BuzzFlash Reviews
September 29, 2005
The
Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now (Book)
Norman MacAfee (Editor)
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A
reader of this book offered these thoughts on another website:
A wonderful collection of speeches from Robert Kennedy's tragically curtailed 1968 presidential campaign. They are challenging, thought provoking & inspiring - as you read them you can only think of what America & the world would have been like if he hadn't been assassinated.
What is also striking is how relevant & contemporary the issues & values articulated by RFK are for the times we live in today.
Norman MacAfee prefaces each speech with thoughts of his own, putting the speeches into the context of not only Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign but also how & why the issues & beliefs that RFK speaks about matters now.
I strongly recommend this book for every RFK admirer who cares about his legacy & what it can still offer to the world.
Sometimes, even we at BuzzFlash forget how the idealism of the '60s was assassinated in a burst of American violence: JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., RFK. All of them evoked passion, idealism, the ability to evolve and inspire. The Republicans who try to position themselves as the great defenders of "life" are really the party of violence and death.
The Bushevik wing of the GOP is built upon the foundation of Nixon's Southern Strategy, which was an effort to harness the angry, defiant, violent white Christian male voting block into a Republican political juggernaut. For a moment, the media recognized the significance of how Hurricane Katrina represented the great racial divide that is encoded in the Republican Party's national political strategy. It may be more subliminal now, but it's there like the San Andreas Fault in California, a force of great compressed power.
When the Busheviks talk about the great immorality of the '60s, it's really a coded way of decrying the advances in civil rights and the opposition to the Vietnam War. What happened then was that the "infallible" patriarchal white male had been challenged -- and ever since then the right wing and neo-Confederates have been trying to restore the white male to ruling the roost, no matter how flawed he is. Just look at Bush.
It doesn't matter how much you destroy things, you start off 100 points ahead just because you are white, male and say Jesus inspires you. It's about accumulating and holding on to raw power for one special interest group. That's it in a nutshell.
Which brings us back to RFK. The Kennedys were the great articulators of an inclusive, secular, idealistic, society based on egalitarian principles and merit. They were the mirror opposites of the Bush dynasty, in which privilege has no relationship to accountability or ability.
RFK, in his brief 1968 campaign, inspired us to be a better nation and to challenge ourselves. He gave us hope in our hearts, not the facade of religious piety that has no heart.
Reading his speeches from that period, it is painful to realize what we lost -- and how America has been stumbling in the fog all these many years. For all their talk of morality, the Busheviks have built an elitist, incompetent monarchy that is dependent on appealing to the most base instincts of Americans, whatever their lofty rhetoric.
RFK challenged us to reach for the stars, not stare at the abyss.
A BuzzFlash special purchase.
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