Camelots Better Than We Were

I have been thinking about that Camelot line:  "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot!"

For several years I taught a January term course that we read and invested ourselves in, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.  We dug as deeply as history would allow us into the real Arthur, who is hardly there, if at all, who might have been an officer left over from the Roman occupation of the British Isles.  We read as many of the sources of the grand story of King Arthur as we could digest fairly, and tried to understand what those stories were all about.

They were all about a time that never was.  When Winston Churchill was asked if the stories about King Arthur were true, he said:  "They are true!  They are all true, or they ought to be, and more and better besides!"

The Arthurian stories are about what the British would like to be; not so much as what was actually true, but about what ought to be true.  There ought to be such a King as Arthur, and a woman like Guinevere, magnificent virtues and faults and all!  It ought to be that when someone like Guinevere falls in love with someone like Lancelot, that someone like Arthur, magnificent in his sense of justice and human goodness, does what he ought to do, and at the same time, what his heart demanded of him.

There ought to be such a kingdom as that where the best and strongest men in the kingdom, around such a table,  committed themselves to justice for the sake of justice, and where it never rained in summer nor froze in winter.  The Arthurian tales, something like the legends of Roland and Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed, celebrated a time that never really was as the stories remember it, but that we choose to believe we could be like if we were better than we are, and ought to be.

I almost hate to say it, but Donald Trump is telling arthurian tales (in his case, I consciously use lower case letters, and I ought to use a smaller font) about a magnificent time that never was.  Trump's tales are about a time when America was white, when every man was free and hardworking and shaping this whole continent into the finest nation the world had ever seen.  "It will be great again!", he says.  "I will make America great again, as it used to be.  It will be so great it will make your head swim!  People will respect us, and come to Camelot to see how we are doing it!"

There will be a new heaven, and a new earth, and justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  Every woman will adorn, and be adored by a knight in shining armor, and every knight in shining armor will have a heart of gold and a sharp sword.  You know, the way it used to be when Arthur was King in Camelot.  There will be no more barbarians at the gates, and even if there are, the gates will be impregnable.  We will all share one, true, holy and apostolic faith:  no more false gods and green dragons!

It is an America that never was.  What was, was hard.  It was slavery, and second-class citizenry for women.  It was Indentured Servitude.  It was sweat shop factories and Robber Barons.  It was blasting stumps from a field, and following a plow; milking cows, and hoping for rain.  It was not Camelot.  It was White European, often English Europeans, non-Catholic Europeans, and great wealth and great poverty.  But it was dreams, too.  It was believing in dreams.  It was, and still is

                           a kind of Camelot

                                                           that never really was.


We need Camelots that are better than we were.  But to get them, we have to be better than we were, too.  And better than we are, right now.