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It remains astonishing to me that I can open my browser and head to the FT.com, and see an article about Maine’s US Senate race. Yes, the composition of the Senate is globally important, and the Republican margin is razor thin, but let’s face it, that’s not why the FT or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times is interested in our race. It’s interested because Maine Democrats happened to vote in a certain Graham Platner as their preferred candidate in the June primaries, despite a checkered and largely unvetted past involving Nazi tattoos and very immature Reddit posts, and then were shocked – shocked! – to find that he was also likely a rapist, or at best, a serial girlfriend abuser. Prurience gains eyeballs, whether it’s on the nightly news or online, and what could be better than a self-righteous left wing hero being brought down in broad daylight due to his misogyny and tortured past. Who could have seen it coming?

To be blunt, anyone born in Maine within five or ten years of Graham Platner, that’s who.

So we’ll get to the political meltdown in a moment and the consequences thereof, but first the man himself needs to be explained. Maine in the 70s to the early aughts – that period when it was poor all over, not just now where it’s poor in the second congressional district and just unaffordable all over – had a weird aura that attracted well-off but disaffected Baby Boomers from away. Maybe they were burned out from too many low quality hallucinogens; maybe they bought in a little too much the Good Earth Catalog vibe; maybe they just weren’t smart enough to succeed in New York or Boston or Chicago or wherever (further west, they went to Oregon) – but a significant number of people moved to Maine with a trust fund or maybe a fourth quartile GPA from a good school and settled down. They ended up in places like Cape Elizabeth, where I grew up, if they felt just insecure enough to not leave their upper middle class milieu even in coming to Maine. Others ended up in midcoast Maine, like Graham’s parents, excited to strike out on their own but still wanting to be within an hour of an interstate highway. And then there were those who really checked out and moved to the North Woods, but this isn’t about them.

Graham’s parents were of the Westchester scene by background. Graham’s grandfather, William, was from Baltimore upper middle class bona fides, and became an architect and designer, studying under Eero Saarinen. His work includes the Ford Foundation building in midtown Manhattan, but more than that, he showed a particular affinity for interior design – his signature work was the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the ill-fated One World Trade Center, still regarded (if only in pictures) as the high point of late mid-century modern design, albeit perhaps so late that it was already in a bit of a decadent baroque phase.

He really hit his mark, however, in designing furniture for office buildings – desks, conference room furniture, even the first generation of cubicles (his were quite tasteful, not the canvas-covered paperboard herding pens of the 80s and beyond). And his jackpot was his series of what one might call lounge furniture: chairs, tables, and accessories made of an interlocked wire mesh circular base and support, with smoked glass tops for the tables and louche, sculpted leather shells for the side chairs and couches; matching but more formal chairs were also in the style for boardrooms and conference rooms. He made a fortune, and perhaps more importantly for the future Graham, they were and are considered timeless. He licensed the designs and a range of related products to Kroll, one of the world’s highest end industrial design manufacturers, and almost all of William’s work still sells today in heaps. You’ll find it in first class airport lounges, the waiting rooms of major corporations (indeed, I sat in William Platner pieces at Barclays when I waited to deliver board presentations), and in only the best hotels and personal homes. A Platner chair can go for upwards of $5,000, and a vintage piece for more; a bespoke Platner table, for the tens of thousands.

William’s children all sort of splayed out. His father, Bronson – could there be a more Wasp-ish name than Bronson? – married an up and coming restauranteur, they moved to midcoast Maine to a town called Sullivan (quite close to where the boy goes to camp each summer) they had a couple of kids, and then got a divorce (as 80s parents were wont to do) when Graham was six. There’s not a lot I can find about his developmental years but by the time he was in high school, he followed a pattern that was almost comically repeated among many, many dysfunctional rich Maine families. He first went to a respected New England boarding school, and got expelled – the press hasn’t reported why, but you can bet weed was involved and you won’t be given interesting odds – and then went to a couple of other schools which did not work out before ending up at an expensive day school in Bangor, about 20 miles from Sullivan, where he finally graduated. By his own admission at this point, he was a drunk, and he made the also predictable decision to enlist in the military.

