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I’ve been humming the tunes from Camelot all weekend.
I ordered tickets yesterday for my wife Valerie and me to see a new production of Lerner and Loewe’s classic musical, starring Michael York, which is coming to Wolf Trap in about two weeks. Moving back to Washington, D.C. at the worst possible time of year, the beginning of the hot, sticky D.C. summer, I figured we might just as well make the best of it and avail ourselves of some of the cultural offerings of the nation’s capital by way of a consolation prize, a reminder that, if one must endure the steambath of June, July and August in the mid-Atlantic region, (after the delightful, mountainous dryness of Spokane, Washington) well, there are at least Washington’s famous theaters, museums, restaurants and venues for musical performance. And Wolf Trap is an outdoor amphitheater. There might even be a breeze!
Camelot is a perennial favorite of mine. I was much too young for its original Broadway run, which coincided nearly day-for-day with the John F. Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, and which has come to be identified with it partly for that reason. The media have been referring to the Kennedy years as “Camelot” ever since. The show opened on Dec. 3, 1960 and ran for 873 performances, closing shortly after Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963. For me these were the years of kindergarten through third grade. But I’ve always been a fan of Richard Burton’s, and many years ago I had a girlfriend who owned the soundtrack album from the show. Of course I saw the disappointing film version with Richard Harris and Vanessa Redgrave. I have the CD of the Broadway production and sometimes listen to it in my car.
But there's more to the association of this show with the Kennedy years than chronological congruence. Camelot, adapted from T.H. White's The Once and Future King, centers around dashing, handsome, mythical King Arthur and his unutterably gorgeous bride, Queen Guinevere. Their doomed love, (by the show’s end Guinevere has run off with Lancelot) a metaphor for the kingdom of Camelot itself, is referred to as “one brief, shining moment” in the show’s lyrics. Also, it was reported that Kennedy himself was fond of the original cast recording, often playing it at the White House. The leap was easy: for decades now, we have been been told repeatedly that the Kennedy years were similarly “one brief, shining moment,” with JFK and his unutterably gorgeous bride Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy as the real-life embodiments of Arthur and Guinevere, etc.
And, coincidentally, just as I’m ordering tickets for a revival of this show here in Washington, TIME magazine is presenting us with a cover story, What We Can Learn From JFK. The cover of the magazine features that famous portrait of JFK that has been paraded before the public’s eyes on a regular basis ever since I was eight years old. (And no, I’m not going to share a reminiscence about where I was when I got the news of his murder in Dallas. Every American over the age of 50 does that.)
TIME, the official newsletter of the Upper-West-Side lefties and of course an acolytic keeper-of-the-flame in the JFK hagiography business, dedicated this week’s issue to a sermon about how today’s politicians could learn from all the wonderful things JFK did, which, if you’re churlish enough to actually examine the record, don’t really amount to much. But he was good-looking, died young and said the correct things about civil rights often enough that there has been an ongoing attempt to obfuscate the facts around his assassination and make him a martyr of the Civil Rights movement, even though the evidence that he was killed by a lone Communist in protest over his policy toward Cuba is overwhelming. (And by the way, Kennedy's vaunted civil rights legislation actually got nowhere during “Camelot” and had to be pushed through Congress later by the cloddish, decidedly un-glamorous Lyndon Johnson.) Still, if you have good looks, youth and a legend going for you, your posthumous reputation is not only going to be protected, but it and your grave will be kept clean one way or another, no matter how many dark revelations about your real past and true character the media have to ignore. So TIME lectures us this week, as it has been doing since 1963, about how wonderful JFK was and what a wonderful world this would be if he were running it.
Stuff n’ nonsense, I say. And it sure would be nice if we could move on from all of this. Every year since the 1960s ended, (and the 1960s ended in 1973 with Watergate) the crowd of mourners who show up at the Eternal Flame in Arlington Cemetery every 22nd of November has dwindled, and as long ago as 1995, NPR marked the occasion with a report that included an interesting statistic: most Americans alive in 1995 had not yet been born in 1963. To them the JFK years were as remote as the Harding Administration to the rest of us. And that was 12 years ago. Can we move on?
Not bloody likely, I’m sorry to say. Not until the last baby boomer is in his/her grave. Because by now this is as much about nostalgia as it is about anything else. On November 22, 1963, the people who now run TIME magazine were earnest adolescents clutching their copies of Peter, Paul and Mary's In The Wind or Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin' when they weren't tuning in Top 40 radio to hear the Crystals singing Da Doo Ron Ron or The Chiffons doing He's So Fine . They were worried about social injustice then. Now they’re worried about colonoscopies. They dreamed about world peace then. Now they dream about paying off their own kids’ college loans. At this stage of the game, Kennedy-olatry is all about the good old days, the days when we all wore our hair long, attended Joan Baez and Lou Reed concerts, flipped the peace sign at each other and sipped brews as we smoked pot, not the Metamucil we sip now. The Kennedy years were the wonderful old days when we were young, strong, healthy and full of future. The George W. Bush years are the years of our dotage, which is just one more reason to hate George W. Bush.
Can we can the ‘60s nostalgia? Can we put away the tie-dyed T-shirts, the lava lights, the Procol Harum LPs and the cannabis posters? Because the ‘60s really weren’t such a great period, in all honesty. Even the supposed radicalism of that decade was largely a veneer. Here’s a fact (look it up): in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the summer riots at the Chicago Democratic convention, the top-rated program on American television was…The Beverly Hillbillies. Even Bob Dylan says he doesn’t like to think about the ‘60s. Grow old gracefully, you fools. And quit telling us (after 44 years) that John F. Kennedy was some combination of Jesus Christ, Santa Claus, Mahatma Gandhi and Elvis. We know better. Even if you don’t. (And by the way, if Kennedy were still alive, he’d be turning 89 this year. No longer a movie star, and way past When I’m 64.) Got it? Okay?
Now excuse me, I have two orchestra seats for Camelot.
