The last time you had probably thought about a bicycle and bear getting together was when viewing a magazine cartoon about an ursine trick-rider at the circus.
Thanks to the recent report of a decade-old stunt pulled by apparently perpetually adolescent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., you are now forced to think of a bear and a bicycle in terms of a yet another blow to the notion that Bobby Jr. is anything like a candidate for the White House who should be seriously considered by American voters.
Kennedy’s campaign — and his life — are circus sideshows in themselves.
Only a child of immense wealth and privilege who never learned any lessons in humility along the way could have the chutzpah to pull off a caper such as Kennedy’s — and it was a mere decade ago, when he was 60, not some frat-boy prank from the distant past.
If you missed the story in the midst of what has certainly been a newsy time in the campaign for the presidency, it goes like this, as first reported by Clare Malone in a profile in The New Yorker: “One day, in the fall of 2014, Kennedy was driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he passed a furry brown mound on the side of the road. He pulled over and discovered that it was the carcass of a black-bear cub. Kennedy was tickled by the find. He loaded the dead bear into the rear hatch of his car and later showed it off to his friends.”
Tickled? Ah, old-money senses of humor.
Then, finding himself in Manhattan later that evening, with the cub still in the way-back of his vehicle, Kennedy hatched a plan that would not perhaps occur to the rest of us.
There had recently been some controversies over bicycle riding in Central Park, with some bike-pedestrian crashes. Kennedy, with the help of some of those friends, “thought it would be funny to make it look as if the animal had been killed by an errant cyclist.” Alcohol was involved, though Kennedy insists not on his part. They dumped the cub’s body in the large park, which pretty much empties out by nightfall, with the bicycle on top of it, attempting to create the idea that the bear had somehow been killed by a cyclist, who unaccountably fled the scene, leaving behind said bike.
New York City, like other world metropolises, sometimes has wildlife sightings, including that of coyotes. But bears are not known to have made the trip across the Brooklyn Bridge.
It became a big, short-lived news story. “This is a highly unusual situation,” a spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy told The New York Times. “It’s awful.”
In a follow-up story for the Times, coincidentally written by Tatiana Schlossberg, one of JFK’s granddaughters, a retired Bronx homicide commander noted, “People are crazy.”
Yes, they are, including would-be leaders of the free world.
Kennedy does not deny the story, and tries to make light of it: “Maybe that’s where I got my brain worm,” he quipped.
In our view, Kennedy was never a serious candidate for the presidency. His dark and, well, weird view of the world, his obsession with patently untrue pseudoscience about not just the effective vaccinations against COVID-19 but with all medical vaccinations, his shambolic personal life, his many years of heroin addiction — not presidential. It’s too bad, in that credible third-party candidates with independent views — from John Anderson to Ross Perot — can introduce vigor and gravitas into contemporary presidential campaigns. The two main parties don’t own the White House.
RFK Jr. does not possess that gravitas. His candidacy will be forgotten as Americans rally around Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. He should exit electoral political life, and stick to cleaning up his beloved Hudson River, for the benefit of the surviving bear cubs.
