Warning: My tin-foil hat firmly in place, and I don’t have time to check sources. Caveat lector.

As the presidential campaign has unfolded, the appeal of the McCain-Palin campaign to minorities has dwindled. Instead, the Republican ticket has increasingly appealed to its "base" and the White Blue-collar vote. It is well known that the McCain-Palin ticket has very little support among Blacks. Support among Hispanics is not readily found; perhaps a commenter can report what I was unable to find. But racial polling is hard to find in general, and what I’ve found focuses more on divisions among the Democrats than between Democrats and Republicans. I don’t see much reporting on McCain and Palin campaigning for Hispanic votes.

The King Arthur of history was the hero of a diminishing archaic population of Romanized and Christianized Celts who were resisting the invasion of Saxons and other Germanic peoples from SE England. The Saxons had a number of technological advantages, which the archaeological literature documents. Geoffrey of Monmouth, court scribe for a noble family in Cornwall, took the historical fragments of King Arthur and transformed them into a heroic tale of Resistance and Nobility that was further embellished by Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, and further romanticized by the legend of Camelot, which got a lot of play during John F. Kennedy’s brief presidency.

But the gritty reality of King Arthur’s resistance, brushing the mythology aside, looks a lot like the resistance of the racially-based Romanized Cornish ancien regime against the Saxon invasions. And this begins to look a lot like the McCain-Palin campaign. Apply some of the tools of post-modern deconstruction to the Republican Presidential campaign, and it looks a lot like a defense of WASP America, representing the ancien regime, against the rising tide of a pluralistic America– not just Black America, like Jesse Jackson, but the America of Tiger Woods: Black, Asian, Hispanic and Other, all mixed together, in a reality easily seen around the Pacific Rim, especially the West Coast of America and Hawaii. This is perhaps what Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition envisioned, but never effectively actualized.

I write from the vantage-point of Hawaii, but my grandparents are all from the Midwest, and grew up on McGuffey Readers and other icons of the ancien (WASP) regime. I was raised as a WASP (is there anyone who doesn’t know that stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant?) among WASPs. But here in Hawaii, I’m in the minority, and there is no majority race. From here, the McCain-Palin ticket looks, well, like a throw-back to the days of my grandparents, except for having a woman on the ticket. But hey, King Arthur had Guinevere.

Perhaps in a decade or two, someone will start writing in glowing terms of the Glory of the McCain-Palin Crusade, and a new mythology like Camelot will take shape.

Bob in HI