Just finished watching "RFK," a PBS documentary...

...on PBS, and I'm a little raw, since that story always upsets me a great deal. But I thought since I had a blog I'd write to you how the show made me feel. I was born in 1969, almost one year exactly after Robert Kennedy was shot dead while campaigning for President, and I know that most of the people who read this are even younger than I am. Some friends who read the blog regularly, have taken the opportunity to tease me about my obsession with the Kennedys and their assassinations in particular. Maybe I'm speaking to those people, or maybe I'm speaking to all of you for whom the politics of the 1960s (or even of the US) are as locked inside history as the invention of the telephone or the birth of Jesus Christ.



In my country, we're suffering from the politics of a broken heart. Our country's heart was broken in the nineteen-sixties, as one inspiring leader after another was shot down, in public. A terrible message was sent--doesn't matter who sent it, really--just that it was received. Don't care about your leaders, don't become passionate about them--if you do, they'll be removed. Whatever momentum they created will be lost. You will have to begin again, a little older, a lot sadder, with a blacker, bleaker view of the world than before. More and more during the last four decades, under the spur of that denied pain, we have been lashing out to share our misery all around the world. Our hearts are armored, and inside the armor is fear, and anger, and sadness.



Remember--or take the time to learn--what's happened in the US since 1968: the sleaze of Nixon and his Iago, Kissinger; the bumbling blandness of Ford, an unelected President; then Carter, a well-meaning liberal totally overmatched and ineffective enough to be safe; then Reagan, and the mass delusion of a return to a pre-heartbreak past that never truly existed; then Bush, a shadowy CEO with no morality save winning and a heart two sizes too small; then Clinton, a Kennedy manque with an obvious flaw which his enemies knew in advance and used like a whip and a leash; and finally Bush, who needs no more castigation than what the newspapers he doesn't read provide fresh every day. Are these the leaders of any great country, much less a democracy? Do we not seem as though we are afraid, as a people, to truly invest our hearts and minds fully in the political alternatives that face us? It doesn't make sense until you use the template of a broken heart.



We're pretending like it doesn't matter--that we've seen it all. Then, we're choosing people beneath us, in the hopes that they will not hurt us too badly if they leave. The country has gone to shit in the meantime--we needn't argue about this, and both parties compulsive pandering to our national "greatness" only makes it clearer. Politics has been turned into a sport, with no more immediate impact than the Harvard-Yale game--though the evidence mounts that this is not so, we are all too willing to believe it, and the parties are all too willing to encourage us to do so. As long as the money flows, they're all too willing to have the minutiae of manuevering stand in for policies; to have weary cynicism play the part of actual choice. To choose is to declare allegiance. To declare allegiance is to believe. And to believe is the one thing we don't do, mustn't do.



And yet believing is so sweet. I would argue it's so fundamentally connected to the democratic process that we can't let it go. So our political world is full of ghosts, of lost loves. We escape into Sixties hagiography, remembering the good times in an obscuring golden haze. Or--and I am guiltier of this than most--replay the events of the assassinations, examining them for that one detail that solves the mystery and, perhaps, reverses the evil spell. Or we dredge up the dirt and expose the flaws, in an effort to convince ourselves that the Kennedys--or MLK--or Malcolm X--weren't really so much to lose. Or we pin our hopes on a proxy (Teddy, Gary Hart, Dan Quayle, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards), replaying the same story with a girl that looks slightly similar, in the hopes that this time, the story will end differently.



When all the remedies prove fruitless, as they do in failed relationships, we swing into bitter impotence. We try to lessen the robbery by devaluing what was stolen. The talking heads are experts at this, explaining that Vietnam would've happened the same way had the assassinations never happened; that the civil rights movement would've petered out into identity politics as it did; that the fundamental inequalities that we all suffer under in this country would remain unaddressed and unimproved; that we would still export the worst of our country into an increasingly resentful world. It's cold comfort--which is to say, no comfort at all--and it's wrong.



Well, folks, I'm here to say that I'm tired of it. I'm going to do the only thing a person can do to mend a broken heart--give up the past, while at the same time focusing even more clearly on what was valuable it. What was appealing about the Kennedys, or Martin Luther King, or Malcolm X, or Medgar Evers, or Fred Hampton, wasn't their style, or the flotsam that can be arranged into nostalgia. It was that they believed in our country's capacity to change itself for the better. They knew that it wouldn't be easy, and knew, too, that any attempt to change necessarily creates an oppositional force determined to prevent change.



In every situation, with every leader, in every time and place, it is that small bit of belief generated by willing hearts, that tips the balance in favor of progress. It is not always there--in the Clinton years, for example--but we all know inside that if we do not begin to generate this bit of belief, this flame, once again, our country will continue to deteriorate, and in its deterioration be even more selfish and stupid and venal, and continue to lash out. As with a broken heart, the good that can be outweighs the good that was lost. I say all this in the hopes that somebody out there understands what I'm talking about.