Now is Now

We re-interrupt this writer's block for some brief commentary on the news.  

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no Graham Platner problem.  Graham Platner's story does not confirm or disprove anything.  Get his name out of your mouth and out of your head. What's done is done.  It was a once-in-a-lifetime meteor that dazzled the sky long enough to illuminate the decrepit state of things on earth.  It has already crashed into a lifeless heap.  It is beyond time to move on.  

The problem is not how do you prevent something that had a one in a quintillion chance of happening from happening again, it is how do we sustain the unheralded moment now that it has passed? 

In short, how do you now give Maine voters what they voted for?  This should be (should always have been) the topic on everyone's mind.  Do not distract yourself with gossip, division and rancor.  Pay attention.  Put the car in Drive.

Until the next better candidate comes along, this highlander says:  Troy Jackson for Senate.

Time to Reflect

We interrupt this writer's block with a special bulletin.  Politico reports that a 41 year old woman in Maine alleges that Graham Platner, recent winner of the Maine Democratic Primary for Senate, sexually assaulted her in 2021. (For some context since his wife has become a figure in some of this, Platner and his wife-- not the woman named in the article-- married in 2023).  Platner has admitted to PTSD from combat experienced in four stints as a Marine serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- wars he describes now as unjust-- and his candidacy has been beset by controversy and surfacings from one corner or another of troubling details of his past from online intemperance to troubling markings on his person in the form of what we have all-- Platner as well if he is to be believed-- just learned is a tattoo of a skull and crossbones of Nazi origin, and most recently in a problematic piece of journalism in the New York Times alleging "unsettling" (if underwhelmingly presented in the story) behavior with women strategically timed just before the primary.  In response to the relentless onslaught of exposure of what to this point could be described as at worst the past very human mistakes of a man in active and by all appearances successful recovery from darkness and trauma,  Maine voters responded with a doubling down of their support of the genuinely populist Platner who garnered 72% of the Maine primary vote in an unusually heavy turnout in early June.  And yet, sources familiar at the time of the alleged incident with both Platner and with the woman named in the Politico article describe these latest allegations as "credible".   For his part Platner, who denies the allegations, is as of this writing, taking time off to reflect on his campaign.

Regular Unspeakable (as heck) readers may be aware that owing to his outstandingly uncompromising platform, I have been an outspoken supporter of Platner beginning in response to the first allegations in October of last year.  (Disclosure: I am a former Mainer who is ineligible to vote in Maine). I also commented on the New York Times article in the wake of Platner's victory.  I feel it is important in light of "credible" allegations of sexual assault that I comment again.  It would be easy to say "I'm done" with Platner.   Those with an audience larger than mine appear to have now found their out.  I on the other hand would like to imagine a different response so come along if you dare.

I must first state that if the allegations are true, I condemn the act.  Sexual assault is in a category of its own as a violation of another person.  A line has been crossed when an act has a victim.  If true, this is a hugely disappointing and disillusioning turn.  It feels like a betrayal.  He said there would be nothing else to surface.  Was he lying?*  It is also a particularly egregious injustice. As such, I must reiterate my position on injustice.  As one who has studied and thought about the topic a great deal  in recent years, and has had an awakening on it, I reaffirm that I do not consider responses to injustice that do not restore justice-- that in fact spread and re-perpetrate injustice "in the name of justice" beyond the confines of the incident that calls for it-- to be justice.  What I would like to see is not retribution and punishment as self-justifying reflexes to wrongs, but rather true undoing of the imbalance introduced by the violation of a person by another.  Not an eye for an eye, but healing of the wound  to include a mending to be provided by or taken from the offender (which could take the form of banishment from the life of the victim and mandatory egoless penitence performed-- say, money or time given or other public service say as an above average Senator-- to the cause of ending sexual assault)  and redemption appropriately sought by the transgressor and to whatever extent possible willingly granted by the transgressed.  All of this a private restitution mediated as necessary by a third party or parties.  And then movement on with the lives of all concerned with only the diminishment that entropy could not restore to the situation due to what remains in the memory of the act.  We have few precedents for it, but it is what I have come to always seek.  To my way of thinking, until we live in a society in which restorative justice is possible, we are neglecting the important society rebuilding work of getting there.

