GO GET ‘EM, POPEYE

 

Ack ack ack!

 

I am a third or so through the English Medieval poem Beowulf, which I seem to have avoided at school (along with much else). It’s a rip-roaring read, too, rendered in half-prose, half-poetry whose metricality drops in and out like a half-heard rhythm. The opening scenes also feature a lot of tough talk and his Beowulf and his crew big up themselves before handing out a career-ending beating to the giant Grendel.

Of course, you want tough guys to fight psychotic giants, accept nothing less. And Medieval berserkers didn’t have CVs or resumés, and so would undoubtedly be eager to tell the tale of the last dragon they dismembered. But while I was pursuing my Medieval studies, I happened to see a video – along with 18 million other people – of Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. working out in his yard. He certainly is a buff man for 69 years old. He could have been one of Beowulf’s posse.

Does the state of a candidate’s physique indicate he is worth your vote? It did Arnold Schwarzenegger no harm, and the Western media who scoffed at Vladimir Putin’s photoshoot from a few years ago, which showed him shirtless on a sturdy Russian steed, might compare him to the almost literal doughboy Boris Johnson.

This is, of course, a time in which the white Western alpha male has all but been run out of town, but Kennedy’s people – unless he went rogue and came up with the optics himself – may be on to something by airing the primaries with some testosterone.

Also, Kennedy is singing from a different hymn sheet to his Democrat colleagues. Skepticism of the Covid vaccine is still a grand heresy, and it might be a good thing if Kennedy smuggles in some genuine political substance rather than Biden’s illusory belief-system. Go get ‘em, Popeye.