01-Mar-2008
Oh Camelot, My Camelot
Drawing historical parallels is a notoriously tricky business, but that business is being conducted right now by folks seeing similarities between the spectacular rise of Barack Obama and the equally spectacular rise to prominence of John F. Kennedy back in the late Fifties and early Sixties. What follows below is something of a memoir – reasonably accurate, definitely biased – of a few high points from those mid-century years, along with a few of my thoughts as to how they mix with current times.
People tend to forget that in Camelot nearly everyone had bad breath and the sort of body odor that made a bouquet of flowers held in the hand a prized possession. That is – the real Camelot, the fictional home of King Arthur and his intrepid knights.
Another fictional Camelot emerged in 1960, however, in the form of a Broadway musical adapted from a bestselling book, The Once And Future King by T. H. White. After a troubled beginning, the show went on to become a terrific success: a fine tale of love, honor, loyalty, and triumph.
It has often been rumored that the soundtrack was a favorite of the young president, John F. Kennedy, and his wife, Jackie, with the favorite lines of the president being uttered by King Arthur as he knights a young man:
Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot,
For one brief, shining moment
That was known as Camelot.
For one brief, shining moment then did those of us who came of age at this time have our own Camelot in the form of the Kennedy administration. He was a remarkable man far more in his presence than in his accomplishments – a grand tenure cut short by an assassin. But what a presence it was and how desperately did we need it at the time. He was young, wealthy, educated, handsome. He had a beautiful wife and two beautiful children. I still remember asking a teacher what has to be the dumbest question I ever asked anyone (though of course it seemed reasonable to me at the time): “Are they allowed to have children in the White House?”
The excitement so many of us felt during the Kennedy years is perhaps best explained not only by what the young president was able to do in his short tenure, but also by what went before: the deadly decade of the 1950’s.
Deadly, indeed: boring, comatose, moribund. I’ve often had problems with how the fifties have been characterized in movies, television, and various sorts of commentaries. It’s often pictured as some “happy” time where (white) families all had three meals a day together and went to church on Sunday.
I never knew any families like that, my own included, though we were all about as middle-class as could be. What we wanted most, as kids, was excitement. What our parents wanted was anything but.
Having just fought World War II as well as the Korean War, America had a full generation of men whose youth had been spent in the excitement of war. All they wanted during the Fifties was to work and raise families and do an incredible amount of drinking.
Our president, Dwight Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, gave us presidential golf and lives lived in gray. Mamie Eisenhower was perhaps the last First Lady who wasn’t expected to do anything and she didn’t – something quite in accord with the paternalistic ambience of the time where women ran the home and men ran the world.
Plato once said that if you change the music in a society, you change the society. True enough, it was music that made the great American gorilla of the fifties finally roll over and wake up when, in 1956, a young, hairy, nervous, gyrating boy from the south said he was all shook up and by God we would be too. I never really liked Elvis Presley a whole lot, but he made a simple point to the young: the purpose of music was not to make you listen, but to make you move.
Move we did. Our hair grew longer, our jeans tighter, our skirts and dresses shorter, and our cars faster. The gyration generation began to royally piss off its elders and that somehow began to seem in accord with the natural order of things.
What also began to seem in accord with the natural order of things was the new president, John F. Kennedy. More importantly, Kennedy seemed to mirror all the changes taking place in the late fifties. His public embrace of a Broadway show was so un-Eisenhower. And golf? Holy cow, the man played touch football! He wore shorts and sneakers! Ergo, we played touch football and we wore shorts and sneakers.
His wife, Jackie, came on as the quintessential anti-Mamie: beautiful, intelligent, articulate. Indeed, she was a mother, but this mother traveled to hot spots and cool spots. She skied and made us think there might be a world beyond Main Street or State Street or First Street. Her mode of dress became the talk of the fashion world, and before long women everywhere were dressing like Jackie Kennedy and looking really, really good because of it.
Where the Democrats in the fifties ran a vibrant young politician against the dispirited and slightly unsavory Richard Nixon, so, today, are the Democrats putting up either a savvy and experienced woman or an equally savvy and charismatic black man against a vision-challenged war supporter and friend of George W. Bush.
There was a demographic youth bubble that got excited about JFK (even those of us still too young to vote for him), and – different rhymes for different times – there’s an equally youthful internet generation going nuts over Obama and ready to hit the streets and doorbells in his service.
In the fifties, a sense of public morality was a threat to individual freedom. Movie censorship and witch-hunts for Communists were common. Today, calls for media control and witch-hunts for terrorists are common, and a government all too willing to spy on its citizens, to monitor its telecommunications, and to track the movements of the populace through ubiquitous video cameras is a threat to individual freedom.
In the fifties and sixties we went nuts over gadgets (the transistor radio soooo cool). I won’t even begin to list the gadgets we go nuts over today, other than to say it took me a while to learn the difference between a Blackberry and a Bluetooth.
In the fifties we were worried about war. In school, we were taught to duck beneath our desks so that we’d be safe if an atomic bomb hit our school. Our current president sees a war around every geopolitical corner and can’t wait to embrace it.
In the early sixties the biggest name associated with my undergraduate school, Northern Illinois University, was the great football hero George Bork. Today the biggest name associated with the school is Steven Kazmierczak.
Parents in the fifties worried about the diseases that might take their children. Parents today worry that their children aren’t safe anywhere.
In the Kennedy years we felt the magical thrill of leadership. America today, I think, is desperate to live that thrill once again, to let our politicians know there is a difference between a president and a program.
Is there another brief, shining moment on the horizon? If there is, it won’t be Camelot. It will instead be its own glittering jewel, cut from another time, and perhaps dazzling us with new visions and new dreams and a return once again to an America that is of its people, by its people, and for its people.
G. K. Wuori © 2008
Photoillustration by the author from a photo by W.S. Wuori
