Yes, hippies are back in suits and coiffed hipster beards, running around causing havoc in strife-torn American politics, pushing the presidential credentials of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
For every Woodstock there is an Altamont, for every Ken Kesey, a Charlie Manson. When the hippie band of choice, the Grateful Dead, arrived at Altamont Speedway in December 1969, Jerry Garcia and co immediately sensed something was amiss, determined the mood of the crowd was somewhere between riotous and homicidal, and wisely decided to do a runner. Garcia didn’t even get out of the helicopter.
Hippies stayed on only to discover their free-love mantra and hessian undergarments were no match for an ebullient Hells Angels. The Rolling Stones caught the last chopper out of Altamont, leaving the Angels to finish off the catering and the hippies. Hippies have only recently resurfaced where they fly to the relative safety of Costa Rica for ayahuasca binges to find inner meaning.
It should have ended in the 1960s for hippies as a political force, but they’re back and they want Kennedy to sit in the White House. His policies include cutting all US funding to Ukraine and spending the Putin appeasement gains on something Kennedy calls “healing farms” for the millions of Americans addicted to opioids. Make methadone, not war.
Early this month, a report in The Wall Street Journal of chaos and mayhem on the Kennedy campaign trail featured this delicious tidbit: “Several staffers fear the electromagnetic radiation from microwave ovens, complicating a volunteer potluck. (People were advised to bring crockpots.)”
On the Kennedy gravy train, potluck (or casserole suppers if you’re an Australian) must be eaten tepid to avoid being irradiated by a household appliance commonly found in kitchens since the late ’60s. Perhaps the air fryer is conspiring with the toaster. And I don’t like the look of the coffee machine one little bit.
In the middle of the campaign, Kennedy’s director of messaging, Charles Eisenstein, took leave to travel to, you guessed it, Costa Rica with the intention of “reconnecting with spirit”. There are claims of sexual harassment among campaign staff and the hippie brigade appears to have no particular interest in what Biden voters like and dislike about Joe Biden or what Trump voters like and dislike about the Donald.
Rather, the Kennedy campaign has opted to paint the septuagenarian as a heroically fit and youthful option.
Last week, the man Trump now simply refers to as “Junior” told The New York Times that a worm had entered his cranium and gnawed away at his brain before dying somewhere en route to the presidential hopeful’s hypothalamus.
When a candidate is trying to prove his health and youth (Kennedy is a mere stripling of 70) maybe tone down the worm ate my brain rhetoric. But Bobby couldn’t let it go with just one brain-eating worm. He took to X with an offer too silly to ignore.
“I offer to eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate,” the Kennedy post read. “I feel confident in the result even with a six-worm handicap.”
Forget the debates, folks. Kennedy thinks the presidency can be won or lost on the six-brain worm challenge, more tequila slammer drinking competition than will of the people.
Often photographed with his sleeves rolled up in an attempt to show himself prepared to get to work, Kennedy instead manages to look as if he’s about to receive an intravenous injection.
The notorious anti-vaxxer can’t be a needle-phobic, otherwise how else could we explain his 14-year addiction to heroin that ended in 1984 following a single felony count charge for heroin possession?
Kennedy has been skating through as the “none of the above” candidate in an election where Americans are faced with an ageist Hobson’s choice: the old guy or the older guy. His polling hit a high watermark back in December last year, with almost a quarter of the vote, a shade more in the crucial swing state of Michigan. Since then he has languished at 12 per cent in the polls, declining further to 10 per cent on polling average across the past two months, proving the more people see of him, the less they like.
According to his campaign, the Kennedy ticket will appear on the ballot in all 50 states which is a Costa Rican jungle, ayahuasca-level delusion. Ballot status has been confirmed or will be soon in six states, including Utah, Michigan, California, Delaware, Oklahoma and Texas. When not paralysed in fear of microwave ovens, his staffers claim he will also appear on the ballot in New Hampshire, Nevada, Hawaii, North Carolina, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa and Ohio.
If that is the case, his ticket will be on the ballot of just three swing states with the possibility that North Carolina and Texas might come into play in the race for 270 electoral college votes and the presidency.
Polling shows he is taking more votes from Trump than Biden at this early stage but it is unclear if he offers any advantage to Democrats or Republicans.
Perhaps the answer lies in Trump’s increasingly disparaging remarks directed Junior’s way, but there is a long way to run.
Biden and Trump have no pressing issues on money to run big campaigns while Kennedy is burning money he doesn’t have every day just by getting out of bed. Will he be Trump’s Ross Perot or Joe Biden’s Ralph Nader? Appearing on the ballot in Texas, for example, would leave Texas red or shift it to light blue. The demographics of the state are changing and Kennedy’s candidacy could kick along a shift in political affiliation not seen since his uncle John’s vice-president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan, won the state.
We’ll know in six months. A win, a loss or a draw for Trump or Biden is too difficult to predict at this stage but I can safely say that by November Kennedy’s political career will be worm fodder and the hippies will have been beaten again.
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Whatever happened to hippies? Well, they got old, beaten up and one of them has decided to run for president of the US.