Now let’s take a quick break for a speculation: Graham was rich and privileged as a kid. His mom ended up doing very well in the restaurant business in the tourist-rich area around where he grew up, and his dad didn’t need to do well as a lawyer because he was clipping coupons off his father’s design licensing fees. I want to be clear that I have no information one way or the other on this, but if Graham’s parents were at all similar to their age mates who divorced and parented broods in Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, Damariscotta and elsewhere, I’m going to guess that they probably liked a bump or two, took the edge off with some of the better locally grown cannabis, and didn’t lock the liquor cabinet. I therefore posit without proof but with high confidence, that Graham was – and if you look at the record, remained – fairly feral in an environment with maximum opportunity and few consequences.

And this would have been obvious to anyone who was around him in Maine in the 90s and early aughts, by the time he enlisted in the Marines.

Enlisting was probably the best thing he could have done, particularly in the Marines: a kid with no discipline immediately placed into the most disciplinary institution in secular America. A kid who was tall and probably pretty buff – did he play lacrosse, or maybe ran track and threw shot put, or perhaps hockey? the record is silent so far as I can tell – was ruthlessly broken down psychologically (the Marines take pride in that) but also probably encountered the first real leadership he had ever seen. He took to it like a horse to water, cozying up to more senior enlisted Marines, some of whom enjoyed reading Dreiser and Hemingway and Steinbeck, others who were right wing nationalists who hated Hitler – we fought him in WW2 dammit! – but could see his points about white people. Graham was torn in two but settled into a strange, incoherent personal philosophy driven by the attractiveness of poorly focused anger (skin heads) and directed against the rich plutocrats who run this country (Steinbeck, Dreiser). No further critical examination of his politics occurred once these coalesced, it’s clear: the vaguely lefty things probably made his champagne liberal parents happy, and the visceral anger was chalked up to military service.

Then he actually served in combat and his head was royally fucked.

As one can tell, I’m not sympathetic to a rich kid gone haywire, but I am sympathetic to a rich kid who tried to turn things around, and then experienced things in three (three!) tours in Fallujah and Ramallah that you and I hopefully can’t even conjure up in our imaginations. But at this point he is totally disqualified as a human being to serve in a leadership role: raised as a rich, well-lubricated hooligan; formed by the Marines into a fighting machine; ripped sideways physically and psychologically by a war that even Vietnam era vets acknowledge was beyond the pale in the damage it created in those who served: the man if anything earned a lifelong pension and the right to serve as Sullivan’s harbormaster – a classic pure sinecure if ever there was one – and raise oysters for his mom’s small restaurant empire until he reached some ripe old age and died of cancer caused by tracer bullet phosphorus and engine coolant from LAV-25 light assault vehicles, plus the medical marijuana he would have enjoyed on his Social Security full disability pay.

Of course, he is a good red-blooded heterosexual male, so he also wanted to find a nice gal and settle down and have kids – his story with his now wife is actually quite touching in that regard. But before he found his wife, his methods of wooing and romancing women veered towards the, er, felonious. Unsurprising given the back story, though, so how this tack got missed or glossed over by future political handlers is beyond me. But again, we’ll come back to that.

So okay – PTSD-ridden Graham, still essentially living off his grandfather’s masterly interior design work and furniture royalties (though indirectly), supported by subsidized purchases of oysters by his mom, and finally – maybe? – settling into a barely functional adulthood, attracts some attention because he’s good at settling fights between lobstermen in the small harbor of Sullivan. He’s named harbormaster – in most towns that role pays a few hundred bucks a month and literally involves settling fights between lobsterman and clammers before they go public and bother the midcoast tourists and replace their image of bearded seafarers smoking corn cob pipes and wearing yellow rain hats with images of bearded overweight middle aged men in wet flannel beating the piss out of one another over a misplaced trap or running over a line.

He becomes the head of the planning board, and is well liked locally, and lets his half-cocked – although by now somewhat sobered up – political views come forth. The anger is still there too but, in comparison with the current president, it seems both well-placed and quaint. He doesn’t take off his shirt enough for people to notice the tattoo. His ex-girlfriends avoid him but still kind of like the fact that he’s engaged in public stuff and hates Trump (liberal girls in midcoast are like that). Plus he’s buff, relatively young, and has that 1880s mining camp beard that goes so well with oysters and other canapés.

