  The old idea that the photon is a Goldstone boson emergent from a
spontaneously broken theory of interacting fermions is revisited. It is
conjectured that the gauge-potential condensate has a vacuum expectation value
which is very large, perhaps the GUT/Planck momentum scale, but that the
magnitude of the effective potential which generates it is very small, so small
that in the limit of vanishing cosmological constant it would vanish. In this
way, the threat of unacceptably large observable, noncovariant residual effects
is mitigated. The linkage of these ideas to other speculative ideas involving
black holes and parametrizations of Standard-Model coupling constants is also
described.
