Waltz About Death

 Angela Autumn and Lockeland Strings prove that we are still making beauty.

I don't care what you think about Graham Platner

But these two would like to thank you.

I already liked Graham Platner, oyster farmer, harbormaster, democratic candidate for Senate from Maine who is aiming to defeat the evergreen Susan Collins-- seeking her record breaking sixth term next year as the reasonable republican who only votes against her party's oppressive public policy impositions when they are assured to win-- when details suddenly surfaced of a raucous internet past peppered with what Elie Mystal has characterized as "bigoted" language, and of a skull and bones tattoo that he and his drunk buddies on leave in Croatia thought looked cool that turns out to have a Nazi origin (he has replaced it).  With a voice that immediately reminds you against your will of John Fetterman's sonorousness and a deep, long Military past that involved stints in every American operation from Iraq to Afghanistan, followed by time as a diplomat's bodyguard as an employee of a company formerly known by its deservedly infamous name of Blackwater, there were hurdles that he had to get past to win my enthusiastic support, but he cleared them with his fresh, unapologetic expounding of policy positions revealing a favoring of government that serves the people that resonates with my own aspirations for government, and that earned him an endorsement from Bernie Sanders* (who stands by him) and a joint appearance with the Vermont Senator at an anti-oligarchy and endorsement rally in Portland attended by a crowd filling the Civic Center on a summer afternoon, massive for political events any time of the year even by Maine standards.

Much of the online left however has lost its mind.  The generally helpful Humanist Report has demonstrated a need for a vacation in professing a done-ness with Platner on account of the scandals. Elie Mystal usually excellent on the law at the Nation has a very bad take on the controversy.  The point of that Platner-defending Pod save America tweet that Mystal critiques is not that Woke is bad.   The point is that very few people, and certainly people ambitious enough to seek public office have lived perfectly woke lives.  Mystal links to a digest of the controversial Platner posts which is how I first set eyes on them.  I am not at all offended by Platners’s obviously over the top use of "gay" in his ancient reddit posts that he now as a mature therapized adult disavows (but I’m not gay, which is why I don’t argue with gay people about how much offense they take from people’s past overuse of the ubiquitous 90’s kid slang addiction to the word "gay" which shocked me when I first heard younger colleagues bandying it about like a beachball in the audience of a festival stage.  Platner's usage strikes me as being in this spirit.)   I truly don’t care about anything Platner wrote in the throes of PTSD as he was sorting out how he felt about how he had spent his adult life to that point.  What he says now about gay people and how he came around to regretting his language is what matters to me.

 

My take is people can decide for themselves (and they will—and the only ones who matter are the voters of Maine) how they feel about the past of a candidate who is strongly in favor of everything I’m in favor of as a candidate to replace the Republican who votes against every Republican bill as long as it’s guaranteed to win.  I happen to think they are wrong not to listen to Graham Platner now.  They are wrong to base their support on no longer in-context internet posts from the wildest west of sites.  (For that matter, though I may be blind, I don’t see anything really objectionable or Nazi or right wing about what he has said at heart. We’re tone policing here.  We’re up in arms about the over the top language of a passionate PTSD sufferer in the rough and tumble of internet shit-posting.    If you read the Wikipedia article for a good summary of what is "troublesome" in his reddit posts, you may be able to see through the fog that his posts pretty consistently show a staunch radical who is not opposed to radicals being as well armed as the other side.  I don’t see anything to apologize for that.

Oppo research is not presented as a service to everyone.   The targets of oppo research are not those who already agree with the funders of it.  They are precisely the terminally online leftists who might dutifully, reflexively, obligingly take up the oppo case for them in order to sow dissent among the ranks and weaken the opponent's base.  This is exactly what has happened in Graham Platner's case.  The left parodies itself when it demands that those who get to work to make life better for people must pass a purity test.  It's a parody of the left, and the dream of the right.  The operatives drooled over what is transpiring: the usual pile on of leftists falling over each other to be the first to cancel an easy target.  What Graham Platner should be is a challenge to the left to grow up, grow some shells and get some game for once for fuck's sake.

