Okay, we actually need to talk about RFK
America’s craziest politician somehow just got crazier.
Something really weird happened in New York ten years ago.
On a cool, overcast Monday morning in early October, two friends were walking their dogs in Central Park when they spotted a strange object under a bush.
“I thought it was a raccoon,” one of the women told the New York Post. “When I looked closer, it wasn’t moving . . . but my friend thought it was a bear.”
Her friend was right.
In the middle of Central Park, there was a dead bear cub.
The story was picked up by news outlets right across America. It was a national mystery. How on earth did a bear end up in the middle of New York? A post mortem on the dead animal showed that it had been likely hit by a car.
As to who dumped the carcass in Central Park or why they did it? The big questions were doomed to remain unsolved. Or so we thought.
Almost ten years later, we finally have an answer. The person who dumped that dead baby bear?
Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy.
Yes, the same guy who admitted that some of his brain was eaten by a parasitic worm.
You’re probably thinking that this all sounds a bit like fake news. How many crazy things can one man – who is earnestly asking to be President – really do? But we know this story to be true, because RFK admitted to the prank in a video posted to Twitter early last week.
In the video, RFK is sitting at his dining room table in a suit, with his sleeves rolled up, recounting the story to comedian Roseanne Barr (from the 90s series Rosanne).
Why is Rosanne there? Who knows! It is just another mysterious layer to this surrealist masterpiece.
The video begins seemingly mid-conversation and without preamble.
“I was taking a group of people falconing up in the Hudson Valley, and I was supposed to meet them there at, like, maybe 8 or 9,” RFK tells Rosanne, who is casually leaning against a kitchen island, a mug in her hand.
“I was driving home… and then a woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it, a young bear. So I pulled over and I picked up the bear and put him in the back of my van because I was going to skin the bear… and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator.”
Eating dead bear meat from the side of the road seems like an excellent way to get brain worms, by the way. But Rosanne doesn’t react negatively to any of these admissions. She nods blankly as though this is completely normal, explicable behaviour.
RFK continues. He says the falconing expedition went late, and he ran out of time to drop the dead bear at his home. He now had a problem. There was a rapidly decomposing carcass in the back of his van and he had a plane to catch that night.
But RFK is a thinking man, and he had a great idea.
“There had been a series of bicycle accidents in New York, they had just put in the bike lanes… and people had been badly injured every day. So I said, ‘let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like it got hit by a bike.’
“So I did that and we thought it would be amusing for whoever found it or something.”
It was the ‘or something’ that happened.
“The next day it was like, it was on every television station. It was on the front page of every paper. And I turned on the TV and there was like, a mile of yellow tape and no 20 odd cars or helicopters flying overhead. And I was like, ‘oh, my God, what did I do?’
“And they're saying they're going to take this [bike] up to Albany to get fingerprinted.”
“Uh-oh,” Rosanne says.
“And I was worried because my prints were all over that bike. And luckily, the, the story died out after a while and, and it stayed dead for a decade.”
But then those pesky journalists at the New Yorker caught wind of what happened. RFK decided to get ahead of the story and share his version of events.
Of course, this is totally, batshit insane, absolutely bonkers and definitely newsworthy.
But what absolutely kills me is the defensive tone RFK takes when publishing this confession. “Looking forward to seeing how you spin this one New Yorker,” he writes, in a Tweet posted alongside the video.
Of course, the New Yorker doesn’t have to spin anything. The story – exactly as RFK relays it – is utterly bizarre. It makes you wonder whether it’s RFK or the parasitic brainworms who are running the show.
The only spin here lies in how he has presented this confession. RFK isn’t sitting behind a desk, or addressing the camera directly. That would add gravitas to the story and drive home the fact he did something wrong. The candid dining room setting is an attempt to make this look like a funny yarn, or a boyish act of mischief.
But the reality is that a man who wants to be President dragged a mangled bear cub carcass through Central Park. A bear cub carcass that he had otherwise planned to eat.
Frankly, this is an act of insanity by a man who – and I really can’t get past this – has a hole in his brain from a parasitic worm. A man whose actions are so consistently bizarre, they make me wonder whether or not self-determination is actually a good idea.
President John F Kennedy – RFK's uncle, and a man of many great quotes – once said “conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth”. Perhaps, though, there are some areas of conformity is good. Like, say, what we should do with dead bear cubs.
Most people would leave them on the side of the road. I think that is probably the right choice.
Dead bear cubs are known to harbour worms whose favourite food is Kennedy brain meat, FYI.