I’d like to say the death of Lindsay Graham robs America of a devoted public servant who embodies the highest ideals of duty and honor.
I do not, however, choose to lie. He was always a conservative South Carolina Republican, for example spouting bullshit to justify denying detainees in Guantanamo Bay the right to habeas corpus. After it turned out the Toddler had left the White House while hanging on to classified documents, Graham said prosecuting him would lead to violence in the streets. He supported the Toddler’s first-term efforts to destroy Obamacare despite, by Graham’s own admission, knowing nothing about how it worked. He favored a national 15-week abortion ban.
Then there’s his complete swing on supporting the whining fascist Republican leader. Once upon a time Graham branded the Toddler as “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women in uniform are fighting for.” Once the Toddler won, Graham fastened lips as tight as humanly possible to the president’s ass and never let them go.
Graham didn’t have to do that. He said once that he turned into a Toddler supporter because it was the only way to stay “relevant.” It wasn’t. He could have opposed the Toddler, even if it cost his his seat. Like most of the Senate, Graham was a millionaire; it’s not like he needed his government paycheck to survive. If he didn’t want to stick his neck out, luxurious retirement was an option. But the people who become senators seem to love being senators. The perks — medical care, food and personal services available around the clock. The status. The attention. Having something to fill their time. And if they don’t want to put in much work beyond talking to the news media they can apparently manage it.
Rather than give that up, Graham supported fascism. At one point he even suggested the Toddler should be pope. Like every other Republican in the Senate, he made his career fully complicit in the Toddler’s doings. Unlike some of the, such as Thom Tillis, he never budged (I grant Tillis very little slack for turning against the Toddler only when he’s not in the running for re-election but I feel I have to grant him some).
Unfortunately the Democratic senators and former senators (e.g., Biden and Harris) are gushing about what a wonderful man he was. He wasn’t. I realize convention to say nice things and be all collegial and shit — let’s not get angry over trivial political differences like 1/6 or Dobbs — but I still think they should have said, as politely as possible, what a slime Graham was. Or noted that they disagreed deeply. Or simply stayed silent. It’s unlikely anyone’s going to lose their career over speaking ill of the dead, and Biden no longer has a career to lose.
As Fred Clark at Slacktivist says, “speaking ill of the dead after a selfish, harmful life, Dickens saw, was essential because it was true and because it demonstrated to those still living such lives the urgency of their need for repentance. It was only because he was granted the grace of hearing the harsh words spoken about him after his own death that Ebenezer Scrooge found a path to redemption.” Graham can no longer change his path or his fate but other people can. Telling them “no, don’t change, we love you just as you are,” is like an enabler pouring an alcoholic a good stiff one.
As I blogged about a week ago, a woman named Jenny Racicot reported that Gerald Platner, Democratic candidate in the Maine Senate race, raped her. Happily lots of Democrats yanked their support and called on him to drop out (not all). He has now done so; he has also formally submitted the paperwork that will allow Dems to remove him from the ballot. He is not, however, at all apologetic, presenting himself as a man unfairly persecuted. He wasn’t; as Scott Lemieux says, lots of left-wing candidates are running this cycle. The others didn’t get accused of rape.
Obviously he’s considerably worse than I realized. As I said in the post, I didn’t see much need to think about him deeply: I’m not in Maine, he was the candidate, and beyond the Nazi tattoo I didn’t pay too much attention. Other people did and they were clearly right to warn against him. As Courtney Milan says, “I just saw someone say that hindsight is 20/20 on Graham Platner, and let me just say that if you did not see this coming, your vision for such things needs to be checked.” Unfortunately some people aren’t 20/20 on Platner even in hindsight. (There’s also this WaPo podcast which explains how what happened with Platner is exactly like what happened to Biden in 2024).
Platner showed piss-poor judgment getting into a major race with so much baggage (I’m not implying rape results from bad judgment. It’s not bad decision-making, it’s plain evil). As Michelle Goldberg says, people “went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.” It didn’t help that Dan Moraff, his top strategist, didn’t want to spend money on an in-depth background check (one journalist says he previously asked her to delete candidates’ quotes from an article). Paul Campos lists other bad judgment calls.
