A Future of Failed Sons
Hunter and Beau Biden; RFK Jr.; Conspiracy theory as cosmological knowledge; Freud's Totem and Taboo; and why all sons are doomed
Sons of important men are doomed from the get go. It’s not their fault. Most of us are not expected to be remarkable, because most of us don’t have remarkable parents, at least not ones that are in spotlights of grandeur. And if you are raised in a life of comfort and privilege, you will almost undoubtedly squander the opportunities provided for you—you were born at the top, so you don’t have to work to get to the top, so you’ll just be a brat instead, do drugs, race your car at three in the morning, peak at sixteen years old, and loathe the peasant world forever.
Men especially become the pathetic ones. Daughters will somehow retain a semblance of their grace and tenderness that is innate to them. But men, for whatever reason, often can’t succeed in a world where they’re raised by nannies, and who’s only way of getting attention is through screaming outbursts of self-flagellation.
Those families must be horrible to be raised in. At birth, they are unwittingly thrust into these wine-soaked Shakespearean tragedies, forced to perform like a puppet in their grabby spectacles of worship and despair. Their inevitable fate into young adulthood always leads to the same embarrassing drunken episode where a good samaritan has to cover the drooling freak with a blanket and escort him away from the shuttered gasps of the public. Even those who meet the challenge of carrying on the dignified role of a family legacy seem paranoid in their all-consuming desperation to succeed—think of Prince William going about the mandatory customs of finding an elegant and qualified princess, of picking a smatter of causes to care about, of waving and smiling to the English masses and all their cyclonic brutishness, their obscene redness and bloated proportions of pointless flesh. These people pay for you to be the country’s chosen celebrity, and you have to perform dutifully like a lapdog, keeping them happy and entertained. It would be as if a portion of our American tax dollars went to pay for the lifestyles of the Kardashians, and hundreds of years worth of generations of their K-offspring were forced to behave in the same genteel quiescence we crave. It must be truly awful. Prince Harry’s turn to his chosen fate was also unavoidable. You’re the spare so you want to be your own person within a cannibalizing curation of performance, and so you do things like dress up as a Nazi for Halloween, you marry a failed actress, you move to Santa Barbara and drink cappuccinos as you anathematize evil upon the ghostwriter of your memoir. But what other choice did he have except to become an embarrassing villain figure in the whole royal amusement.
We’ve know this forever, it has always existed. In Greek mythology, Phaethon is the son of the sun-god Helios and Oceanid Clymene. In an attempt to confirm his own parentage, he is granted a single wish from Helios, allowed to drive his father’s chariot of fire-breathing horses. He loses control of the chariot and the horses in turn run too close to the earth, scorching Africa down to desert, and then they drive too far from the northern latitudes of earth which in turn freezes it. In order to save the earth from the ravages of the wild chariot, Zeus strikes it with a thunderbolt, killing Phaethon. The story is meant to explain the uninhabitable regions of a frozen Arctic and the hot deserts of Africa, as well as why the people of Africa have darker skin. But in truth, the Greeks wrote the story because they knew the disastrous evils that come along with being the son of a great god.
Eric and Donald Jr. are comic goons, but it’s really Beau and Hunter Biden who are hallmark cases of this. Their story needs to be told in all its cinematic glory. Because their story is a florid disaster, a fantasia of comic failure waiting in the throes of a wannabe dynasty. Here are two sons who are thrusted into a newfangled political family, a father who runs for President over and over again. And Beau follows all the dutiful protocols of carrying the torch into the political frontier. He was an officer in the legal arm of the Army, the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corp, he served in the National Guard in the Iraq War, where he was stationed next to the burn pits, and then as attorney general of Delaware for several years up until his death from the brain cancer that was brought on by the toxic fumes he was forced to inhale. (As DA of Delaware, he let the Du Pont heir Robert H. Richards IV who raped his three-year-old daughter off with a slap on the wrist, one of those unexplainable fuckups that only a promising politician could be capable of. The guy admitted to raping his own daughter and Beau explained there wasn’t a strong case against him.) Hunter on the other hand is the gormless farceur of tragedy, he is the flailing antihero, the antithesis to his consummate dandy of a brother. Crack-addicted, taking photos of himself doing the crack, getting his rotting teeth filed down to nocuous pins and then capped with a fresh set of gleaming teeth, taking selfies of himself fucking prostitutes. He’s amazing. The fact alone that he chose crack as his drug of choice warrants respect. Because there’s an innate self-hatred in it not dissimilar to smoking meth. If he were just to do coke like everyone else, our tabloid fervor of his downfall might not be so potent—he would just be nearly identical to every other loser son. But Hunter’s different. He’s the derelict idiot who eats turds for his own entertainment, the crushing palliative of a regenerating legacy fortune. Life would be too cruel in its boredom if men like Hunter weren’t there to sustain it with their comedic gore. In a way, I feel bad for him. In the car accident that killed his mother and infant sister, Hunter and Beau survived, but Hunter sustained a serious head injury and was hospitalized for months. That has to cause some lasting traumatic effects on who you become later in life. He’s tried ibogaine therapy and ayahuasca ceremonies to cure him of his addictions, and admits at times he is still only barely holding it all together, taking one day at a time.
But still, all of this is preamble for the true Failed Son, the fetal excrement of importance. No one is as noxious in their desperation to meet the family expectations of importance as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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