The point I want to make from the above is not that I choose to imagine justice restored as I describe in this particular alleged incident.  That would be a fairy tale of wishful thinking.  Rather, I  would like to stress that I feel such a violation in a more perfect world to be a private matter of the woman and her family and circle of support, her going public with it notwithstanding.  As for Platner, I would like to think that if this is true he would have already taken steps or made plans to selflessly and privately make amends for his act.  And if he is innocent, and can be in contact with her, his seeking a rapprochement or coming to an agreement with her would be a lovely thing. My only wish would be for restorative justice to be made good on in a way that would undo the harm that this betrayal (if true) has done to the woman and yes will have done to Maine voters and to others who have placed hope in and support behind Platner's highly unusual and to this point thirstily welcomed campaign.  But it would be foolish to expect it.

Until we know the outcome, I do grieve for the people of Maine, and for the piece of the National consciousness that had awakened in hope from the real substance for working people that Platner's campaign platform had aroused.  The sad truth about politics is that too much of it is a spectator sport.  The online leftists who were eager to be done with Platner in October (and who surely are enjoying a good if premature last laugh at this turn of events) inspired me to support Platner openly for the first time because while content to destroy a worker's campaign willy nilly they were not efficacious enough to provide a better alternative.  Their smug inaction is partly responsible for the disaster that will transpire should Platner not find the wherewithal or redemption to continue.  That disaster is the void left in opposition to Susan Collins (and the end of a rare and beautiful dream of a vastly superior alternative for the working Mainer and an example for the country) leading inevitably to her re-election at the worst moment in history for it.†

~~~~~

* In my estimation, it is much too soon to rule out further shenanigans from a political establishment that does not want the change that Platner and other insurgent Democrats represent.

† For what it's worth, I still don't care what you think about Graham Platner.

Worked Up About Nothingness

Less than a week after declaring his desire for a schism in the Democratic Party following the victory of 3 Zohran Mamdani endorsed candidates in New York's Democratic primary on Tuesday (2 over Democratic incumbents!) James Carville is already back in my texts asking for money.  You know what James?  Fuck off!  Schism yourself, Prune Face.   Over the past week a whole mess of Democratic adjacent assholes tripped over each other's tongues to express the same opinion, some more disgustingly than others:  Van Jones, Bill Maher, Hakeem Jeffries, Letitia James, John Fetterman, Josh Gottheimer, Chris Hayes.  

This motherfucker whose statement is so moronic I would smudge his name to protect his identity if he hadn't been Democratic Party Chair from 2021 to 2025 (I know, Jaime who??  Democratic Party what??):

Um, hello??  Did you happen to notice "Building the party you actually support" is exactly what Mamdani and those who supported his endorsed candidates were literally doing?  Knocking doors, making calls, organizing meetings-- Fighting for the Values they Believe in and thereby genuinely exciting dems both stalwart and lapsed into voting for Democratic candidates with joy for once -- is how they beat your grubby asses.*

The comment that really nailed what's going on didn't even come from a Democrat.  It came from Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson:  

Hakeem Jeffries has a tall task ahead of him right now. He's got to go out and somehow make a credible pitch to Democrat establishment donors that that's a good national investment right now.  That's a tough one to make.

This is what's really going on.  The Gravy Train is threatening to derail.  And Democrats who actually care about their voters and not Establishment Donors are threatening to dominate the party and actually win back voters who left it years ago or who never voted Democrat before.  And James Carville, one of the pioneers of the corporate sucking old "New democrats"-- who deliver to the donors by delivering nothing to the voters-- is trying to cope, straw manning flag hating "commies" as the enemy when the enemy is actually the drying up faucet of his beloved paymasters.

You say Democrats should stand up to the insurgents and tell them to go away?  You've got feet.  Get your ass out of here if you don't like democracy, you fake ass "Democrat".  You are the reason people hate "Democrats".   You didn't ask me in 1992 when you took over my party.  You just waltzed in like you owned the place.  How do you like it, motherfucker? 

Carville and his kind stand for NOTHING.  Republicans-- representatives of the owner class-- at least use hate and blame and ego-pandering and fear to enthuse the masses of non-owner class voters vulnerable to those passions.  Establishment democrats-- stewards of the party traditionally built for the working class but beholden to the managerial class and to their corporate donors-- are allergic to passion, tone deaf to the needs,  wants and desires of  the working masses they take for granted; and the only brush in their toolkit for their base is shame.  No wonder they lose every branch of government they're supposed to represent us in.

If I sound a bit unhinged, I am.  I am the Democratic voter.  I am the sucker who eats shit and shows up on Election Day to cast a hate vote for bloodless careerist Dems who nobody wants to vote for in order to keep the country from plunging headlong into fascism.  I am the guy turning blue in the face imploring purity leftists to set their passions aside for the 5 minutes it takes to vote for the Democrat who stands for nothing in order to thwart the dominance of the Republican who stands for full throated Harm to the working and under classes.  The nuance is lost on the purity voters, and apparently on the drunk-on-their-own-stink Dem leadership as well.

And you're telling me when Dems like Mamdani, Graham Platner and the New York insurgents finally actually stand up for what I believe in and win elections, I'm the one who needs to get lost?

Get lost.

