There’s a wonderful passage in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King in which the young King Arthur begins asking the big philosophical questions.  The wizard Merlin, who has tutored him ever since he was a small child, is the one person present in the Royal Chamber who understands the significance of the moment:

“Well,” said the King. “It is about chivalry. I want to talk about that.”

Merlyn was immediately watching him with a sharp eye. His knobbed fingers fluttered among the stars and secret signs of his gown, but he would not help the speaker. You might say that this moment was the critical one in his career—the moment towards which he had been living backward for heaven knows how many centuries, and now he was to see for certain whether he had lived in vain.

“I have been thinking,” said Arthur, “about Might and Right. I don’t think things ought to be done because you are able to do them. I think they should be done because you ought to do them. After all, a penny is a penny in any case, however much Might is exerted on either side, to prove that it is or is not. Is that plain?”

Nobody answered.

We’re at a historical moment where a decision of comparable magnitude is going to be made in the near future. The death of Osama bin Laden provides symbolic cover for the United States to finally shed the burden it has shouldered ever since World War II of providing a global police force, while shifting gears to a non-imperialist foreign policy. That will free up funds that are desperately needed on the home front. Tom Hayden eloquently described the crossroads we face in his blog post this morning. I don’t agree with him about defending Wikileaks, but that’s a relatively minor quibble. The Democratic Party had the opportunity to shift course in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the lure of imperialist fantasies unfortunately proved its downfall. My reading of the tea leaves is that President Obama is going to jump down on the right side of the fence and radically change course. He began laying the narrative framework with his State of the Union address, and I think the movement of Leon Panetta to the Defense Department and David Petraeus to the CIA signifies a shift towards focussing resources on the domestic front, as a smarter, sleeker military apparatus concentrates on intelligence and diplomacy rather than troops on the ground in various trouble spots around the world. I hope to the Goddess I’m right.

I’m struck today by the juxtaposition of the once-in-a-generation photo op/merchandising bonanza of Britain’s royal wedding and the quiet American love story of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords making her first public appearance since January’s massacre in Tucson to attend the launch of the Endeavour space shuttle with her husband at the helm (the launch ended up getting postponed at the last minute due to a technical malfunction). Lots to ponder in these two love stories.

“If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.” — Tom Hayden

The Port Huron Statement of the Students For a Democratic Society

“To counter this ancient, self-destructive bent, rulings from the Oracle, whom all respected, were often sought. The prophetess offered graceful solutions that entailed no loss of face for either side. And while she is no longer there at Delphi, her ageless wisdom remains. In the Libyan case, it is worth following to the letter.”

From Ancient wisdom in a modern crisis, by John Arquilla

“A blind and ignorant resistance to every effort for the reform of abuses and for the readjustment of society to modern industrial conditions represents not true conservatism, but an incitement to the wildest radicalism.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Hopefully, the jig is up for the extent to which the American system has been rigged to favor profits over people.  It is not even remotely amusing anymore.

Thank heaven for the wisdom of the truth-tellers. The adjunct to this is that a large percentage of today’s adult American women aren’t old enough to remember the days of back alley abortions and their dire consequences. The Republicans are going to have some serious “splainin’ to do” when the next election season rolls around. Bring it on!

Moderates who traffic in objective truth have become the radicals of the day. Such is the legacy of post-modernism, I guess. I’m ready to move on to reality-based narratives, myself.

I totally get why artists tend to want to ignore the realm of politics. Real art is about deep-level immersion in universal truths that transcend the petty preoccupations of individual egos, just as genuine scholarship begins with a recognition of how vast the field is of what one doesn’t know. It seems to logically follow that political punditry is about the diametric opposite of art and scholarship, as it takes effort to find someone who isn’t primarily obsessing about their own ego projections rather than any objective engagement with ideas and information.

I didn’t watch President Obama’s speech this morning on the deficit, but I got the gist of it from Internet skimming. The man has both substance and artistry to his style, and it seems like he goes over the heads of about 98% of his audience. There are two entirely separate tracks going on in any situation like this: the policy points he favors and the political tactics necessary to engage the public with them at a substantive level. The vast majority of the bloviators seem to get caught up in whatever they personally think about policy and not comprehend the sophistication of what’s going on tactically. It’s the rare piece of commentary that can take in the merits of the policy points while simultaneously appreciating how historical context impacts the fashion in which they are presented. It’s enough to make me want to tune out the whole cacophony and immerse myself in something like the rosebuds emerging in my garden.

Exactly 150 years ago, shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, kicking off the long, bloody Civil War. Today, our society is rent by conflict every bit as great as that which culminated in the War Between the States. We cannot afford to re-litigate the issues that were fought over back then. If nothing else, we owe it to the dead to build upon their sacrifices rather than regress and wallow in old battles. I have no illusions that getting out of the mess we’re currently in will be easy. But I have faith that it can be done, and in a classy and constructive fashion to boot. The power of the idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people should not be underestimated.

How much longer are the Republicans going to be able to get away with the outrageous fabrication that they represent the party of fiscal responsibility? Republican presidents from Reagan onward have been wildly reckless about deficit spending, and their policies have unabashedly transferred wealth out of the pockets of the working class and into the hands of the idle rich while crashing the global economy and miring us in messy, expensive foreign entanglements. Sarah Palin and her ilk may be too anti-intellectual and/or self-absorbed to realize they’re being played for fools by the unapologetic proponents of barbaric, unfettered capitalism, but the rank and file won’t stay hoodwinked forever. All bills eventually have to be paid.