RFK Jr. slid into my TikTok “For You” page this weekend. I had never thought of him as being For Me, but TikTok knows all of us better than we know ourselves, so I kept watching. He was standing outside on a sunny day, wearing a pale-blue T-shirt, his mien familiar: inexhaustible, in high spirits, a solo artist ever ready to start one more aria.
“Hey, everybody,” he says cheerfully; “I’m down in Baja with Cheryl.” Trying to save his marriage, I thought cynically. It’s been widely reported that his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, was “the opposite of encouraging” about his dropping out of the race only to join Donald Trump’s team. “This is my first day off in 17 months,” Kennedy said, “and it’s been great.” Great, and apparently not something that required marital lockdown. Hines was not part of the video message. One pictured a casita in which the lights had been dimmed, the AC had been turned to emotional-emergency full blast, and a long-suffering wife lay flattened on the bed.
“Look what I just caught,” Kennedy said. It seemed like a statement that should have begun or ended with the word Mom. He lifted a small, bright-green lizard, its head held steady between his forefinger and thumb, its ancient eye glittering. “I wanted you to see this.”
He’s going to snap that thing’s head off, I thought.
“This is a beautiful little lizard,” he said, explaining that it was “a cape spiny-tailed iguana” and that “they’re so beautiful; they’re this emerald color right now. But later on, they’ll turn gray, and they get about—ah, 40 inches long.”
The life cycle of the cape spiny-tailed lizard seemed to be one more subject that Kennedy knows a hell of a lot about, and on which he can freestyle until the listener is partly hypnotized. The lizard was apparently like the American economy, suicide rate, poisoned soil, teenage disaffection, and vaccination accidents: one more crisis he’s got firmly in hand.
“They eat mainly flowers and fruits,” he continued, “and occasionally—and opportunistically—some small animals.” He paused and smiled slightly at the thought of opportunistically taking down some small animals.
Another thing to know about the cape spiny-tailed iguana, he said, was that “they make great pets.”
Pets? Is this the new environmentalism—taking beautiful creatures out of their delicate biospheres and relocating them, far from the land of flowers and fruit, into a mesh cage, there to be fed on handfuls of bitter greens gleaned from the clippings of produce departments? The iguana pet business has led to an overpopulation problem in Florida, where the offspring of lost or abandoned lizards disturb the natural habitats of other species, tear up yards, and fight above their weight in making that state one of the strange wonders of the world.
RFK himself had once owned an iguana, he said, “and also chuckwallas, another great pet I had as a kid.” Chuckwallas, he informed the viewer, were the cape spiny-tailed iguana’s biggest competitor. The specter of cage fights arose. He had more to say on this subject: The iguanas “were brought here to Baja by the Seri Indians, who canoed over from the mainland, and they were brought to the island as a food source. I’ve seen green iguanas—which is like their cousins—sold in Barranquilla and some of the other markets in the Caribbean—”
Can nothing shut this man up? He was filibustering, but at least it was sort of interesting. A lot of what he says is interesting. More than interesting; it can be mesmerizing.
It turns out that iguanas are fit for consumption, as are their eggs, and that he’d seen people “cut the eggs out” in markets. That’s something I never wanted to see myself, but a mental picture could not be prohibited, because he then added another image: “The eggs come out on a string, and they’re considered a delicacy.”
The end of the video was even creepier: “It’s such a beautiful lizard,” he said, lifting the terrified creature up to the camera again. He looked beyond the lizard directly to the lens and, with another slight grin, asked the viewer, “Don’t you wish you had one of these?”
I can’t explain it; just watch it.
Last month, Kennedy made a video in which he told Roseanne Barr that he’d once been hunting with his friends and, on the way up the mountains, a driver in front of him struck a bear cub, killing it. Kennedy’s response was to pick up the dead animal and throw it in the back of his van. “I was going to skin the bear,” he told Roseanne, “because it was in very good condition, and put the meat in the refrigerator.”
This seems implausible, and in any case, the day went long and he never got around to cutting steaks out of the creature. Instead, with a table at Peter Luger waiting, and the genius machine always running, he told some buddies: “Let’s go bring the bear into Central Park, and it’ll look like it got hit by a bike … Everybody thought, ‘That’s a great idea!’” Police and news crews descended on the scene the next morning.
This isn’t something Kennedy did in college; he did it when he was 60 years old. That isn’t the time to grow up; it’s the time to start getting old. He released the video with Barr because a New Yorker profile was about to drop that included the anecdote, and he must have wanted to get his own version out first. What’s clear is that he remains delighted by this nasty story, proud of a prank whose only possible purpose was to freak out the cyclists in Central Park and to show his buddies how reckless and hilarious he was. I don’t know a single person who could watch a six-month-old bear get struck and killed by a car and not feel any pity for the animal. But Kennedy didn’t show a flicker of compassion.
