RFK, Remembered

Speaking of wealth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had it but chose not to sit along the Riviera drinking highballs, as Pete Hamill put it today on NRP's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

Bobby Kennedy was shot 40 years ago today.

I was a college student. And as I reflect back, I think I experienced violence fatigue, some kind of withdrawal, some kind of escapism.

Months before, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assaasinated; nearly five years before it was JFK.

I didn't follow the RFK funeral much or the eulogies or the media coverage, any of that.

Enough already.

Maybe it was sophomoric escapism or solipsistic narrowness, but looking back I think it was depressing, defeating, a killer of idealism, a dreary enterprise. I couldn't take it.

Somewhere around this time Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in Esquire magazine that Americans had entered into a kind of collective psychosis. We couldn't tell the difference between ketchup or blood, from a TV program's fictional violence and reality. (Forty years later, I remember that essay in Esquire.)

Maybe so.

And we have not been yet lifted from that psychosis.

What is the medication you would prescribe for us?

I pray a dose of Obama does some wonders.

But alas it may be irrational to pin so much hope on one flawed human.

The Albatross of Entitlement

According to the Wall Street Journal of May 28, 2008, here's the price of gas of a gallon of gasoline in May in select countries, and the percentage of increase from a year ago:

U.S. -- $3.72 -- 20%

U.K. -- $8.42 -- 17%

Austria -- $7.66 -- 15%

Ireland -- $7.43 -- 13%

Greece -- $7.01 -- 13%

France -- $8.44 -- 8%

Germany -- $8.38 -- 4%

What can one conclude?

I'll let the numbers speak for themselves.

They say a lot.

A wealth of policy is behind those numbers.