~~~~~

* I say this with no ill will or animosity.

Midsummer Stochastic Dance Explosion

 Oscar Carl Soderberg - Toaster Oven

Garveh Navazi Tanbak - Tonbak Interlude

Clap! Clap! - (L) Liberty

Paul McCartney - Ram On

Dolly Thorne - Killshot

Cihat Aşkın - Azeri Halk Dansı

Deodato - Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)

Haute & Freddy - Dance the Pain Away

Atarashii Gakko - Fantastico

Desmond Dekker - Israelites

Aurora - Rasputin

Gelli Haha - Spit

Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66 - One Note Samba / Spanish Flea

The Vernons Girls - Don't Look Now, But

Brothers Johnson - I'll Be Good To You

Pierre de Maere - Je pense à vous

Fran Jeffries - Meglio Stasera (Princess Dala's song from The Pink Panther (1964))

The Criminal State

A while back, I mentioned that a book I had just started had me wondering if I was in for a "hate read" since it was a highly anticipated book on the subject of International Law published in 2026 that did not mention Gaza once in its introduction.   Burning with curiosity about what, if anything it would have to say on the topic, I hauled ass and finished the book-- The Criminal State by Lawrence Douglas, professor of "Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought" at Amherst College.  As I suspected, the gent admits to Zionism, actually in a way that seems to make clear that he equates anti-zionism with anti-semitism.  It’s in the context of discussing Israel and its historic problems with its Arab neighbors.  (i.e., equating Arab anti-zionism with Anti-semitism).  After critiquing the Nuremberg Tribunal for studiously excluding the testimony of Holocaust victims in its prosecution of Nazi war criminals at the conclusion of World War II, Douglas goes on (contra Hannah Arendt's criticism of the practice) to praise Israel's successful prosecution of Adolph Eichmann, captured by Israeli Mossad agents in Argentina in 1960, and tried in Jerusalem in 1961 more than ten years after Nuremberg, almost exclusively through the testimony of victim after victim of Eichmann's Nazi war crimes. Moreover, according to Douglas:

... the Israeli proceeding can be rightly credited with transforming the shared experience of victimhood into a source of group status and an element of group identity. And as the trial made clear, legal recognition of a group’s history of victimization can serve as a potent source of symbolic capital available to advance a group’s social and political goals.

