Camelot rises from the ashes

The problem, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves. – Shakespeare

It is perhaps fitting that the specter of Camelot rising from the political ashes of the Clinton funeral pyre should occur at the same time JFK's supposed illegitimate son comes forward in Canada.

Like the great ocean tides, history ebbs and flows, confined within the banks of time. Immersed in its currents, we travel alongside our daily events, our families, our nation – indeed, our entire civilization. Seldom do we glimpse the cultures and civilizations that have come to grief on history's meandering shorelines.

In at least one sense, politics is no different from any other industry: It rests on demographics. Put another way, politics – like other luxury goods – depends for its growth upon a new crop of naivety that can be harvested about every generation or so. A new car, a new house, a new family – all at your first job and before your first promotion. "Gosh, everything is so expensive and I don't have any money! Somebody should do something about this!"

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Many of us carry in our minds a brief laundry list of what we think the world's problems are. Although we get these from the media, and during interaction with other people, often they are a thinly disguised list of our own problems: health care, schools, day care, retirement funds, or children who didn't turn out quite the way we'd hoped. Scribbled off to the side of each item on the list, often unintelligibly, is a quick thought or two for its solution.

So many thousands of different people; so many thousands of different problems. And so many thousands of different answers. The magic of Camelot is this: The candidate in front of the crowd speaks directly to us, not to those around us.

Bill Clinton never got the drawbridge to Camelot lowered even a single notch, despite eight years camped just outside the castle. All he promised to do was to meet us halfway: "He feels my pain." (Hillary, on the other hand, has always seemed to me as someone more concerned with administering pain. But check with Bill for the final word on that one.)

But the promise of Camelot transcends what the Clintons were able to deliver; hence their abandonment now by Democrats. Camelot promises an end to pain, with someone to "wipe away every tear." A thousand different hurts. A thousand different answers. And yet somehow Camelot speaks to us – and us alone.

Those of us with a certain degree of life experience, and a commensurate amount of honesty, recognize that the world is the way it is, not because it is filled with people so different from ourselves, but rather because it is filled with so many people so much like ourselves.

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