This summer, reporters also dug up an old photograph of Kennedy holding the ends of a spit on which a four-legged animal had been splayed and charred. He’s leaning over the carcass with his mouth wide open, looking like the Prince of Darkness himself. This was followed by the resurfacing of an old magazine story in which his daughter Kick described the day in her youth when he put all of the kids in the car, drove to where he’d been told there was a beached whale, and took a chainsaw to its neck. He then attached the whale’s head to the roof of the car with bungee cords. On the drive back, his kids covered their heads with plastic bags that had mouth holes cut out so they could breathe, while blood and fluids streamed down the windows of the car and the other drivers gave them the finger as he bore his grotesque souvenir homeward.
These are behaviors you read about in news articles not about a candidate but about a suspect. Mutilating animal carcasses, or exploiting them for a laugh, or trapping live animals for your enjoyment—these are all acts that can make a detective look at you twice.
The problem with Kennedy is that a lot of what he says actually makes sense.
Consider the address he gave after Joe Biden’s most recent State of the Union, comparing the exhausted America of today with the incredibly vital one of his youth, and mine. He talked about the America I grew up in, one in which you might be aware that the government was involved in some very shady operations—principally the Vietnam War—but you never questioned its place as the strongest, the richest, the most innovative, put-a-man-on-the-moon country in the world. In those days we still recited the Pledge of Allegiance, even if the words—allegiance? indivisible?—were incomprehensible. We said the pledge with a sense of purpose—even if our purpose was not to defend the Republic, but to get the morning started so that we could eventually go to recess. But day after day, staring up at that flag, we understood that it was important, and that America was a good thing.
“I grew up in an America that seemed to have achieved its promise as an exemplary nation,” Kennedy said. He called us “the freest country in the world and, by no coincidence, also the most prosperous.” Back then, he said, “working Americans could provide for their families on a single salary. They could buy a home, raise a family, save for retirement without mountains of debt. We made the best music. We made the best movies, we made gold-standard automobiles that everybody in the world wanted. We made blue jeans. We reconstructed Europe. We put men on the moon. We had the world’s healthiest, best-educated children. Our productivity, ingenuity, our can-do spirit were the envy of the world. We had confidence in our strength, our capacity, and the limitless potential of our country.”
All of that was true. It wasn’t something you figured out; it was something you knew. But where, I wondered, would he place the issue of race within this cosmology? I had forgotten that he is Bobby Kennedy’s son—Bobby, who was the muscle on all of his brother’s tentative steps in the civil-rights arena and behind all of Lyndon B. Johnson’s significant ones, including the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
“Yeah, we had serious racial and environmental problems,” RFK said. “But in the heady days of my youth, the environmental movement and the civil-rights movement were picking up steam. My father and some of his allies were fighting to eliminate the last pockets of hunger in Appalachia, in the Mississippi Delta, and on the Indian reservations. And we became, for the first time, a true constitutional democracy in this country, with all races voting and holding political office. Other countries aspired to be like us, and our children grew up proud of their passport, proud of their flag.”
Then he adumbrated America’s current problems: “We’ve become a nation of chronic illness, of violence, of loneliness, depression, and division, and poverty. Our great cities are becoming tent encampments, modern-day Hoovervilles filled with undocumented immigrants and dispossessed Americans and people living in their cars, plagued by mental illness and addiction and despair.”
He rattled off some harrowing truths about our country, things we’re used to confronting one at a time, not in a single, shocking snapshot: Among the rich nations of the world, we’re 35th in child poverty. Worldwide, we are 36th in literacy and 59th in life expectancy, just behind Algeria. Close to half of us are obese, many of us have chronic illnesses, and our cancer rate is criminally high.
He presents all of this along with a vision of the future both sunny and elegantly expressed—a vision of “the America that almost was and yet may be,” which is really just “Make America great again,” but with some spin on the ball, and the old Kennedy magic. But at the same time, he is beholden to a long list of the kind of conspiracy theories usually associated with street-corner prophets and the tinfoil-hat crowd. It’s impossible to shake him of them, and matched with his abilities of oratory and inspiration, they’re dangerous.
Put it this way: One more sign that we’re on the downward escalator is that we once had Bobby Kennedy, and now we have Bobby Kennedy Jr.
He and his wife are presumably back from their excursion. Kennedy has already caught a grasshopper in his airy Brentwood home and set it free into his bright garden, a charming little video except for the unnerving skill he displays at clamping his hand around the creature and holding it so that we can see its head clearly. There has been no report on the whereabouts and well-being of the cape spiny-tailed iguana, which we now understand could make such an excellent pet or snack or possibly even souvenir, its tiny head mounted on a matchbook cover and hung alongside other treasures in a trophy room of the great and the meek, between the chainsawed whale’s head and whatever was left of the bear.