Category: Political

Zeitgeist 7/14/26

I feel like I have an obligation to dig into this whole Graham Platner debacle, considering how enthusiastic I’ve been about him.

I had thought to write a bit about a Jethro Tull album for this week, but I’ve trashed that post. I might write about it again at some point, since I am interested in the evolution of that band over its many decades of existence. Every band is a story, and Jethro Tull has fascinated me for years. This observation idea of mine is a chance for a deeper dive and I will definitely take that opportunity.

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But what I feel like I have an obligation to dig into right now is the whole Graham Platner debacle. Regular readers of this blog (if such a beast exists outside of my imagination) will remember that I have posted about that dude with enthusiasm on more than one occasion.

And then this week we learned that he probably is the horrible person the oppo researchers have so wanted him to be this whole time. Yes, most likely he’s a rapist. I’ll tell you straight up. I’ve been made aware of the incident’s particulars and it really does seem like he’s done a terrible thing, dehumanized a woman, and lived in denial of that fact for years – denied it so hard he thought he could deny it right into a seat in the US Senate.

And until the facts of this case surfaced, I was absolutely on his side, even though there were a few other rumblings in the oppositional noise to suggest that he had this tendency. Because that’s the nature of elections in this country. Throw dirt at your opponent and hope some of it sticks. In this case, it really did, like a fork in a roast turkey. Goddammit.

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I’ve been listening to The Pretty Reckless a lot lately. They’re a fabulously arty punk/rock/pop band with a decidedly modern flair. Taylor Momsen is blowing my mind, tbh. At different times, they’ve tickled my particularly generation jones ear with a redolence of Gun Club, Zep, Kelly Clarkson (this is a compliment, goddammit,) X, mid-seventies Floyd, and Jobriath. In short, they’re brilliant. The cover art for this new album, Dear God pt. 1, is spectacular. I have the indie-variant vinyl, which is, I think, the proper format for this album.

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But the thing with this whole Platner situation is that… Platner constantly said to his audience, “This is not about me, it’s about YOU!” and the fact is, that is the way every US pol should think. One of the things that really made Platner click with people is that he understood that money being the biggest influence in our politics these days needs to end. I think he also campaigned on the terminality of the cult of personality. We should vote for the politicians who say and feel like they will follow through with policies that will help working people.

I think I need to reiterate, at this point, that Graham Platner is not an acceptable or viable candidate. He has **** of his own that he needs to deal with now. And seeking the approval of the public while he goes through this is… anathema.

But whoever replaces him on the ticket should reflect the values of the voters who supported Platner. The next candidate should:

  • work to abolish ice
  • address the corruption on the supreme court and in the federal government generally
  • fight for medicare for all
  • campaign for a living wage and affordable housing
  • strongly oppose the Israeli genocide against Palestinians and Lebanon
  • And the same for all forever wars.

In short, he campaigned as a representative of working Americans. That needs to not be lost, and the next person who takes up the mantle of Democratic nominee for that senate seat should have the same positions.

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We’re about to start our third heat wave in as many weeks here. That seems to be going on in a lot of places. The planet’s clearly out of whack, due to stupid human activity. I’ve been hearing that we’ve crossed the line, and that no matter what we do, we’re about to face climate disaster. And yet we’re in the middle east fighting for oil and against human decency. It all makes me wonder if humanity can survive its own greed and thickheadedness. I don’t have an answer for you about this. Time will tell, if there’s anyone to listen.

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The best things about Summer are home grown tomatoes and ice cream. I wish you plenty of both!

Some of Karen’s tomato haul from last year. Photo by me.

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Americans Are Pissed

Don’t piss it all away…

I heard a guy with an English accent
Use the word “pissed” in the American sense.
No one else noticed.

He was talking to Americans
And Americans certainly know
What it means to be pissed.

A prominent example of an American being pissed. Note the red hat.

We are pissed. We all are.
So much of the time
And for every imaginable reason.

Over there on the other side
Of the big drink,”pissed” means “drunk.”
Being pissed is something you do to yourself.

But what are Americans drinking
That makes us so angry?
I answer that question all the time.

We swim in righteous dudgeon.
We ride a high horse as we wade through the river.
We vote our values.

Apparently, one of those values is revenge.
Another is the fear of being wrong.
But the greatest value is property.

You can own all the things
If you buy them in installments.
The things you own also own you.

Don’t piss it all away, some say.
If piss has no value,
Does that mean it’s free?

Like life in the USA is free?
Or bought with borrowed money?
Or rented, like beer and coffee?

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Babtists

My sense of right and wrong is well developed and is based in justice, not in following the second-hand pronouncements of a god that I no longer believe exists.

