Sometimes it’s harder to forgive a politician’s oddball, eccentric, merely mean-spirited positions, even when they are expressed offhand and are not the main plank in the platform, than it is their fundamental beliefs.
Robert Kennedy Jr.’s fundamental belief, other than his past main plank of thinking that the tens of millions of lives saved by the miracle of medical vaccines in the last century are all part of some dangerous conspiratorial fraud.
Whatever, would be the proper response to such nonsense, except that this guy thinks he ought to be president.
But, again, it’s sometimes the down-ticket nonsense on a candidate’s list of priorities that bothers. For me, it’s akin to discovering a couple of small lies that a candidate for office told me during this spring’s endorsement season. If they were lying about the little stuff, what about the big?
RFK Jr. is bad news — already knew that.
Just another entitled, not particularly bright spoiler. At least Ralph Nader and Ross Perot were very smart spoilers.
But somehow, when I read recently that Kennedy was going out of his way to protest the removal of Confederate statues from Southern city parks where they have stood too long as an unforgivable insult to the descendants of enslaved Americans, the bad news got worse.
“I have a visceral reaction against the attacks on those statues,” Kennedy said on a podcast hosted by Tim Pool, apparently a right-wing commentator.
Cliche-watch: to take them down is “destroying history.”
He went on to cite “heroes in the Confederacy who didn’t have slaves,” The New York Times report.
But then, asked to name a hero of his own from the Southern side in the Civil War, he cited Robert E. Lee — who very much did “own” slaves.
Well, he said, “if we want to find people who are completely virtuous on every issue throughout history, we would erase all of history.”
It is at this point in the discussion of Confederate monuments, thousands of which remain in Dixie along with the several prominent ones that have been removed, that it is well to remember when most of them were erected.
It was by no means right after the Civil War.
They were a long time coming.
They were mostly proposed and created during the long effort from the 1890s into the 1920s to create the myth of the Lost Cause in the American South.
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Those were the years of the Jim Crow South, of the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and most of the statues of General Lee and his fellow martyrs to the cause were put up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who sought to further the myth of the genteel plantation-era South of their grandparents as it was about to disappear into memory in the 20th century.
It was all nothing more than propaganda to counter the fact that the plantations and the economic success of the agrarian South had been entirely built on the backs of enslaved human beings.
And the son of Bobby Kennedy — who sent federal troops to the University of Mississippi to enforce a federal court order admitting James Meredith, an African American, to what had previously been a segregated school — defends the propagandist history of the Lost Cause?
That Americans would vote for such a person shows that matters are worse than we think.
Larry Wilson is a member of the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