But make no mistake about it: he’s a meathead. And I have no doubt that everyone in Sullivan knew it but didn’t have the heart to tell him.

And unfortunately, his wife – smitten, of course, so smitten she’s overlooking sexts to his ex-girlfriends that he’s too stupid to keep secret, and well aware of the Nazi tattoo but enamored with the romantic story of Marine bonding which led to its inscription on his manly chest – calls up the worst possible people to call – Brooklyn political consultants from the Sanders camp – to see if her big hunk of love might be an interesting candidate for Senate. Not the 2nd district House seat – there were already two credible Democrats running – but the Senate, where the race felt wide open, with a much-despised termed-out governor seemingly the only choice in a race consisting of herself and a milquetoast party functionary who barely polled double digits against Angus King, the independent-registered junior senator, in his last run at office.

Brooklyn political types heard the spiel, realized this was their chance for the big time, and effectively sight unseen threw the weight of the activist wing of the Democratic Party behind…

… a complete meathead.

At this point, late last summer, out of state “volunteers” – lured north from the outer boroughs by the promise of cheap weed and ample raw seafood – were going out across the state, asking loyal Democrats “would you support a nice enough oysterman from midcoast in his race against Governor “I Hate Passing Bills” Mills in the senate primary?”. Never heard of him, they likely said, but sure, put a sign in the yard. They put signs everywhere. And of course he did the obligatory Tic-Tok video and Instagram Reel, the outer borough people called their rich uncles and aunts, and boom, suddenly he was well funded and the locals were talking about him.

Meathead.

It didn’t take long for someone who probably just plugged into ClaudeAI “what is Graham Platner’s posting history on substack, reddit, or other secondary media sites, and does he have much posting history on mainstream social media”, and boom we find meathead fodder. Some of it was taken out of context – he famously called lobstermen “a bunch of violent idiots”, which is (a) true as a general remark, and (b) coming from a midcoast harbormaster, likely backed up by years of hard evidence – by people who couldn’t find Maine on a chart of the Gulf of Maine. But the machine was in motion, the donations were flooding in.

At this point as well, it should have been obvious to more Mainers that this is a movie we’ve seen before: arrogant out of staters with no actual knowledge of our state’s many subcultures come and think they can improve the place by bringing their out of state ideas to bear. The last Democrat who ran against Senator Collins was of this variety: moving to Maine after a ten year political consulting career in Rhode Island (complete with Brown degree!), Sara Gideon, who despite a whole ten years of being a town councilor and state legislator, was convincingly defeated by it being pointed out simply that if she was so gawd-damn smaht (that’s my Maine dialect for you), why didn’t she stay in Rhode Island and run there? The lessons have been there since Maine’s 20th defeated the Rebel army at Gettysburg in 1863: if it’s from south of the Piscataquis River, don’t drop your aim until they’ve turned back.

But what bothered me was the sort of amateurishness of the production. The first ad I heard from Graham sounded like a comic book – “I’m Graham Platner, and I’m angry”. Oh great, the New Yorkers are encouraging him to act like the Hulk – Me Hulk! Hulk Angry! Want Single-Payer Health Care! – oh sure, that’ll work. But then it did, because the New Yorkers did get the calculus right: the Hulk – a meathead – was much more compelling than either the ex-governor or the wimpy party hack. And the meathead backed by out of state money not only was compelling drama, but it bought a hell of a lot of airtime and clicks. Subsequent ads – despite tens of millions in donations – felt like they were put together by my son and his friends. Somehow that made Platner seem “authentic”, though – even though the engineering and cynicism behind it screamed pure Brooklyn.

We know how the story ends but what people really forget is that it was always out there for everyone to see. Graham was raised by dysfunctional Boomer cultural carpetbaggers to be a meathead, and he was then manipulated by arrogant GenZ political carpetbaggers to be Senate candidate who was also still a meathead.

Maine Democrats have since then gotten themselves into an old-timey kind of hootenanny of excitement in bringing Troy Jackson into the race as a replacement candidate. You’ll read lots of stories by New York based and New York raised journalists in major national and global services tell you he won because he captured the fighting spirit of Graham Platner, that they campaigned together, that they share a love for rural Maine, that they are cut from the same cloth.

Bull. Shit.

Troy Jackson is a coldly calculating lifetime politico – who does, to his credit, come from a humble background that he’s scratched into a decent livelihood as a lumber industry guy in the north woods – but forget that now. The story is really that he became the president of the Maine Senate by mastering parliamentary procedure and cockblocking Governor Mills when she bullied her way out of her lane. He lost the primary for the governor’s slot handily, but he never totally dismantled his organization, knowing probably that Platner had enough dirt left to uncover that there might be an act 2 in the 2026 primary game. He won the post-Platner caucus by almost instantaneously realizing how the procedures put together by the party could be arbitraged if the right circumstances were played and – especially – if his opponents treated it as a fair fight.

Troy Jackson is not a meathead. I don’t know if he’ll beat Susan Collins, who is in her own way brilliantly ruthless too, but at least we have a real race. No carpetbaggers here, just two Mainers who have made statewide politics their raison d’être. Fire up the popcorn, kids, we got ourselves an election.

And thank God we don’t have a meathead in it. But also, candidly, give a thought to the poor guy. He was born and raised by rich out of staters, crapped out his teens, tried to do his best for his country, then got shot at in hell, acted terribly to a series of women, finally found a bride and a low skill job, and then got royally fucked by some folks from away whose parents probably knew his parents in a different life.

Graham Platner is now is a barely functioning but globally humiliated meathead. Give him a thought and send some karma his way, won’t you? Because Sullivan still needs a harbormaster to keep the lobstermen from punching one another in the face, and Graham seems like a pretty good guy for the job.

Henry VIII is England’s most famous king.  Some kings are famous for great wartime deeds, for example Richard I, known as “the Lionheart”, or Henry V, victor at Agincourt; some are famous for well-remembered episodes during their kingship, such as Alfred, who burnt some cakes, or Richard III, who lost his horse; others are famous for disabilities, such as George III’s madness or George VI’s stutter.  Henry VIII is famous neither for heroic deeds nor disabilities, but because he had six wives.   Plenty of kings had multiple mistresses, but multiple marriages are far less common; six wives is an unusually high number for kings; even for movie stars, although Tony Curtis managed it.

To understand Henry VIII’s lifelong commitment to serial monogamy we need to consider the political problem that confronted him and his belief about how best to solve it.  His father, Henry Tudor, had emerged as the victor of the War of the Roses, a civil war in England that followed on from the end of the Hundred Years War between England and France (1337-1453).  For more than thirty years, two English noble families contested the right to the throne until the dispute was finally settled by Henry Tudor’s victory over Richard of York (who lost his horse) in 1485, and his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter and heir of the rival family. 

Continue reading “Six wives”

When the Sexual Offences Act (1967) was passed by the UK parliament, homosexual acts between men were partially decriminalised. Initially, the law only applied in England and Wales (decriminalisation was extended to Scotland in 1980, and to Northern Ireland in 1982), and only applied to men over the age of 21 (the age of consent for homosexuals acts was lowered to 18 in 1984, and then in 2000 was harmonised with the age of consent for heterosexual acts, at 16), and did not apply to men serving in the armed forces (although it was extended to include them in 2000). Homosexual acts between women were never legally prohibited in the UK and therefore did not need to be decriminalised. This Act formed part of a slew of progressive legislation in the late 1960s, which also included the legalisation of abortion, the abolition of capital punishment, and the relaxation of the divorce laws, all championed by the Labour Party’s then Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins.

Not everyone in British politics welcomed the advent of the permissive society. In the mid-1980s public anxiety about the spread of AIDS provided the chance for opponents of liberalisation to campaign for new laws that proscribed ‘the promotion’ of homosexuality. Section 28 of the Local Government Act (1988), passed by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, required that local authorities in England, Wales, and Scotland shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality, nor should they promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. While many local government employees and many teachers worried about the meaning of the term “promotion” – did buying copies of books by Oscar Wilde for libraries count as promotion? What about playing music by Benjamin Britten? Was visiting Hadrian’s Wall problematic? – many UK newspapers conducted aggressive and intrusive reporting of the lives and behaviour of well-known gay men. It appeared, for a short time, that twenty years of progress had been reversed.

Continue reading “Joining in and opting out”

Five hundred years ago, on the low-lying plains that run eastwards from the River Danube, near the town of Mohács, an army of 20,000 Hungarian soldiers led by Louis, the 20-year old king, faced an Ottoman army, estimated at 100,000 men, led by Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey.  King Louis II of Hungary was married to Marie, who was the younger sister of Charles V, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, and his brother Ferdinand, Emperor of Austria.  Louis and Ferdinand had pleaded with Charles to send more troops to halt the Turkish advance, and had even suggested a temporary cessation of hostilities with the German Protestants, to allow them to recruit a mercenary army to defend European Christendom from the infidels.  Charles declined to support his brother-in-law, preferring to concentrate his military resources on his war with France, by which he hoped to secure Burgundy and much of Northern Italy for the Habsburgs.  Although Francis I, the French king, was betrothed to Charles’s elder sister, Eleanor, Charles viewed Francis as untrustworthy and referred to him as “the tiresome Turk”. 

Despite being heavily outnumbered, Louis II engaged the Ottoman army in battle: he was killed, along with many leading Hungarian nobles, and most of his army.  Two weeks later, Suleiman entered the city of Buda and appointed  John I, as the vassal King of Hungary, determining that an annual subsidy would be paid to Istanbul.  Ferdinand claimed the crown of Hungary for himself, and set about rallying the Christian kings of Europe to form an alliance and raise an army to drive the Turks out of central Europe.  His pleas were ignored, not least because most of Europe was more concerned about the territorial ambitions of Charles than of Suleiman.  The French, English, Venetians, Milanese, and the Pope all joined together to form the League of Cognac, established to resist the Habsburgs threat, and Buda remained firmly under the control of the Turks.   When John I died, in 1540, Ferdinand disputed the succession of the Hungarian crown to his young son, John II, and raised his own army of Austrian and German troops, which was dispatched to Buda to liberate it from Ottoman control.  This army, once again around 20,000 in number, was crushed by Suleiman’s troops along the banks of the Danube, and Turkish control of Hungary was once again confirmed.  The Ottomans remained in charge for almost 150 years until, in 1686, a Habsburg army finally wrested back control, first of Buda and then the lands to the south and east.   

Continue reading “Blue Danube”

I recently read a biography of Napoleon, written by the French historian Georges Lefebvre, first published in 1935.  I wanted to learn about him through the work of one of his own countrymen, for whom his historical importance would not be in doubt, but who nevertheless understood the many shortcomings of his rule, first as Consul and then as Emperor.  I had become aware that, despite studying European history at school until I was eighteen, I had never learned much about Napoleon, and that his portrayal in England was often rather cartoonish – a short, pompous man, who over-estimated his abilities and deserved to be ridiculed – with an emphasis on his dictatorial character.  By contrast, contemporary accounts by philosophers, novelists, and poets, celebrate Napoleon as the man who abolished Feudalism across Europe, introduced religious toleration, granted civil rights to the Jews, drafted constitutions, and who cut down the power of the church and the landed aristocrats.  Rather than a figure of fun, for many people of his day he was a symbol of progress, the champion of the rights of the people against the old elites.  Lefebvre’s book was exactly what I needed, and I think I now have a more balanced view of one of the Europe’s great but flawed leaders.

Early in the book, Lefebvre describes preparations for the Battle of Marengo (1800), which took place near a small town in Piedmont, roughly at the centre of the triangle formed by Turin, Milan, and Genoa.  In May, Napoleon led the French forces over the Alps and into northern Italy, ready to face the Austrian army.  As I read this, I remembered that this event is also described at the start of the novel Vertigo, by W G Sebald, a German author who lived much of his life in England and whose works have acquired something of a cult status.  I picked up my copy of Vertigo and re-read the first sentence:  In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great Saint Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible.  How odd!  For, according to Lefebvre, Napoleon had decided to lead the army to the Great Saint Bernard Pass which, having been crossed in 1798 and 1799, was a passage familiar to French armies.  Had the French army crossed the Alps using that pass twice before, or did they do so in 1800 for the first time?    Whose version of events should I trust?

Continue reading “Making stuff up”