The whole mess has once again highlighted for me that the election of ambitious people with flaws that may color the dysfunction of their service, by voters with their own flaws that likewise are apt to contribute to the dysfunction of their choice is no way to pick those who represent us in government.  The answer for the 10,000th time is sortition: the scientifically random selection of our leaders from among ourselves -- all citizens, residents, subjects of the places we live-- for short, non-consecutive terms.  It is the only way to remove the types of partisan politics that in this day and age has come to mean battling opposition research, horrifying reveals of our candidate's mistakes and their humanity, and millions of dubiously come by dollars spent on hours of negative ads of performatively fake outrage rehashing those hard-won nibblets of scandal.   I will take sortition anyday.  But as long as we are stuck with our duopolistic system, can you imagine if one day sortition actually won and in an effort to undermine it and get back to oligarchy, billionaires (perhaps using AI) studiously dug up oppo research on every one selected randomly by sortition?   How would you do, comrade, under the censorious scrutiny of the oligarchic oppo machine?

If you want me to take your own false outrage seriously, try to come up with a better candidate than Graham Platner first-- good luck with that-- and if you succeed, let's see how long that candidate evades the oppo trap and your own acquiescence to it.

~~~~~

* There's a contingent of the left who in spite of everything Bernie has done in the Senate to try to end the funding of Israel's assault on Gaza (to say nothing of what he's done for left causes throughout his still very vital career) think he took too long to call what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide.  Good for you you fucking purists.  What has your purity actually accomplished for Gaza?

What it is

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Losing Time

I recently got into my head a notion I couldn't shake to read 107 Days, Kamala Harris's new book about the 2024 election.  Nearing completion of a book with nothing else in particular lined up I found myself scanning the list of current titles in the Apple Book store, and Harris's book appealed to me as a quick settlement of the what's next question.  I made the purchase and was dismayed to discover I had accidentally selected the audiobook instead of the ebook.  Being frustrated in my efforts to figure out how to make an exchange (it seems to be impossible), I resigned myself to the audiobook delivery method.  It paid off: at double speed, I was able to finish the unabridged book, read by Harris herself in about 4 and half hours.   That was really about all the investment I had hoped to give it anyway.*

I can't say I didn't have an agenda in even considering Harris's book.  I have been maintaining for months that the impulse felt by so many single-issue leftists to punish Kamala Harris as a proxy for Joe Biden, particularly over Biden's Gaza policy by voting third party (or abstaining altogether) without regard to what a Trump victory would mean instead was a tragically misguided mistake.   The "cease fire" just negotiated comes when Gaza has been flattened after months of  intensified bombing by Israel after unilaterally breaking a January cease-fire in March.  Israel continues to starve those who remain.  Trump did not get the Nobel Peace prize this year-- another few years of degradation and it should be his-- but it's all he wants out of it -- he couldn't give a shit was happens to Palestinians.  And if he doesn't wind up profiting from Israel's development of Gaza's beachfront real estate (as he has certainly indicated are his designs) it will only be because we have been transported to another dimension.  Would a Kamala Harris administration have been any different?

I don't make a habit of reading political memoirs, but it strikes me as a given that politicians who want to continue their careers do not serve themselves by speaking unvarnished truth in their public utterances.  If I were a politician, I would certainly have to hide my atheism and reflexive eye rolling at displays of patriotism and expressions of American exceptionalism.  Not only do I think we should expect politicians to be somewhat hypocritical and duplicitous in their public lives, but I almost think we should want them to be at least in certain relatively benign respects.  If Kamala Harris had said in her book that Joe Biden was the albatross around her neck that prevented her from soaring to the presidency it would have been truthful but might have had a ring of unseemliness coming from her.  For this reason, I was not expecting Kamala Harris to come out and say, "As President, I would have forced Israel to stop bombing Gaza and done what I could to see Netanyahu and Israel punished for war crimes." and she does not, but I did expect to see some coded signals of differences between herself and both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I was not disappointed.  She speaks about generational differences between herself and the reflexively pro-Israel Biden, as well as the importance of International consensus and her preference that Israel and the US not be opposed to the rest of the world in wanting to proceed with the destruction of Hamas regardless of the cost to Gaza and its innocent 2 million inhabitants.