This is before he even gets to Gaza which is discussed for about 3 electronic pages (much less I’m sure in the physical book) in a section called “The Wages of Riskless War in Gaza and Kosovo” which is within a chapter on Kosovo.  Gaza comes up as an example of what he calls Riskless War—he’s comparing the casualty free intervention in Kosovo in the Clinton years in which NATO pilots flew above the threshold at which you could distinguish civilians targets from military targets (the trade-off being, continued public acceptance of the intervention which would be undermined by say American soldiers being killed from flying close enough to the action to distinguish  military from civilian targets but also vulnerable to being shot down in exchange for some NATO caused civilian casualties) with the low Israeli casualty response of Israel to the Hamas attack in which the risk of distinguishing Hamas from civilians by hand-to-hand up close combat on the part of IDF which would have resulted in heavy IDF casualties was averted by IDF accepting levels of civilian casualties in the targeting of suspected Hamas strongholds placed among civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, markets etc.   According to Douglas Israel has a metric of “acceptable” civilian casualties on 4 levels and given the severity of the Oct 7 attack and the objective of removing Hamas altogether in order to eliminate the threat of future such attacks, they had adopted an acceptance of Level 3—almost the top number of accepted civilian collateral damage but not quite.  

Douglas acknowledges and cites in a footnote some of the  differences of opinion about whether Israel’s response was genocidal—but in his estimation, although he has described genocides in Germany, Rwanda, Turkey and Yugoslavia in almost exactly the same terms as what we’re seeing in Gaza—he does not believe Israel’s actions in Gaza rise to the level of genocide.  He does admit it is hard to look at the devastation in Gaza and not conclude that there have been war crimes (but he does not himself go so far explicitly).  And then he is back to Kosovo.  In summary, for Douglas, Gaza is an example of a sovereign state undertaking what he calls riskless war in response to a terrorist attack against its own civilian population. For Douglas, then, the destruction of Gaza and the egregiously disproportionate killing and starving of Palestinian civilians has been Israel's prerogative as a sovereign state.  On concluding the book, I watched a discussion held at Washington DC’s Politics and Prose bookstore between Douglas and a former undergraduate student of his at Amherst, now a law professor at Georgetown.  Douglas was not challenged by his interviewer or by anyone in the audience on this point.

So was it a "hate read" for me?  Not exactly.  I certainly adamantly disagree with the professor on the prosecutability of Israel for what to me is uncontestably its genocide against Palestinians, most notably and recently in Gaza.  And yet it was an instructive read.  Douglas in my view inadvertently or not strengthens the case for pursuing International consequences for Israel, for crimes against humanity.  The book opens with an admiring discussion of Hobbes, who set out the problem of international justice succinctly:  while the sovereign state is responsible for containing the natural state of war that its citizens by virtue of being self-interested brutal and nasty humans would perpetually wage against each other, there is no natural uber sovereign to contain the natural inclination of sovereigns to be at perpetual war with each other.  Therefore war is the natural state of nations, and this forces the pursuit of international justice as a means of keeping a check on the wayward Criminal State.  The Criminal State is that which, according to Douglas commits crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, crimes of aggression or crimes of atrocity and genocide.  The Nazi state was the Criminal State extraordinaire-- but Douglas is not willing to put Israel under the same lens, thereby falling into what he calls The Hobbesian Trap that cannot distinguish between a sovereign's right to wage war in the interests of forestalling aggression against itself and the natural inclination of sovereigns to aggress for the sake of aggression.

The discussion of Hobbes has inspired me to envision a different kind of sovereign than the world has yet seen.  Imagine if you will a sovereignty of the people:  the people coming together to mediate conflicts among themselves will not have the unchecked ambition of the self-appointed leader of the state.  We have evolved to the point at which we no longer need the protection of a warlord.   Rather, we can rely on the wisdom of each other to keep the surfacing of individuals' worst impulses at bay.  We have the tools at our disposal-- history, experience, democracy by lot.   We have only to dream to make it so.

