Clearly there are such times in our personal and communal lives...sublime, extravagant, joyous times...when everything is right...when life is enchanted: a summer romance, a family holiday, the courtship-honeymoon stage of a romance, the illuminative stage of prayer life, an athletic championship. For Israel, the kingship of David was Camelot; it fell apart, due to the diabolic dynamisms of incest, biological and moral-spiritual.
The heroic warrior-king-father David (a prototype for Arthur, JFK, MLK) created the quintessential Camelot, but the seeds of its destruction were in his adultery and a pattern of incest. His adultery with Bethseba was despicable mostly in his betrayal of Uriah, her husband and his loyal soldier and therefore, symbolically, his son. Morally, David slew his (moral) "son" to have his (moral) "daughter-in-law." Fast forward and we have his family in a sexual chaos: his one son rapes his own half-sister and then is slaughtered by her full-brothers. We have: adultery brings filiocide, brings incest, brings fratricide. This is the prototype for the incest-driven fall of Camelot.
The John F. Kennedy Presidency was a Camelot for us liberal, Catholic, especially Irish Americans. It was...the intelligence of the brain trust, the movie-star-glamour, the virile energy, the international altruism, the confidence, the expansive economy, the Pax Americana, the Vatican Council, the large families, the religious vocation surplus, and so much more.
The pressing historical question that haunts our boomer generation: Why did this splendid, enchanted Kingdom collapse so catastrophically shortly after the death of JFK around 1965? The answer may be in the Camelot tradition itself!
In the earliest legends, King Arthur dominates as a heroic warrior...much like the young King David, not unlike JFK and MLK. Later, he is sidelined as elderly and relatively weak in comparison with the appealing Lancelot who steals his bride Guenevere. We see here that the king, a paternal image, becomes weak while the queen's affection goes to the younger knight in a quasi-oedipal adultery. One of the earliest Arthurian legends has his nephew achieving this oedipal victory. In both cases, the king is diminished and sidelined as mother and surrogate son surrender to sexual chaos. This simple story line unveils the inner form of the Cultural Revolution that exploded in the late sixties: the diminshment of the Father (and authority, tradition, law, the sacred, the masculine), the explosion of a resentful femininism, and the license for contracepted, sterile, largely oedipal sex.
JFK was himself, of course, the opposite of the cuckolded, failing patriarch: he was robust, vigorous, confident and shamelessly promiscuous in imitation of father Joseph Kennedy. The Patriarch established the adulterous legacy and explicitly initiated his sons into it. John's alleged bedding of his father's ex-lover Gloria Swanson is an oedipal soap opera on a colassal scale. The Kennedy men continued this abuse of women out of unrestrained, power-fueled, toxic masculine lust. The legacy continued: Martin Luther King, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Harvey Weinstein, Andrew Cuomo, Jeffrey Epstein and a legion of often-Democratic, always contracepting, pro-choicing abusers of women. Clinton' daliance with Monica, same age as his daughter, was the most overtly incestuous drama; as such fatal for the life of the family and community; but casually dismissed as a recreational indiscretion. Epstein's abuse of underage women is nauseatingly oedipal in the moral and psychological sense. MLK continues as a cultural idol, curiously immune to "me-too" critique and its implicit acceptance of sexual license.
It is a mystery, a paradox, an irony: as the Great Generation (of men who defeated two totalitarianisms, contained a third, built a superb economym, society and church) reached the pinacle of power in the late 1960s that there was this luciferian pivot against the paternal into oedipal, incestuous spiritual chaos. How could this happen? How did they lose their grip on the Good and the True? Why did their women collapse into envy, resentment and disgust for the paternal/maternal? Why did their children despise them and their legacy with such arrogance and narcissism? it is a Mystery from hell! At the heart if it is the dark underside of Camelot: patriarchy turned adulterous/incestuos; womanly rage and envy; filial disloyalty, narcisissm and arrogance; the desecration of the iconography of the paternal, maternal, spousal and filial.
I recall a conversation many years ago with a young Italian security guard at Newark Airport: speaking of his love for his children, he recalled running into an ex-girlfriend who offered an adulterous daliance. He declined. Thoughtfully he reflected: "In regard to my wife, I could have gone with her. But not in regard to my children. I could never look them in the face." It struck me at the time as a profound moral intuition: the worst thing about adultery is the damage to the children. We know marriages that survive and even flourish post-adultery, where the offender is contrite and the offended forgiving. But the wound to the children, it seems to me, is indelible. The child's very being is conceived in the union of groom-and-bride; the child's very identity flows from the conjugal union, however imperfect, of the two. The violation of the sacred father-son/daugher relation in (implicitly incestous) adultery is the deepest of sins; it is not so much about sex as about the holiness and desecration of fatherly love.
The fall of Camelot, of the kingdom and the family and a legacy...of David, Arthur, JFK and MLK, Clinton and Weinstein...lies in the betrayal of paternal love in adultery; oedipal resentment and distrust of the father; feminine envy and rage at the paternal as disloyal and tyranical; the degeneration of the paternal as heroic, noble, generous; and the surrender into the chaos of sterile, recreational-romantic, non-spousal, anti-paternal, non-maternal sex.
The building of a new, genuine Camelot must be on the foundation of the holiness of the family; the primacy of state-of-life (vows of marriage or consecration); chastity; filiality; fraternity; fruitful, spousal love; paternity and maternity. This is why the destruction by Pope Francis of the John Paul Institute for the Family in Rome is the most disloyal, decadent of his decisions. The trivialization of sexuality and the pervasive acceptance of the adulteries of JFK, MLK, Clinton, Trump in the desecration of paternity is the deepest evidence of the decadence of our society and Church. It is that the health of the Church and society flows from the deep, good roots of wholesome, holy families...the prayerful, faithful, humble life of Nazareth.
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