Will New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie go to Kennebunkport, Maine, on his summer vacation? You know he would like to. You can tell by the way he thumps his foot when Jeb Bush scratches his neck.
Obama goes directly to Camelot’s spa on The Cape. “Camelot” is what we unabashedly called the place when Jack Kennedy was the first king of America, because it reminded Jackie Kennedy of King Arthur. Really.
Frankly, I did not think my aunties were ready for democracy; even the televised “Wheel of Fortune” type we play in our time, pretending we are still a republic. They’d only been one generation from the Old Sod and nothing there in their previous 900 years in the rainy moss prepared them for Jeffersonian principles. The only thing that prepared them for America was hunger.
Possibly Obama goes to the Cape so that his little doggie can bond with its ancestors over at the Camelot compound. Does Barbara Bush have an extra doggie she might want to pass on to Christie to make him feel at home in Kennebunkport? Make him feel part of the family?
Trouble is, he is not; not now, not ever will Christie ever be a Bush. He should realize right away that he is a front for the Bush/Kissinger legacy and their policy dictators, now at risk of losing their jobs at The Washington Post, thank you, Jesus. Trouble is, he does. So his dilemma is personal, existential. He needs to ask himself, what kind of a man am I, and skulk off for a month of long solitary walks on the beach, but not in Maine.
It is what we have come to in America at least since the early ‘90s. I felt the first chill when a prominent Democratic fundraiser and diplomat said of Bill Clinton and the missus: “I guess this is the closest thing we will ever have to a king and a queen.” Wow.
My guess, no. The closest thing we will ever have to a king is King George; not the Kennebunkport serial mediocrities, but the one born last month. They have a plan, you see, called The Commonwealth, and a model, that booming wilderness and responsible banking wunderkind above us. I asked a well-known Canadian scholar what Canada would do if America fell apart. Canada was and is the plan, he said — just joking — but you know what Freud said.
Visualize this: That which circles around and above us like a large intestine, from Australia to Gibraltar finding its center in Ottawa by the time the wee one is old enough to serve in battle like his ancestors, real monarchs. And ask our fledgling monarchs — Obama, Christie, Bush, the Clintons — did you serve? Do you know what percentage has served in New Jersey and Massachusetts?
But will Kennedy, Bush, Obama, Christie, basically the monarchist families of Massachusetts (plus the Clintons), satisfy once they stop blasting that tedious crap from the ’60s and ’70s in grocery stores? I can’t imagine.
Consider George Kennan’s plan. The great ambassador of late felt we had come pretty much to the end of it and proposed devolving much federal law to more manageable regional circles and advancing likewise compatible state law to the same dozen circles and bringing in a Council of Elders — say a “supercommittee of governors” — to modulate. That’s food for thought for Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Nancy Mace and the rising generation.
Start again with Jefferson, but not in Massachusetts.
