Camelot’s Killers: Gordon Dickson’s Rhetorical Cleansing of America

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 31, no. 3, 2001 Camelot’s Killers: Gordon Dickson’s Rhetorical Cleansing of America Tim Blackmore Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King – Else, wherefore born… Tennyson, Idylls of the King Writing Around the Table The idea of Camelot was a lance stuck in the side of American culture – the eruption that followed spilled some of the best and the brightest blood in Southeast Asia and Africa. In the science fiction community, Gordon Dickson’s well-liked Childe Cycle1 published between 1960 and 1994, made a fictional Camelot that paralleled Kennedy’s New Frontier. In this paper, I argue that the series functions to make war bloodless and palatable, to mirror the rhetorical postures of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and its political aftermath. A line can be drawn from Kennedy’s rhetoric to the creation of the Peace Corps, the space race, and the deepening involvement in Vietnam. This paper understands Kennedy’s rhetoric to be a step in the direction of American foreign policy that began in Vietnam and extended to other global conflicts. However, Dickson’s writing reflects the early heroic part of the mission: the part we most typically associate with Kennedy’s New Frontier. Many Kennedy historians divide Kennedy scholarship into three phases: the first phase is that of early, idolizing, mythologizing writings, typified by Theodore Sorenson’s Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger’s A Thousand Days; the second phase Canadian Review of American Studies 31 (2001) 168 of scholarship (often called “revisionist”), criticizes the Kennedy presidency at every level (Robert Fairlie’s The Kennedy Promise), including the intimate (Garry Wills’ “tell-all” sexual history The Kennedy Imprisonment); in the 1990s, historians seem to agree, we reached a third stage where the issues (if not the people) are judged with less heat and more clarity (some of these historians, like David Kaiser, rely heavily on newly declassified documents unavailable to previous researchers). I draw on all three of these groups throughout the paper. However, the reader will find that I come to certain conclusions about Kennedy that put the burden of responsibility on Kennedy for America’s move from a cold war to a series of hot wars. I believe Kennedy’s rhetoric, while idealistic, is not innocent. As well, in this paper the reader should be prepared to hear from cultural and military critics like Klaus Theweleit, Paul Virilio, Richard Slotkin, and Max Weber. These voices help to illuminate the darkness around the issues of rhetoric and militarism. Dickson’s original plan for the Childe Cycle (also known as the Dorsai series) consisted of three historical novels (beginning with the story of a fourteenth century military man), three novels set in the present, and six science fiction novels. As of 2001, we have ten science fiction novels, but not the six other planned works. Dickson’s notion was to trace the evolution of the human race, to examine the forces that make the race what it is, and what it could be. In Necromancer, chronologically the first of the Dorsai novels, Dickson depicts Earth as a rich genetic pool that must first be divided if the race is to be ultimately strengthened. The reincarnated hero Paul Formain sends four divisions of humanity into space. These divisions become known as the splinter cultures, and include the “Men of Faith, War, and Philosophy” (Miesel, “Plume” 255). Dickson’s heroes, whether they hold a holy book or a gun, conform to Max Weber’s famous definitions of the charismatic leader: “the chieftain … is the patriarch of the family or sib, but also the charismatic leader in hunt and war, the magician, rainmaker, medicine man – hence priest and doctor – and finally, the arbiter”(1142); all these types correspond to Dickson’s “Men of Faith, War, and Philosophy.” It’s worth noting that these truly are “Men” – women play very limited roles in the Childe Cycle (despite Dickson ’s attempts to inject women later into the Cycle, the story is about men). The Men of Faith (the Friendlies) settle on Harmony, a planet of religious fanatics that owes a spiritual debt to Calvin and the Stoics...