Camelot and Obamalot

I grew up in a storybook family. My parents, refugees from the urban jungle, felt like royalty in our little suburban home. They even referred to our lives as a fable, with a happily ever after ending.

The problem for me was the disconnect between what my parents said and what I experienced. As a kid my life felt more like a Greek tragedy than a fairy tale. While my parents partied hardy, I was bored out of my gourd at home.

When what you're told doesn't jive with your own eyes, you proceed in one of two directions. One way is to grow up and invent new myths for your life. You delude yourself into believing people love you when they don't. You're convinced that you're happy when you're not.

Or you can follow another trajectory, the one I've traveled -- you develop a highly attuned BS detector. Your detector goes off loud and clear any time someone says one thing and does another.

When I was younger I'd frequently ignore the blare of my BS alarm because I wanted so much to be loved and accepted. I hooked up with people whom I knew from the get go were bad news, and I suffered the inevitable consequences. I fell hook, line, and sinker for leftist ideology though the contradictions became more apparent year by year.

When I learned to stand on my own two feet, I started trusting my BS detector, and it's rarely failed me since. I can usually tell right away whether someone is a trustworthy person or full of crap.

I've had friends admonish me for being judgmental and implore me to give people the benefit of the doubt. But it's not uncommon for that same friend to admit to me months later that I was right; the person was a Class A jerk.

Since Obama and the far Left are ruling our fair nation, my BS detector has been blasting like a siren. While conservatives prefer reality, the Left lives in fantasyland with its home base being the past.

In the liberal's eyes, life is all about atrocities, unfairness, every single awful thing that has happened since time began. It's a black and white world of good guys and bad guys, damsels in distress, and pseudo-heroes dispatched by the Democratic Party.

A favorite yarn of the Left is Camelot, the home of the Kennedy family -- John Sr. and Bobby, the saints who sacrificed their lives for this country; John Jr. who tragically died too young; and now Teddy.

While the Kennedy's did some good for this country, creating icons out of them is as foolish as a grown adult still believing in Santa Claus. For a tyke, the idea of Santa and elves and fairy godmothers offers refuge and comfort in an overwhelming world. When adults invent tall tales, all they're doing is fleeing from reality.

The talking heads now tell us we have a new Camelot, with Obama's smiling visage a reminder of the young JFK. Michelle, in her designer clothes, is presented as another Jackie, with pretty young children in tow.

When I ponder the Left's fascination with fairy tales like Camelot, my mind flashes on that great courtroom scene in the flick, A Few Good Men, when the grizzled Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson), bellows at pretty boy, Tom Cruise, "You want answers? You can't handle the truth!" And I think that progressives live in a hallucinatory world because the harsh realities of life stun them.

Robin of Berkeley:

... So the Left detests us because, to them, we're the spoil sports. We're the mean parents who break up the party and make all the children go to bed. We lecture them to mind their manners, respect their elders, and "Who do you think you are to talk to me that way?"
We expose their hair brained plots to change the world for what they really are -- castles made of sand that will vanish with the first strong wind.
We unveil everything they're hiding from, all the cold, cruel facts of life that render them helpless: that in the grand scheme of things, human beings are quite small; that none of us can or should play God; and that there are consequences for cruel or evil behavior.
And perhaps most of all, we trigger in their memory banks those excruciatingly vulnerable moments when the bubble burst, the truth broke through, and they were forced to look reality squarely in the face....

Robin is a recovering liberal and a psychotherapist in Berkeley

Nailed It!

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