March 2018

A very important month.

And a very important man.

The Wound

What is there about this intense, brave, confused, very funny, and very tender-hearted campaign -- lasting a mere 82 days -- that haunts us 50 years later? Why is it impossible to see or hear even a glimpse of Robert Kennedy without feeling, in Norman Mailer's words, "sorrowful as rue in the throat"?

Thurston Clarke's The Last Campaign moves us toward the answer, in a way that is more like a piece of music than a literary creation. He makes us understand that the campaign -- the wound that will never heal -- was not constructed as an ideological pursuit, and as Clarke takes us forward we understand it doesn't make much sense politically as well. Yet it's impossible to imagine a campaign which has ever embodied something as intensely specific as this one: what it means to be human. For Robert F. Kennedy that meant obsessive concern with all that is hurt, hungry, ignored, degraded, invisible; tenderness toward the broken; self-deprecation bordering on shame for all he was blessed with; political, moral and physical bravery that would make Hemingway flinch; self-criticism and self-learning.

He burned with everything that's been burned out of our land and out of our culture. The last campaign recalls us to those moments in our lives, so rare, that made us fully alive, better than we thought we could be, more romantic, more brave, more moral. He lived that way every day, at least toward the end. The heartbreak of the book is, of course, the knowledge we have of what followed the extinguishing of the flame. Nixon. Watergate. Carter. Reagan. Let's mention that one again: Reagan. Bush I. Clinton I. Bush II. Obama. Donald Trump.

As someone who worked for the Obama campaign beginning in 2007, the book makes me quite angry. Perhaps a leader, especially in the cool ironic virtual world of our own, cannot burn by such a light. Yet the comparison goes beyond. Compared to RFK's campaign, Obama's didn't do a thing to challenge the paradigm of spin, calculation, focus groups, or safety which has suffocated every national campaign since 1968. In the closing days of the '08 primaries, Barack Obama was giving the same stump speech in South Dakota he gave back in Iowa in January. Kennedy changed his message all day, every day -- challenging whomever he was speaking with, saying the things which would irk them the most. Whenever Obama came to a fork in the road, between going toward courage or going toward safety, he chose safety each time (denouncing his pastor, leaving his church, suddenly turning into an anti-Castro Cuban in Florida, changing his positions in several ways before AIPAC).

Thurston Clarke's book is as passionate and human as was the campaign he's covered. And as short. One takes it slow. One does not want it to end. It is a major achievement. Norman Mailer, once more: "Tragedy is amputation. The nerves of one's memory run back to the limb which is no longer there."

Robert F. Kennedy - R.I.P.

Spring is Here?

Kennedy for Senate

Ren

One of the great movie actors of our time has died, at the age of 66. Osugi Ren is best known for his work with director Takeshi Kitano, yet his work stretches back decades and includes performances under the best Japanese directors of the past 40 years (Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Higashi, Kore-eda, Yukisada). He was the ultimate professional: elegant, subtle, romantic, tender, reserved, and very moving.

From Hana-bi (1997), the greatness of Osugi Ren. (And Kitano.)