I was raised in Southern Baptist churches. Every moment of my young life I felt like an outsider. The Baptists helped with that. Inside me was the hard truth that every day, I secretly wished I was a girl. I heard over and over again from the churchy people in my family, who insisted (without knowing what was true of me, because I kept that secret buried deep inside) that people with sin in their hearts were bound for Hell, and that femininity in a male was a sickness and a sin.

I was presented with a choice. And my choice was to embrace my whole self: to be a good person, and to let the idea that I was inherently evil go, instead of internalizing the self-hatred I had been raised to. Every positive step I’ve taken since then has led to a larger worldview and a stronger sense of myself in the larger context.

My sense of right and wrong is well developed and is based in justice, not in following the second-hand pronouncements of a god that I no longer believe exists. This is not to say that I have not been a little shit at times in my life. I have. I acknowledge that I have made mistakes, as everyone does, and I continue to try to move forward and choose to take good action for myself and those I love as best I can.

But the Southern Baptist Council, the governing body of the churches I attended as a child, continues to dehumanize and marginalize people, and continues to believe that its views should rule this country and hold dominion over this world. At the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention, attendees voted to actively oppose Obergefeld, to exclude from membership any church with a female pastor, and to keep the SBC’s financials from being made public, thereby confirming their ideology as toxic.

Of course, they also have this effed up resolution, dated June 1st, 2014, that permanently separates me from the ideology of much of my family: On Transgender Identity, which is contradictory and hateful on a profound level. They claim that “we love our transgender neighbors” and in the same document resolve to “oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity,” rendering the whole document nonsensical and branding themselves once again as hypocrites.

And that’s at the heart of my exit from that religion and from the positive regard of much of my family.

not my family, not my church

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Sometimes I Wonder if I Will Live to See the End of This Era.

A Show-and-Tell

If, if Reagan played disco
He’d shoot it to shit.
You can’t disco in jack boots.

High upon a white horse
He’d sing lame lyrics
To try to reach the working man.
–The Minutemen, 1982

That’s the entire lyrics to If Reagan Played Disco by southern California punk band the Minutemen, released as one of five songs on a seven inch vinyl record entitled “bean-spill e. p.”

Here’s my copy: Sorry, I will only be posting the non-obscene label here…

        

This cultural artifact from 43 years ago shows that the issues that seem so immediate and emergent right now have been with us for decades. The Republican conservative project has been the same for all this time. The Democratic response has been just that – a weak, ineffectual response. The Democrats initiate nothing. All they seem to do is talk in the least effective/offensive way about vaguely lefty ideas they never enact, while governing like diet Republicans.

The real response to what’s happening in the world now comes from outside the corporate infrastructure, in places like the LAVA Center, citizen political groups, spaces that hold independent artists, writers, musicians and other creatives, who exist outside that structure. We are purified in our intentions because we exist outside the mainstream.

The mission of mainstream cultural money and power is to blind us to what’s real, to create an artificially rarified sense of what qualifies as legitimate cultural contribution so that anything real – anything you’d recognize as coming from someone’s real life and intention is seen as substandard — grubby and grimy, faulty, unwashed and obscene.

Because the truth is obscene. We see the IDF shooting Palestinian children in the head, carpet bombing and starving an entire people out of existence. And in the Palestinian people we should see ourselves. The big money, the power of industry, and world leadership supplies the bullets to, as our president says, “finish the job.”

“The job” is to diminish working people, out of existence if necessary. Their mission is to fill us with artificial hopes and synthetic mass-manufactured bullshit dreams, all the while eroding all of the real value – the compassion and care, the pride, the willingness to work to better each other and ourselves together, the simple beauty of the world around us – and turn it all into a zero-sum game, a race to gobble up that which has more value if left alone, those things that will grow if nurtured but can only wither if exploited.

Our job is that nurturing, and we’re doing it now: sharing our hearts, hearing each other. It’s the same job the Minutemen were doing decades ago. “If Reagan Played Disco.” In those words, there is a dream. It’s the same dream that had that lone student standing in front of a line of tanks in Beijing not so long after this record was made.

Some say that student’s name was Wang Weilin. The Chinese government says there was no such person. It’s said he was 19 years old when he stood in front of those tanks. It’s said he was arrested for “political hooliganism,” whatever that means. Now, nobody can prove he existed or if he exists still, in some gulag somewhere. But we know who he is, because of what he did – what we all saw him do, even though his country’s government denies it ever happened.

D. Boon, the guitarist and singer of the Minutemen died in the band van when it rolled while they were on tour, three years after this record was released. These grooves are part of his corpse. After he died, his fellow band members George Hurley and Mike Watt continued on.

Years later, they recorded a drop-dead gorgeous instrumental called “Tien An Men Dream Again” as fIREHOSE, with guitarist Ed fROMOHIO.