In undertaking Harris's book, I was partially interested in seeing if I could get to the bottom of the question “Would Kamala Harris have been a continuation of Joe Biden?  Did Kamala Harris deserve to be punished for Joe Biden’s administration?”  While she doesn’t come out and say, “Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?  Of course I would have wiped the floor with Joe Biden’s first term, ” she does codedly indicate that Joe Biden’s Israel steadfastness prevented him from seeing Palestinians as people whom Israel was unjustly immiserating.  We learned last spring that Biden's sense of timing with the demands for loyalty that he placed on his hand-picked replacement was impeccable as on the eve of her debate with Trump three months after Biden's own pratfall of a performance hastened his exit from the campaign when he urged her to allow "No daylight, Kid" between herself and him in public assessments of his administration and promises of how hers might depart from it.  It's also clear that in 4 years of being the racist and sexist Biden's ethnic and feminist beard as his DEI Vice President, she did not get a lot of support and loyalty from the Bidens before or after she took over the ticket, and attributes the deficit in public recognition she was handicapped with at the start of her curtailed campaign to her purposeful invisibility as Biden's second in command.  Notably, she regrets not having had the courage to talk the poorly aging Biden out of seeking a second term (she thought it would be perceived as being self-serving at the time but in retrospect she thinks it would have been the right thing to do for the country.)  Nevertheless, with the microphone hers, she openly mocks some of Joe’s senile foolishness around the election such as his ideological discomfort in pushing the wedge issue of reproductive choice in contrast with Trump's role in gutting it, as well as incidents of tomfoolery on the campaign trail such as actually putting on a MAGA hat that someone handed to him at an event they both appeared at following his dropping out of the race providing helpful fodder for mockery from alt-right media.

My big takeaway is that she called the book 107 Days --not to echo 10/7 as some dummies have suggested-- but rather to emphasize that the curtailed campaign was the obstacle she could not overcome, that it forced her to make decisions and edits and snubs that she would not have taken if she’d had the whole 2 years and left her at the mercy of "the conversation" that was already underway, such as her failure to negotiate an opportunity to speak to Joe Rogan's audience of disaffected young men-- Rogan had congealed as a Trump endorser before she was able to persuade him to have her as a guest.  (Of course she probably would not have been the candidate if there had been an actually open Democratic primary as there should have been.)  

One of the highlights of the book is when campaign adviser David Plouffe tells her too late in the game for her to re-adjust her strategy the thing she needed to hear from a strategist on her side much sooner: “People don't like Joe Biden”.  But the campaign was already lost by then and it was too late to pivot from its focus on peeling wishy washy Republicans from Trump’s side to add to what she assumed was Biden’s solid support.  More malpractice.   Low point of the book: she talks about her appearance on the View, which she says was marred by an answer to a Whoopi question to the effect of She would have done nothing differently from Joe Biden if she had been president.  She was not prepared for the question she said and she gave a perfunctory answer.  But that’s not the low point.  The low point is that she was prepared to say that she would have had a Republican in her cabinet.  (In keeping with what she thought her strategy was supposed to be.)   Because she blew Whoopi’s question, she actually made a point of slipping her prepared Republican in the cabinet remark into a reply to someone else’s question.  She apparently did not ever see that if “People hate Joe Biden” it’s not because he didn’t coddle enough Republican genitals.  

I’ve probably left important stuff out but the thumbnail is, as an adult who has seen a lot of elections and politicians and as an American in October 2025 who can tell the difference between a fascist creep and a smart enough if rather typical post-Obama democrat, I feel satisfied that I was not deluded that regardless of what Joe Biden was forcing her to say at the time, she would have been a break from the stench of the America of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  Not a savior of anything but America from more of the same old old man stink.  

~~~~~

* The downside is that when I appear to be quoting the book I am actually paraphrasing it and paraphrasing it from memory at that, and from memory pieced together from whatever snippets of attention my ADHD brain was devoting to it at the time.