A few words about RFK

Today is the 38th anniversary of the day Bobby Kennedy got shot--no, it wasn't marked on my calendar, Slate reminded me. I thought I'd take a short break from revising Sophomore to share some thoughts.

I come by my Kennedy assassination fetish honestly: My mother was raised Catholic, and my seldom-seen father died when I was young. By 1978 or so (when I was nine) I was spending too many hours delving into JFK books filled with timetables and testimony, alibis and ballistics, tryng to figure out what had happened. This fascination persisted for years. I never understood then why the adults in my life all got so emotional when I asked about it. Now, of course, I get it: to me, JFK's death felt like ancient history, but it was no more remote than the Challenger explosion is today.

The JFK assassination is a maze with no end, and I eventually lost both the heart and stomach to run it. I read about the murders of Martin Luther King and RFK, too, but they seemed (wrongly, it turns out) too open-and-shut to sustain my interest. Eventually life--by which I mean, girls--took hold, and I moved on to other things. I was fortunate; these riddles are poisoned. Attempting to solve them is a religion that eats its acolytes.

When I think of the assassinations now, there is no curiosity or nostalgia; because they have never been definitively solved, I feel that they are still with us. History is fact robbed of its ability to injure; these events still bite. And so, when I saw RFK on Slate today, the long-haired, doom-etched RFK of '68, I felt the bite again, and not a little dread. JFK's death was about the unthinkable happening, but his brother's murder was the world confirming the terrible fact of what it had become. Or maybe, what it always had been.

Forty years on, Kennedy-King-Kennedy looks to me like the moment things started going bad, when control really clamped down from above, and apathy really took root below. Our country is headed in the wrong direction, and without a shred of romanticism, I think that direction was set by the assassinations of the 60s--not only by the loss of those people, their ideas and their ability to inspire, but also by our getting used to unsolved public murder as business as usual. That is a coarsening equal to any suffered by the Roman Republic. Is it merely coincidence that we've turned from a country of possibilities to one grinding out the same tragic, hoary imperial script? The country is traumatized, directionless, hurt; and a generation of politicians have risen who are experts at keeping us that way.

We go around in circles, searching for Kennedy-manques, a right wheel turning around a chewed stump where the left wheel used to be. If you don't like metaphors, here's a fact: All of the "lone nuts" of the 60s weakened one side of the spectrum, in favor of the other. We may think that's a mournful coincidence now, but I doubt future generations will. In my dark moments, I'm convinced that those bullets marked the beginning of American civilization's decline, the time when our capacity for fear and corruption decisively outstripped our desire for positive change. Perhaps the internet will save us; perhaps this glorious chip-and-wire hive-mind is stronger than the gun. I hope so.