of dollars to the author, E Jean Carroll, after being found liable in aspects of her sexual abuse case against him.
Yet for the Fascists and deniers the State is wrong and Trump is right.
Camelot? Where art thou?
VICTIMISING TRANS CHILDREN, THE PATHWAY TO GLORY
And there are more Trumps on the way. Republican Presidential candidate, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed bills banning children from undergoing transgender medical treatments or going to drag shows, and restricting pronoun use in classrooms. He has decreed that public bathrooms and changing rooms must also be separate “based on biological sex” under the legislation.
All the while when a number of major medical associations in the US, consider transgender medical treatments to be appropriate and even life-saving care for people diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Not only that but the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) claim the law would have “a chilling effect on the medical community by inserting politics into healthcare”.
A simple definition of fascism is “a way of organizing a society in which a government ruled by a dictator controls the lives of the people and in which people are not allowed to disagree with the government”. When governments turn on their people, even children, by demanding that society conforms to the image they have of it then in my view, that is a clear form of fascism. It is not democracy. It isn’t Camelot.
JOIN ME IN FIGHTING THE FASCISTS WITH LOVE AND PEACE
Despite all of this, will you join me in fighting for a better world? The fight I have taken on as a father and grandfather is for the rights of transgender children and the gay community.
None of my children are LGBTIQ, yet as a parent and grandparent I don’t want to be a fascist trying to control the lives of those who follow after me. I believe parents and society should be like gardeners, planting seeds and growing plants and trees and letting them flourish.
The small charity I formed “Humanity in Need — Rainbow Refugees” focusses on the plight of queer young people who cannot survive without caring “fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and others.”
A small or large monthly donation will help us pay for safe houses to keep them off the streets in Kenya, Uganda and neighbouring countries. The fight is only just beginning, but Camelot, a place of peace and love and welcome awaits.
Our Chuffed campaign is here: We will decide to love and not to hate.
Please join us.
Please support us if you can.
www.patreon.com/nosexplease or No Sex Please — Chuffed Appeal
My blog here, and my podcast @nosexplease on YouTube and giggling on audio apps like iTunes, Audible, Spotify, and others, tell the story of the abuse people have received through the church’s sex shaming that in recent years specialises in LGBTIQ+ people.
This blog and the podcast seek to support queer refugees in East Africa who need our help simply to survive. Many of them are killed or die from disease or hunger simply because homophobic cultures don’t merit them as human. So sad.
