www.msn.com Opinion by Matt Lewis •
Twitter was abuzz on Sunday after video and photos of a shirtless Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doing pushups and incline bench-presses outside Venice Beach’s Gold’s Gym started popping up in social media timelines. The caption on the pushup video shared by RFK Jr., read: “Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!”
Reactions ranged from accusations of steroid use (there’s no evidence of that, but it would be plenty ironic if true, considering his anti-vaxx stance), to fans gushing that he’s the most “jacked presidential candidate” in history, to critics mocking how little he can lift. Others suggested that the obsession with Kennedy’s alpha male status was evidence of “crypto homoeroticism” on the right (see the many photoshopped pics of a muscular Donald Trump).
Whether you think Kennedy’s an Adonis or a wimp (I’d say he’s in good shape for a 69-year-old man), it might be easy to dismiss this PR bump as a quickly forgotten blip in Season 8 of the surreal reality show that started the day Trump came down that escalator.
Believe it or not, though, I think this moment tells us a lot about the state of politics and celebrity culture in 2024 America. This is a commentary on modern America.
Let’s start with politics. For a while now, there has been a sense that America was devolving to a primitive state that prizes machismo over intellect. It’s been said many times before, but our current moment seems to have been foreshadowed in the 2006 dystopian satire Idiocracy, where an ex-wrestler named President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho becomes president.
This fictional event takes place 500 years in the future, whereas in real life, it only took America a decade to sink to approximately the same level of dysfunction.
Real-life headlines like “Andrew Tate says he wants to train Elon Musk to fight [Mark] Zuckerberg: ‘You will not lose’” suggest that Idiocracy was always a documentary. (Did I mention that RFK Jr. is literally applauding Musk and Zuckerberg for “setting a physical fitness example for Americans with their Octagon challenge”?)
Great work, Mike Judge. Talk about being ahead of the curve.
Or behind. American politics was once incredibly violent (a condition that led us to a civil war). We mellowed in the 20th century, although “brains” never fully replaced “brawn” in the minds of voters; the tallest candidate, for example, almost always won the presidency…
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