Democratic operatives Moraff, Leanne Fan and Morris Katz all pushed Platner to run; the New York Times notes his campaign was a disorganized mess. I agree with Hilzoy: Katz, Fan and Moraff should be redflagged for future political work. I doubt they will be. To be fair, lots of other Democrats backed Platner as a white knight: “Many justified their endorsements with Platner’s so-called progressive values and the idea that the party must oust Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to have a better chance at winning a majority in the November midterms.” I’m sure Cheryl Rofer is right that Platner represents masculine stereotypes many people still find appealing.
I’ve read arguments over whether there are other, equally viable candidates with the right politics; like I said, I’m not following the Maine race closely enough to say. Regardless, I agree with Mother Jones at the last link that we cannot excuse rape in the name of the greater good: “This perspective considers only the good abusive men like Platner can contribute and dismisses the people they abuse. It treats survivors with disdain, devaluing what they add to their communities. It slams shut any pathway to speak out and denies survivors personhood by condemning them for even daring to exercise the right to speak.”
Stephen King makes an alternative argument: everybody’s doing it! We already have a Congress full of rapists! That’s not entirely true — I’m confident Ocasia-Cortez and Susan Collins haven’t raped anyone — but it’s entirely possible I’ve voted for rapists without knowing it. However that is not an argument for voting a known, or at least credibly accused rapist, into office. Adding another rapist doesn’t balance the scales. As Rebecca Solnit says, “Rape is a profound human rights violation, an act of dehumanization, and an act that says the rapist’s rights and desires are boundless and the victim’s rights and desires are nothing. It is incompatible with democracy.”
Besides, the everybody’s doing it argument, AKA “we are all sinners,” is fundamentally flawed.
It’s true, some compromises are necessary in politics; arrogance, ego, adultery all turn up in candidates. All can be forgivable, maybe Rape is not something to compromise on. As Steve Philips puts it, “If we are willing to look away from credible allegations of sexual violence whenever the political stakes are high enough, then we are not, in fact, the movement we claim to be.” Even though Republicans have no qualms about supporting rapists and accused rapists, “we’ll accept a rapist if they have better politics” is not an acceptable solution. Let’s go with “no rapists.” Rachel Cohen: “A version of this argument plays out now, as shocking numbers of people log on to defend Graham Platner’s candidacy, rapist or not, by pointing out that the President is a rapist with worse politics. They seem to have forgotten that we want to be different than the President.”
Over in a Lawyers, Guns and Money comment thread, my friend Karen points out another sexist aspect of this. Platner supporters hailed him because he was authentic, a working-class guy who’d served in the military and yet had progressive attitudes; by contrast Hilary Clinton in 2016 was often attacked as inauthentic. Karen replies Clinton was perfectly authentic: “She never pretended to be anything other than the hard-working honor student with the perfect resume.” And politically ambitious. And that’s kind of authenticity many liberal pundits despise: Clinton would be an example of what Ken Klippenstein labels “the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly.” See Cheryl Rofer’s link above about Platner’s appeal to a certain kind of man.
Of course Platner’s ambitious too. Nobody who starts out in politics running for the Senate can be anything else. But it’s more acceptable in a man. And if Clinton had his kind of authenticity — i.e., bad behavior — they’d be dumping on her for that. A woman can’t get away with inappropriate behavior the way a guy can (Echidne of the Snakes has an example).
Gender bias shows in other ways. Cohen points out that some people who initially insisted we have to support Platner as an the alternative is Republicans holding the Senate would probably have been outraged if someone made a similar case for Harris (e.g., however flawed her policies, Republicans will do worse). Solnit points out (at the link above) that “according to the New England Journal of Medicine, rape is about four times more likely to result in diagnosable PTSD than combat.” It’s hard to imagine the people defending Platner’s acts as resulting from PTSD would be similarly kind to a rape victim.
As Fred Clark says, rape is a national emergency. It happens a lot, it happens every day. Like sexual harassment it derails the lives and careers of countless women, choking off their contributions to society. “How many? Too many. How often? Too often. That’s all the quantification we really need here.”
Years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote that the difference between classic Hollywood and today was not that classic Hollywood didn’t turn out trash but that even the people who made trash knew art was real, knew it mattered, and knew they weren’t making art. Susan Jacoby’s THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON from 2008 makes the same point at greater length and less effectively.
Jacoby’s argument is that while anti-intellectualism has always been a strain in American life, Americans traditionally valued education and culture. They wanted to learn, they wanted to acquire sophistication, they wanted to see their kids become better educated than they were. That might mean college, trips to museums or “middlebrow” sources of culture such as the last century’s Book of the Month Club. People, at least some of them, were willing to learn about classic literature and classical music.
That belief in the life of the mind, Jacoby argues, has collapsed under the combined impact of sixties radicalism, fundamentalist religion, drugs, non-intellectual pursuits such as movies, TV and videogames, the cult of celebrity, and nobody being willing to uphold intellectual rigor. Colleges offer puff courses for an easy A; intellectuals refuse to call out bullshit, preferring to tolerate nonsense (religion, in Jacoby’s eyes, gets way too much of a free pass).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sympathetic to her view. If anything, it’s gotten worse as we plunge into a world where any crackpot can use YouTube or a podcast to reach millions with idiotic takes, students use AI for their term papers, and the administration actively denies facts in favor of political right-wing orthodoxy. At the same time there were lots of little things that nagged at me, like assuming videogames are strictly a guy thing (lots of women played them) or that religion is inherently anti-rational (the Abrahamic religions start with faith and divine revelation but they’ve poured a lot of logical thought into them). And how much the media contributed to this decline even before they began sanewashing the Toddler. From what I’ve read, they didn’t pick W as the winner of the first Bush/Gore debate, the media told them repeatedly that he’d won (the rationale, IIRC, was that they had low expectations and W surpassed them, so there you are).
This also comes off a lot as an intellectual snob’s rant about Kids These Days — sure, the Beatles are nice, but why aren’t people listening to classical music? Reading serious literature (I think she’d be either astonished or annoyed that I’m comfortable reading both nonfiction and comic books)? Taking fluff courses instead of serious academics (as someone who took several fluff courses, they can make a fun break from the serious stuff. It doesn’t mean I didn’t have hard ones). Ultimately I wanted to like the book much more than I actually liked it.
KIDS FOR CASH: Two Judges, Thousands of Children and a $2.6 million Kickback Scheme by William Ecenbarger induced rage in me much as Empire of Pain did. Ecenbarger shows how Pennsylvania Justice Mark Conahan and juvenile court judge Mark Ciaravella shut down their county’s juvenile detention center, then became silent partners in a local for-profit center the county contracted with (their decision — Ciaravella’s position gave him a lot of clout in such things). To make up for the huge kickbacks the company owners had paid them, the judges made sure lots of kids had stays there, regardless of how trivial the offense. Flipped a passing police car the bird? Got into an argument with your step-parent? Threw a piece of lunchmeat at a fellow student? Three days to a week in juvie, maybe as punishment, maybe so that their psychiatrist (a relative of one of the judges IIRC) could evaluate you — something that could normally done as an outpatient.
To be fair, Ciaravella wasn’t just a corrupt judge, he was a shitty judge. He sentenced kids who’d committed trivial offenses to months in detention at facilities he didn’t have any investment in. He did this without any regard for their rights. Probation officers assured kids they’d get lighter sentences without an attorney — this was a lie — and if they insisted on having a public defender, Ciaravella often ignored the PD or talked over them. The kids would usually leave the courtroom in shackles. Their permanent record was tarnished; kids their age assumed they were serious criminals and shunned them; and many of them grappled with trauma, guilt and shame as a result.
Ciavarella didn’t care. Conahan didn’t care. Almost nobody else did. The system collaborated willingly. Schools got rid of troublemakers, however trivial the trouble was; prosecutors got their conviction stats up; probation officers kept their caseload down; staffers in the courts protected their jobs by not pushing back against the powerful; the judicial review board which was supposed to investigate things like this did nothing. The entire system was corrupt, which was typical of that part of Pennsylvania (teachers mention in passing that it took a $5,000 payment to the school board to land a job).
Happily, there were officials, reporters and activists who pushed back. It took far too long but both judges were eventually convicted of some of their crimes. Ciavarella remains in prison; Conahan unfortunately got shifted to home arrest during the pandemic, and got his sentence commuted under Biden. Those who fought the good fight were a light in the heart of darkness, and this was a shitty darkness indeed.
All rights to cover images remain with current holders.
Yep, no movie reviews today, either. That’s because after soooo fricking long, Southern Discomfort is finally available for sale. Print book here, ebook on various sites here. Amazon ebook here. I’ve added it to my list of self-published books from the Behold the Book imprint here.
Here’s the cover synopsis: “It’s May 1973 and Maria Esposito has spent three years as a wanted fugitive. Constantly on the run, she never lets anyone get close. Now torrential floods have trapped her in Pharisee Georgia, in the middle of an FBI investigation. Maria needs to keep a low profile; too bad the murder victim’s widow insists she can help solve the case. The county sheriff makes it clear saying no is not an option. The FBI soon becomes the least of Maria’s problems. There’s the hostile ravens. The homicidal horse. The living shadow warning her to leave town or die. Maria has no choice but to run, even though something monstrous is threatening Pharisee. Something only she can stop. Maria tells herself she doesn’t give a damn. She can’t afford to give a damn. She has a grim feeling she’s not going to listen …”
Here’s the cover, courtesy of the amazing Sam Collins.
It has been such a long road, it’s hard to believe it’s done. For anyone who’s curious, I’ve been looking back at the novel s creation and development in a series on this blog. Today, though, I thought I’d discuss something different: what are all those people/things doing on the cover of the book?
I feel pretty damn pleased with myself for this book.
The woman: Maria Esposito, Army nurse in ‘nam turned anti-war activist, now a federal fugitive. She doesn’t want to be the hero; she may not have a choice.
The cloaked figure: Gwalchmai, my antagonist. He’s on a 300-year-old mission of revenge that won’t stop until Olwen McAlister is dead. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone else but when push comes to shove, he will.
The cat: Gwalchmai gained powers from a ritual, the taghairm, that involves roasting live cats on a spit for four days straight; one cat dies, he roasts a new one. The cats of Pharisee can smell his crimes against their kin and they want revenge.
The freaky-looking hand: the hand of glory, a mystic talisman that puts people to sleep and unlocks doors. To make it you cut off the hand of a hanged man and cover it with corpse fat. Georgia’s not currently hanging anyone so Gwalchmai hanged someone himself.
The clouds and lightning: After 300 years, Aubric and Olwen McAlister were the secret monarchs of Pharisee County. They and the land were one. With Aubric already murdered, nature is running wild. The county is coping with a rainstorm like it’s never seen before.
The creepy house: there’s a couple of ’em.
I feel really pleased I wrote this. Hopefully lots of readers will be too.
I’m honestly not sure, but whenever I sat down to work, my creative juices were not flowing.
Stuff which didn’t require creativity went fine. I finished the draft of Savage Adventures, which is not a small thing. One more draft should do it, a combined line edit with fact-checking (did I get the names of all the characters right, for instance). However I wanted to make progress on fiction as well and my mind just balked.
Short stories? No idea how to progress.
Rewrite of Let No Man Put Asunder? Ditto.
I did take the beginnings of two new untitled stories I worked on last week and share them with the writing group. The feedback satisfied me they’re worth working on and some of the suggestions were interesting (could they be part of the same novel? Probably not but if I could think of a way …). That was it, though.
I also didn’t do as well as usual with our dogs’ home PT care, or my own exercise regimen for that matter.
I did find that if I concentrate my various non-writing tasks — errands, bills, submissions to our pet insurance, Trupanion — in the first hour of work this gets them taken care of and lets me concentrate better the rest of the day. That helped with Savage Adventures at least.
Part of it may be that I’m still sleep-deprived — a couple of bad nights, no nights quite good enough to catch up. Plush Dudley being extremely restless is a big part of it. Sometimes I think he just likes to sleep on my side of the bed and he knows if he makes enough trouble, I’ll have to move and try to sleep in the spare bedroom. Wicked boy.
He’s so stinking cute, though.
Part of the problem may be that I haven’t had much break from our various pets the past month and a half, except when I’m out running errands. Over time it erodes my personal space and that does get draining.
I did get to attend my Genre Book Club, as I discussed over at Atomic Junk Shop. That was fun. And I had lunch with one of my writing friends, the first time I’ve managed that in a while.
Tune in next week for (hopefully) a better result! Cover by James Bama, all rights to image remain with current holder.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there was much concern about teen pregnancy. The percentage of babies born to teens was skyrocketing though historian Stephanie Coontz pointed out in one of her books that was largely an illusion. Married women were having fewer babies, ergo unmarried women and teens became a larger share of the total.
At the time everyone agreed this was bad, though not how to fix it. Conservatives wanted a No Sex, Abstinence Only message in sex ed. Liberals (though not all of them) favored comprehensive sex ed and making birth control available. A standard right-wing talking point was that using contraception increased the chance of abortion: if the contraception failed, the girl/woman had already decided not to have a baby! Statistics have proven that’s bullshit: Colorado offered free contraception and slashed the pregnancy and abortion rate. Republicans killed the program. For all their lies that abortion is “the American holocaust,” they’re more horrified by women having premarital sex.
They’ve also argued that teen marriage is a good thing. Missouri State Senator Mike Moon, for instance, thinks 12 year olds marrying is a win: they’ll be happy and if she gets pregnant she won’t need an abortion (only slutty single women in Republican fantasies have abortions). Besides, parental rights to marry their kids!
For decent human beings, this is a lousy idea. 12 or even 15 is way too young to make a life-changing decision like marriage. However it has several upsides for Republican misogynists. Women who get married that young will have less chance to become independent or learn the skills to support themselves. Plus they’ll have year to churn out Aryan babies for the American Reich. The ever-odious Federalist website, for instance, argued that Republican theocrat Roy Moore hitting on teenage girls was sound family planning. If you want a big family, a teenage girl has years of fertility while an older man has the money to support lots of kids. Isn’t that great? Besides, Joseph married Mary when she was under-age.
Framing teen pregnancy as the alternative to abortion lets them pretend its a good idea. Lauren Boebert argued her son getting a girl pregnant shows the superiority of Republican morals, because they don’t get abortions (a lot of them do, of course). Efforts to raise the age of acceptable teen marriage face Republican opposition in multiple states. It’s no surprise that “a spokesperson for U.S. Health and Human Services confirmed to Stateline on Friday that the agency is canceling 53 out of 67 grants, worth about $68 million, under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, affecting grantees in more than two dozen states.” Teen pregnancy advances their misogynist agenda; if the parents can pressure the girl into a good old shotgun marriage, then it’s an even bigger win. Jessica Valenti breaks down the details, including an anti-masturbatory slant.
As I blogged about last month, conservatives are trying real hard to present the life of a submissive wife and mother as true, liberating femininity. How can feminists think it’s oppression? No, feminists are the oppressor, using their Jedi Mind Tricks to trick women into forgetting how much they loved the tradwife life.
As I put it in an earlier post, “The issue for feminists isn’t that motherhood is inherently a bad choice, it’s that it’s a choice, period. Not destiny. Not their “natural” role, any more than being the breadwinner is “natural” for fathers. It’s not about working in journalism or finance being better than stay-at-home parenting, it’s that we should have the freedom to pick the path that works best for us and our families.”
As Jessica Valenti says, if tradwife is that wonderful a choice, “why not show young women what their life would look like 20 yrs from now?” Where are the endorsements from the older tradwives?
For more on this kind of misogyny, and others, check out my book Undead Sexist Cliches, available in ebook and paperback. Links here. Cover by Kemp Ward, all rights are mine.
A more conventional but less intriguing SF cover by Alex Schomburg
I’m a Clifford Simak fan so I don’t need a cover to sell me on his work — but I do like this cover. I don’t know the artist though it looks to me like Leo and Diane Dillon.
1)Lots of Republicans said exactly that about W during his first term and he didn’t turn America into a shining city on the hill. Hell, his eight years ended up so dreadful (the housing bubble, 9/11, the senseless invasion of Iraq for non-existent WMDs, the FEMA failure in Hurricane Katrina) even Republicans try to pretend he didn’t exist.
2)Let us assume Miller is right and God wanted the Toddler in office this year. So? If God is the all-powerful arbiter of human events (as opposed to letting us exercise free will) then presumably he did — and he also wanted Biden in office in 2020 (otherwise the Toddler wouldn’t be eligible to run in 2024). And for that matter must have decreed W, Obama and Clinton step into the Oval Office. So the Toddler President isn’t anything special.
3)Alternatively let’s assume he is indeed special. Again, so? God scourged Israel with endless conquerors and bad kings — who’s to say the Toddler is a blessing rather than a curse?
I’m sure some of y’all aren’t God-believers but even for those who are, Miller’s logic is — well, he doesn’t have any.
This Saturday, Southern Discomfort goes live, though the Kindle version won’t publish until the 18th (I don’t know why). This will be the last post about the supporting cast, focusing on my grieving daoine sidhe, Olwen McAlister and the community she and the late Aubric founded, Pharisee County Georgia. Spoilers ahead, though nothing that I think ruins the book (one reason I’m not blogging about my villain, Gwalchmai — I think I’d have to give away too much).
As y’all eventually learn, Olwen and Aubric McAlister were daoine sidhe — elves — who like most of their kind spent centuries flitting between England and their otherworldly realm, the Hither Country. When the Puritans came to power after the English Civil War, however, they saw the fae as demons and sought to drive them out. Ringing the church bells, for instance; in themselves, they’re harmless but rung with malice towards elvenkind, they create agony. The sidhe closed the gates to their realm and fled into a further plane, the Thither Country. From there, they can never return.
Aubric and Olwen were different. They liked life in the mortal realm so they fled to Ireland, outside the Puritan reach. There they lived outside a small mortal town where people respected the old ways. All was well … until Cromwell’s forces invaded and crushed the Irish. Olwen and Aubric fled again, across the sea to the New World, taking with them the townsfolk in a magical boat. They arrived and wound up settling in Georgia before it was even a colony.
As Katharine Briggs’ Encyclopedia of Fairies makes clear, the fae of British folklore are not pleasant people. I developed Olwen and Aubric — whom Gwalchmai has murdered before the book begins — with that in mind. They’re immortal; from their perspective any pain they inflict on mortals will be over in an eyeblink; who cares about the suffering of mayflies? Their own suffering, by contrast, is a long-lasting thing. They hold grudges and they take revenge when they’re crossed, and it’s easier than you’d think to cross them.
By the time the book starts, Olwen has been watching over the people of Pharisee for three centuries and it’s mellowed her. She might be disdainful of outsiders’ lives but Pharisee folk? They’re hers. She will protect them, as she’s always done. She’s as close as I’ve ever come to a “morally gray” character, as so many book ads put it. The good stuff she does is noble and compassionate, the bad stuff is very bad. I think I’ve done a good job acknowledging both.
Then there’s Pharisee itself. I made the right call in casting Maria, an outsider, as my protagonist. She doesn’t know what’s going on, she’s primarily concerned with herself rather than Pharisee; I thought at one point about turning Joan Slattery into the protagonist. I realized if I did that, the exposition would get awkward: Joan already knows everything about Pharisee. Sharing information with the reader would take either me providing info-dumps or Joan having “as you know” conversations. An outsider slowly learning the truth, works much better.
However the more I worked on the book, the more I realized Maria wasn’t enough. Even adding Rachel, Liz and Joan wasn’t enough. Because this wasn’t just the story of the individual residents, it’s the story of the entire county (primarily the town of Pharisee). What it’s been like for them flourishing under the guidance of Olwen and Aubric. How they’ve adapted as outsiders have become residents, buying up property and turning it into a bedroom community for Atlanta commuters. What happens when Aubric, one of their rocks for 300 years, lies dead.
So my POV cast is quite large. Sheriff Slattery. Father Michael, the senior Catholic priest. His brother Harry, the head of the county commission. Military attorney Captain Jeff Carpenter. Dr. Aaron Moreno, one of the new physicians in town. His daughter Susan. Some of them know the truth; some don’t. Together they make up the mosaic of Pharisee. Which Gwalchmai is on the brink of smashing to pieces.
I’ll be announcing the book release Saturday, with links.
My cover is by Samantha Collins, the other artist is unknown to me. All rights to images remain with current holders.
