Once Upon a Time in the Middle Ages

Chapter 3 Once upon a Time in the Middle Ages

He who controls the present controls the past. G. ORWELL, 1984 (1949)

We left off with a comment on the Bush Era, which was accused of being dark and medieval no sooner than it was over. Now we are setting off from the Ken- nedy Era. The same White House that in 2009 was called medieval for its lack of technological equipment, was between 1961 and 1963 referred to as Camelot. In the wake of the enormous success of the eponymous musical by Alan Jay Lerner, which debuted less than a month after the 1960 elections, the Presi- dent’s cabinet became the Knights of the Round Table, while John Fitzgerald and his consort Jacqueline were Arthur and Guinevere.1 Almost fifty years lat- er, various observers wondered whether Camelot had come again to the White House, weaving parallels between the smiling Kennedy and Obama families.2 Thus, within a sixty year period, the United States would see four returns to the Middle Ages: twice in the name of darkness (McCarthyism and the Bush ad- ministration) and twice in the name of Arthur’s splendid chivalry (the Kenne- dy and Obama administrations). Moreover, in recent years the Bush adminis- tration has been censured anew not just because it was perversely “medieval,” but also for the exact opposite reason: because it had completely disregarded the great tradition of the Magna Carta, whose lesson on liberty sanctioned by laws still endures today.3 George W. Bush thus becomes a disturbing character

1 The comparison was first conceived by John Steinbeck. On that subject: Br. A. Rosenberg, Kennedy in Camelot: The Arthurian Legend in America, in “Western Folklore,” xxxv (1976), n. 35, pp. 52–59; V. Ortenberg, In Search of the Holy Grail cit., pp. 167 ff. 2 For example: N. Tucker, Barack Obama, Camelot’s New Knight, in “The Washington Post,” Jan. 29, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/28/AR20080128 02730.html (cons. May 5, 2019); “Camelot” Returning to the White House?, in “The Early Show,” Nov. 7, 2008, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/11/07/earlyshow/main4581583.shtml (cons. Apr. 28, 2019); N. Bryant, Obama Echoes JFK’s Camelot Romance, in “bbc News,” Jan. 15, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7786440.stm (cons. Apr. 28, 2019). 3 Cf. N. Turse, Repealing the Magna Carta, in “Mother Jones,” Jan. 6, 2006, http://motherjones .com/politics/2006/01/repealing-magna-carta (cons. Apr. 28, 2019); P. Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto. Liberties and Commons for All, University of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 2008, pp. 11, 267; see p. 275: “Magna Carta is required to open the secret state. Magna Carta is needed for the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.” Linebaugh’s book is a study of

Once upon a Time in the Middle Ages 51 both as a symbol of the dark Middle Ages and as someone ignorant of the en- lightened Middle Ages—even as he himself accused fanatical extremists of sinister, anarchical, and feudal medievalism and claimed to be a Crusader mandated with a mission to defeat them. This is where the two-sided idea of the Middle Ages has led us, even in America, a land that throughout that his- torical era remained unknown to the West. The first two chapters presented some reflections on the medieval as a nega- tive concept. In the cases previously considered, the robust Middle Ages serve as a touchstone for the modern age. Apart from the case of New Medievalism, which can take a neutral point of view, and also apart from the positive use of the idea of the Crusades (which nevertheless arises only in the context of bitter conflict), in general the medieval and its correlate the post-modern have been judged as equally sinister. The key word has been “analogy”: we are like them, equally wretched. Now, however, our conversation moves in a different direc- tion. The argument of this chapter and those to follow aligns with the preced- ing, in the sense that here too we find a critique of current events accom- plished through constant references to the Middle Ages. The metaphor stands, but turned on its head. “Medieval” becomes not a term of similarity, but a place of opposition. The key word is no longer analogy, but distance. The rhetori- cal device shifts from parallelism to antithesis. Antithesis between a corrupt civilization—the current one—and a better civilization, which is held to be the medieval one. The Middle Ages return not to frighten, but to enchant. This is made possible, and we cannot say this enough, because the word “medieval,” which has become polysemic over the course of the centuries, contains in it- self both condemnation and celebration. I now want to discuss this second aspect of the theme, examining the many ways the Medieval Era produces positive reference points for political events of the last fifty years.

Readings of the Middle Ages as a positive period can be found in the vast litera- ture of the critique of progress. We are dealing with a new querelle des anciens et des modernes in which, contrary to the judgments passed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the palm of victory goes to the anciens. In this sense, our debt to late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture is immense: from Luddism, the movement against the society of machines, through Novalis and François-René de Chateaubriand, through John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and William Morris, we can trace a line to contemporary environmentalism,

the uses, interpretations, and omissions to which two documents from the thirteenth century (the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest) have been subjected from the sixteenth century to today.