Camelot and Obamalot
Another good one by Robin of Berkeley
By Robin of Berkeley
I grew up in a storybook family. My parents, refugees from the urban jungle, felt like royalty in our little suburban home. They even referred to our lives as a fable, with a happily ever after ending.
The problem for me was the disconnect between what my parents said and what I experienced. As a kid my life felt more like a Greek tragedy than a fairy tale. While my parents partied hardy, I was bored out of my gourd at home.
When what you're told doesn't jive with your own eyes, you proceed in one of two directions. One way is to grow up and invent new myths for your life. You delude yourself into believing people love you when they don't. You're convinced that you're happy when you're not.
Or you can follow another trajectory, the one I've traveled -- you develop a highly attuned BS detector. Your detector goes off loud and clear any time someone says one thing and does another.
When I was younger I'd frequently ignore the blare of my BS alarm because I wanted so much to be loved and accepted. I hooked up with people whom I knew from the get go were bad news, and I suffered the inevitable consequences. I fell hook, line, and sinker for leftist ideology though the contradictions became more apparent year by year.
When I learned to stand on my own two feet, I started trusting my BS detector, and it's rarely failed me since. I can usually tell right away whether someone is a trustworthy person or full of crap.
I've had friends admonish me for being judgmental and implore me to give people the benefit of the doubt. But it's not uncommon for that same friend to admit to me months later that I was right; the person was a Class A jerk.
Since Obama and the far Left are ruling our fair nation, my BS detector has been blasting like a siren. While conservatives prefer reality, the Left lives in fantasyland with its home base being the past.
In the liberal's eyes, life is all about atrocities, unfairness, every single awful thing that has happened since time began. It's a black and white world of good guys and bad guys, damsels in distress, and pseudo-heroes dispatched by the Democratic Party.
A favorite yarn of the Left is Camelot, the home of the Kennedy family -- John Sr. and Bobby, the saints who sacrificed their lives for this country; John Jr. who tragically died too young; and now Teddy.
While the Kennedy's did some good for this country, creating icons out of them is as foolish as a grown adult still believing in Santa Claus. For a tyke, the idea of Santa and elves and fairy godmothers offers refuge and comfort in an overwhelming world. When adults invent tall tales, all they're doing is fleeing from reality.
The talking heads now tell us we have a new Camelot, with Obama's smiling visage a reminder of the young JFK. Michelle, in her designer clothes, is presented as another Jackie, with pretty young children in tow.
When I ponder the Left's fascination with fairy tales like Camelot, my mind flashes on that great courtroom scene in the flick, A Few Good Men, when the grizzled Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson), bellows at pretty boy, Tom Cruise, "You want answers? You can't handle the truth!" And I think that progressives live in a hallucinatory world because the harsh realities of life stun them.
What is the truth? The Kennedys were not paragons of virtue. John F. Kennedy was a disreputable womanizer who escalated our presence in Vietnam, the war the Left most detests. Bobby assisted John with smuggling women in and out of the White House. John Jr. dismissed expert advice about inclement weather and flew his small plane anyway, with his pregnant wife and her sister on board, all perishing.
And Ted Kennedy paid some poor schlemiel to take a test for him at Harvard, and got them both kicked out (though Ted pulled some strings to get himself readmitted). He left Mary Jo to slowly asphyxiate in an air bubble while he fled the scene and constructed an alibi. Ted Kennedy may have even covertly supported the Soviets during the Cold War (isn't that treason?)
Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, all the Kennedys; the Left edits out the unflattering details about its heroes, leaving only a chimerical world, a Camelot on earth. But what is Camelot anyway? It's a made up place of dreams and wishes that come true if you only believe hard enough. It's the bedtime story we tell our children to lull them to sleep when they're afraid of the dark.
In Buddhism, there is a rich tradition of storytelling, but these poignant tales are designed to wake people up, not pacify them. One that touches me is about a Buddhist master whose main teaching is, "Life is an illusion. It's all an illusion."
One day the master's son is tragically killed, and the teacher is incapacitated by grief. He sobs and wails in his room for weeks on end.
The disciples are unnerved by his being so ravaged by grief. One student volunteers to talk to him, and timidly approaches the master in his room.
"Master, don't you remember what you always tell us? That everything is an illusion."
The teacher looks up, and in between sobs he cries out, "Yes, I know. But the death of a child is the greatest of illusions."
It takes great courage for all of us, Zen masters and the like, to live in the world as it is, not as we want it to be. It challenges us to open our eyes and our hearts every day to both the miracles and tragedies of a human birth, what the Buddha himself called the "ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows."
Conservatives recognize that life cannot be easily pigeonholed into good and bad, fair and unfair because we don't know what adversity is doing to us.
What appears at the time as calamitous may have shaped our character and fortified our courage. The ancient Chinese understood this; in their language, the symbol for crisis means both danger and opportunity.
But liberals think that life should just be about the l0,000 joys. If there is sorrow, it means that something went terribly wrong, and someone should pay.
If I had to name the number one reason why the Left hates the Right, it would be this: because we shine the harsh light of reality on the Left's starry eyed hopes and dreams.
We expose their illusions for what they are -- naive, grandiose, even dangerous. As forcefully as Dorothy ripped open the drapery in the Land of Oz, we reveal that Obama and his ilk are not wizards, just little men and women behind a curtain.
Even when the Left tries to hide the sins of their heroes by canonizing them, we see through the charade. We know that effusive tributes and mile long processions do not exonerate immoral behavior.
For us, personal behavior matters. If a man abandons a woman to die, or sleeps with little boys, or calls his grandma a "typical white woman," this speaks volumes about his character.
So the Left detests us because, to them, we're the spoil sports. We're the mean parents who break up the party and make all the children go to bed. We lecture them to mind their manners, respect their elders, and "Who do you think you are to talk to me that way?"
We expose their hair brained plots to change the world for what they really are -- castles made of sand that will vanish with the first strong wind.
We unveil everything they're hiding from, all the cold, cruel facts of life that render them helpless: that in the grand scheme of things, human beings are quite small; that none of us can or should play God; and that there are consequences for cruel or evil behavior.
And perhaps most of all, we trigger in their memory banks those excruciatingly vulnerable moments when the bubble burst, the truth broke through, and they were forced to look reality squarely in the face.
When they had to hear, "Daddy's moving out"; or "Yes, this will hurt but only for a while"; and, "I'm sorry but your kitty won't be coming home from the vet."
Or, what must feel utterly crushing to a youngster, "No, there really isn't a Santa Claus."
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