As Maine Goes

The 2026 Maine Democratic Primary for US Senate took place yesterday.  The New York Times lost.  

The rest of us won.  In a document on Graham Platner's campaign  website detailing what he calls his Defend Democracy Agenda is this paragraph:

For too long, the promise that all people are created equal has remained unfinished business in our Constitution. Passing the Equal Rights Amendment would help complete that work by making clear that equality under the law cannot be denied because of sex. But we must also confront how protections like those in the Fourteenth Amendment—written to defend the freedom of formerly enslaved people and guarantee equal rights—have been twisted over time to shield powerful corporations while the rights of real people are attacked. Communities of color, LGBTQ Americans, immigrants, and others have too often found those protections turned against them instead of working in their defense. We need a 21st-century Constitution that restores the original purpose of these guarantees: equal rights under the law, protected for every person in this country

Women's issues come up repeatedly in Platner's platform. Defending the right to choose abortion; legislating against government intrusion into women's lives; passing the Equal Rights Amendment to constitutionally guarantee equality in the law for women.  All are on Platner's agenda for the Senate.  Additionally, Platner is a proponent of policy that improves the lives of working women (and men):  early childcare for all; healthcare reform including Medicare for All; funding and protecting Public education; clean air and water and a healthier environment.  

The 989 American billionaires and the megacorporations who offshore their wealth fare less well. Platner's tax plan to "End Billionaire Welfare" is a must read for understanding how Platner intends to work for legislation that imposes a modicum of burden on the ultra wealthy in repayment of the some of the debt they owe society for their obscene riches.  Is there a better equally non-violent way to take care of the billionaire problem than electoral politics and popular legislation?  If I were a billionaire I wouldn't want to find out.  For the rest of us, Platner promises to work to ease the burden with protections to social security, increases in the Child Tax Credit, and a buffer against tax hikes on the poor and working classes thanks to "making the wealthy pay their share."  

Also in the platform are policies that address campaign finance flaws and other crises of democracy; housing (including the epidemic of private homes being sucked up by hedge funds while home buying becomes more out of reach for each generation)l; tribal rights; increased protections and enhancements of quality of life for the disabled; the promise to prevent pointless wars, overspending on the military budget-- including especially to aid Israel's genocide in Gaza-- while underspending on those who sign up for the military or who have served.

Platner's run-of-the-mill Centrist Democratic Primary opponent (and Chuck Schumer's pick), Governor Janet Mills had already seen the writing on the wall and suspended her campaign, so one has to wonder what this outburst of anti-Platner propaganda in the past few weeks has been for.  Maine voters foiled the campaign of the mainstream media and the Democratic and Republican establishment who are terrified of a candidate who promises to bring change to the system that elevated our feeble-brained elite and its infrastructure in an effort to rise the tide and lift the boats of all of his constituency.  But do not count the media campaign out just yet, because the stakes are not just about Maine, but about what a Platner defeat of  Susan Collins portends for the nation.  It's an effort to besmirch Platner before his energy infests the Senate.

Privilege is when your identity comes before your socialism.  But a socialist whose platform is not for women, for African Americans, for Native Americans, for new and would be Americans, for Gay and Trans men and women, for working men and women of all identities, for old and young and in between, for solidarity with those across the globe, isn't really a socialist.  Take time with Platner's extensive Platform and it is impossible to to miss why the Privileged and powerful and the bought gatekeepers of the status quo in the mainstream media do not want what he brings to the table in its full power and glory.

Moanin' and Moanin'

Ernestine Anderson sings Bobby Timmons' Moanin' (lyrics added by Jon Hendricks) with Cherry Wainer on Hammond organ and her husband Don Storer on drums on German TV show Beat Beat Beat in 1967.

 Not to be confused with Charles Mingus's 1959 piece of the same name with actual moaning (along with bass) from the man himself and Pepper Adams on baritone sax: