In fractious times such as these...don’t worry, we’re not going to subject you to another “when it seems like half the country can’t agree with the other half about anything!” cliché. Are we so committed to the project of national amnesia that we’ll allow the trope of “the nation has never been as divided as it is now" to be used as a framing device to discuss Jimi Hendrix? A man who died two years in either direction from Bobby Kennedy and George Wallace getting shot, who embodied the 1960s to such an extent that he absolutely refused to live in the '70s? I suspect that, if you told Hendrix that 2026 was somehow more divided than any other era in history, the guitarist would do that famously gentle “heh-heh” chuckle, maybe make a spiritually wry reference to the Civil War, then point out that, regarding Jimi Hendrix at least, America has never been so on the same page.