America Needs An Act of God

An Intervention

America needs an act of God, and I don’t say that lightly. Not the Old Testament fire-and-brimstone kind, but something akin to a divine hand snatching a microphone from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before he further contaminates the public discourse with his slurred science-fiction masquerading as testimony.

This morning’s congressional hearing has been a trial in oxygen deprivation—me, holding my breath, terrified that sharing the same televised airwaves as this man might shave years off my life. He doesn’t merely stumble across words; he mangles them into an incoherent stew, the kind of word salad that could only be concocted in a brain gnawed by addiction and delusion.

Picture the scene: Bernie Sanders, granite-faced, asking the obvious, “So tell me, Mr. Kennedy, the AMA, 100,000 doctors, the world of medical science says mRNA saved 20 million lives—who do you get your information from?” Kennedy, with all the gravitas of a man misquoting scripture, utters, “Dr. Oz.”

Dr. Oz, the green-coffee-bean messiah, the colloidal-silver snake-oil man, the same huckster who once convinced suburban America their apple juice was laced with arsenic, neglecting to note the difference between organic and inorganic forms. Dr. Oz, who waved hydroxychloroquine like a magician’s wand while quietly holding a half-million-dollar stake in companies manufacturing the stuff. This is Kennedy’s oracle, his source of gospel, and we’re supposed to keep straight faces while the Republic totters on its foundation.

Then comes the Trump bait. Kennedy blithely affirms that Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for “fast-tracking” COVID cures. Pressed further, he confuses the Nobel-worthy remedy with hydroxychloroquine, never mind that the vaccines Trump tried to drape himself in were the very mRNAs Kennedy rails against. It’s like watching a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving insist that Elvis is still alive and renting the basement apartment.

The tragedy of Kennedy is not simply his ignorance—it’s his audacity. He sits there, a man who once clawed through fourteen years of heroin hell, a body left vacant for worms of paranoia to hollow out and dares to cast stones at medical science. He brands Sanders and Warren as pharma puppets, though Sanders fires back with the unvarnished truth: nearly every senator, Republican and Democrat alike, takes pharmaceutical money. Dark money, Kennedy says, and he’s right—though it’s the Roberts Court, not Sanders or Warren, that greased those tracks and gift-wrapped democracy for the highest bidder.

Here’s the rub: Kennedy and Sanders both speak a shard of truth. Yes, Big Pharma needs boundaries, guardrails, shackles even. We’re not blind. We see the commercials at dinnertime—dancing seniors in turquoise polo shirts, marionette mimes prancing about like Cirque du Soleil rejects—while a low voice rattles off a side-effect list that reads like Dante’s Inferno. Type 2 diabetes in check, sure, but your scrotum will itch like a thousand hornets are nesting between your thighs, and if you don’t like that, well, death is the ultimate “rare complication.” A diet change might work better, but who profits from an apple and a brisk walk?

Kennedy, though—Kennedy is not reform, he’s deform. He is a gargoyle turned flesh, a grotesque gargle of half-truths and snake venom. Words drip from his lips like a goat with dysentery, babbling and frothing. His skin—perpetual bronze, Fisher Island hue—sits too taut, too lacquered, as if he’s been dipped in shellac. He is a pelican flapping madly, tangled in a novice fisherman’s line, wings flailing, beak snapping, eyes wild with confusion. A screeching, swilling chub destined not for leadership but for the padded halls of a sanatorium.

And yet here he is, on my television, gumming democracy with his worm-eaten syllables, the echo of a name once noble now ringing hollow. If this isn’t cause to pray for intervention, for a celestial lightning strike to the power grid, I don’t know what is.