Gentle reader, do you feel as I do, that America is under a curse? If it is, of course, it is one we have cast on ourselves.
Some time back, in this space, I mused that Trump’s advent was like a volcano of filth that was coating everything, not only in America’s present and future but even in its past. I’m sure I’m not the only American these days for whom a drive through the “purple mountain majesties” no longer evokes emotions like that of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (whose first movement proclaims “Joyful Feelings Upon Arriving in the Country”), but a gut-clenching fury and terror every time I pass an oversize sign on a crumbling shack urging us to SAVE AMERICA AGAIN with the Maximum Mangy Mountebank.
But the crud gets on everything, and not only in Trump country. The primitive bloodlust that Hamas let loose in its October 7 mega-pogrom in Israel unleashed a beast that will not easily be re-caged, not least among American “progressives.” Just like the MAGAs, they are exulting in their newfound “freedom” to indulge their every hateful impulse. This applies not only to Jews as such, but to other “categories” of humanity they were sworn to protect and boastful about standing up for. Women rape victims brought it on themselves or are making it up, if they are Israeli; women who voice support for Jews and Israel deserve to have their weight and their looks mocked; skin color prejudice is not only acceptable but praiseworthy when directed at certain people, even if it happens to contradict physical reality; mob violence is righteous, as long as the victims wear yarmulkes or Stars of David. Needless to say, now that they have acquired the taste for indulging these kinds of hatreds, they will turn them against other targets too.
The crud gets on everything, and not only in Trump country.
What do I mean that the vileness of our times also pollutes the past? First, Trump and his minions often single out disgraceful aspects of American history, sometimes things that were half-forgotten, to justify their own even worse plans. A prime example is “Operation Wetback,” when the Eisenhower administration deported perhaps one million Mexicans who had been living in the United States, with little to no due process, some of them actually U.S. citizens.
But the filth has spread more broadly than that. Anyone who recognizes the danger Trump poses and the roots it has in American history can’t help but look at much of the latter in a worse light. How could the Founders have punted on the issue of slavery, with consequences that imperil the nation to this day? Was slavery ever even truly abolished? Isn’t the story we’ve been telling ourselves for decades about the irreversible triumphs of the movements for African American civil rights and women’s rights wrong, now that such basics as black people’s suffrage and women’s bodily autonomy and even freedom of movement are in danger? And so on.
One treasured relic of the American past is the Kennedy family. With Ted Kennedy now safely dead, even Republicans can claim to venerate the family that also gave his brothers, President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General and later Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In my family, the affection was personal, with my late father writing to Eleanor Roosevelt and receiving a hand-signed reply in 1960, during the Democratic primary campaign, reassuring him that she strongly supported the future president. Twenty years later, my dad campaigned door to door during Ted Kennedy’s ill-fated run for president. Inheriting this passion myself, one obsession behind my own interest in “alternate history” fictions was how much different and better the recent past would have been if not for Robert Kennedy’s assassination, during his presidential campaign in 1968, over a year before I was born. He could have beaten Nixon and ended the war in Vietnam years earlier, saving countless lives, and gone on to steer America in a very different direction from the one it actually took in the Reagan-Bush years. Or so I believed then.
Now Robert Kennedy’s son and namesake has stepped forward to mount the fourth Kennedy family presidential campaign, but the curse of the American twenty-first century is upon him, and the campaign, and Robert Kennedy Jr. himself, are obscene travesties. Which is the case even if he doesn’t manage to throw the election to Trump, doing his Best and Brightest™ to turn America into a Theocracy of Dunces. In the 1960s, the Kennedy “brand” was all about youth and “viggah,” masculine energy and charm, all of which had their dark side as everyone now knows. That said, what the hell are we supposed to make of this foul old crank who bears the Kennedy name, but is the Portrait of Dorian Gray compared to his father and uncles? His version of Kennedy idealism started with keeping the ocean view from the family compound in Hyannis Port unobstructed by unsightly windmills meant to reduce the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels, and then proceeded to full crackpottery over the COVID vaccines, and lifesaving vaccines in general. Then he was caught on tape ranting about Jews and Chinese people having been spared the worst pandemic in a century, presumably because the Elders of Zion and those wily Chinese engineered it that way. Not to worry, though, because the publicity hound Rabbi Shmuely Boteach has absolved the Worst Kennedy of antisemitism, just as Bibi Netanyahu has made kosher Trump, Elon Musk, and other assorted neo-fascists. And Bobby Junior himself turns out to be as staunchly pro-Israel as the real Bobby Kennedy, who ended up paying for it with his life—his assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, was a Palestinian Jordanian enraged at his support for the Jewish state. Just like his frenemy Trump, Fake Bobby is indignant at accusations that he hates Jews, since he is such a big Israel supporter. (At least the Free-Free-Palestines won’t vote for him once that soaks in.)
One is tempted into a psychological speculation: Junior’s support for Israel demonstrates to himself and others that he really is a chip off the old block (though he is now nearly twice as old as the old block ever got to be), but he secretly blames the Jews for getting his father killed when he was only fourteen… Well, perhaps. Darker speculations center around the Trump friendlies who have been contributing to his campaign, although now Fake Bobby has picked Google founder Sergey Brin’s ex-wife as his running mate to ensure a source of ready cash. Ah, for the days when it was only Mean Old Joe Kennedy Sr.’s bootlegging fortune financing the family’s presidential campaigns! (Old joke: Why was the 1960 election so close? Because Old Joe had wired Young Jack, “I’LL BE DAMNED IF I’LL PAY FOR A LANDSLIDE.” Ho, ho, ho. A wire was a sort of prehistoric text message also known as a telegram, kiddies.)
All of which is yet more proof that this is and always has been America’s real national motto:
Emanuel Goldstein 