Collective Effervescence

 

Margaret Mead Green in Theodore Roosevelt Park, Manhattan, with the new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation looming in the background. Photo by Alvaro Keding for American Museum of Natural History.

Sunday morning, after the spectacular finish of the NBA final, I was in the greenmarket outside the American Museum of Natural History, being an out-there citizen for once and helping to pass out fliers for one of the candidates in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district, Micah Lasher, who I regard as the natural successor of the departing Jerry Nadler, if you need to know—the museum entrance on that block of Columbus Avenue is the way to an early voting location, so the point wasn't so much to give them another flier (incredible amounts of money are being spent in this campaign, and we've been getting five or ten of them every day in our mailboxes) as just to remind them of our candidate's name, in case they were there to vote. 

Lasher and Nadler were there, a block or so away from my station, and I went down there to be introduced and shake their hands. When I got back, there was a Black lady sitting on one of the park benches outside the museum, taking advantage as I was of a bit of shade from the trees in the Margaret Mead Green (a little meadow park where we used to wander freely before it got fenced in some years ago, making room for the bright white shotcrete wildness of the Gilder Center), and talking with great animation on her cell phone about what a great day it was and how she just had to get outdoors and into the atmosphere of the city, and I thought how wild it was that I knew exactly what she was talking about—the Knicks—and felt similar. Then a little old white lady in a respirator mask came and sat down beside her and they began to engage in more Knicks conversation, which got into still more metaphysical territory with the discussion of civic unity and the sense of some kind of redemption. And lastly she went off to finish her shopping and the original lady was greeted by a couple of friends talking about plans for the day; one of them, a big bald Black man with a gray beard and extraordinary resonant voice, was recognizably the wonderful writer Jelani Cobb. I, standing there with my fliers, in a green shirt in the sea of orange and blue, on a different errand, was shy enough already, and this made me shyer, so I kept quiet and focused on the customers, who were hardly making eye contact, though every once in a while one of them would give me a thumb up or whisper, "Already voted for him," but I certainly did all the same feel myself to be a full participant in the Jalen Brunson communion that was bringing us all together, what Émile Durkheim called the "opposite of grief", a "collective effervescence" that can help to restore social solidarity following a collapse. 

Sooner or Later God'll Cut You Down

 

Video of the 2003 recording, released three years after Cash's death, with lip-synching tribute cameos by a host of mostly engagé celebrities including, of all people, Kid Rock.

Thoughts of Johnny Cash raised by our old friend Hunter Biden, who has recently surfaced on Twitter as a first-class shitposter, answering an insult from some Republican fool using the Johnny Cash finger-giving photo as his avi:

Bravo to Hunter Biden. Well done. I like this informed swagger.

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— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 7:53 PM

Note how he's not by any means suggesting he's as cool as Johnny Cash; he's reminding us that Cash was once as low and fucked up as Hunter Biden has ever been, and for a pretty long while before he ended up the great songwriter and performer we all remember with fondness and awe. Which Hunter is not, presumably, at least not yet, but he's working on himself and getting better.

And also of what a flaming liberal Cash became too, something the Republican fool clearly has no idea of—not mixing it up with party politics, but working with the deprived and defeated, stressing the liberal message that, as Hunter put it, no one is past saving. If you've done some horrible stuff in your life, you can try to be better. And God will surely cut you down either way.

Which brings us inevitably to the Maine Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner, whose primary is tomorrow. Well, maybe not that inevitably. 

I was kind of hoping to have finished writing about Platner,  but then came the new allegations, in The New York Times, no less, that he had not only joined the Marines and served in the abominable Afghanistan and Iraq wars, entered some kind of connection with the horrible Blackwater company or something related to it, and at some point in a Croatian tattoo parlor gotten himself a tattoo with the insignia of the elite "Totenkopf" 3rd Panzer Division of the Waffen-SS (a paramilitary organization of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei that operated independently of the German Army, and certainly committed some really horrific war crimes and crimes against humanity), and posted some pretty awful and politically incorrect posts on Reddit,—but also apparently been kind of shitty with between one and three of six women he dated between around 2013 and 2021 that The Times was able to interview, promiscuous, drinking to excess, and in the one case possibly something akin to violence.

And then posted a bunch of "sexually explicit messages" with some other women in 2023, around the time he got married; it was his wife Amy Gertner who revealed the last in fall 2025 to a campaign aide, Genevieve McDonald, who thereupon resigned from the campaign (over the Totenkopf and the Reddit posts) and then months later, it seems, passed the story to The Wall Street Journal and The Times:

In a statement released by the campaign, Ms. Gertner suggested that she had been betrayed by Ms. McDonald, saying she was “deeply hurt” and bothered by “the invasion of our privacy.”

“I confided deeply personal details about my marriage to someone I considered a friend,” she said. “I trusted this person with the most private chapter of our lives — the early days of our marriage before any campaign was on our mind.”

“Our marriage today is stronger than ever before,” she added. “I know the man I married and the husband he has been to me on the best and the worst days of my life. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.”

What Platner has in common with Johnny Cash and Hunter Biden is that arc of a life story from horrible behavior through regret to trying to be better, in his case, as I was saying in the earlier post, through therapy, his counselor (primarily for PTSD), hers, and the one they share for marriage counseling. It's a great story of redemption. Honestly, it's a great story whether it's true or not, and the other thing, which is vitally important, is that enough Maine voters seem to have bought it, women in particular, according to polling from last week:

The survey of 650 likely Maine voters shows Platner has the support of 48% of respondents, compared to 43% for Collins, with 6% undecided and 2% supporting another candidate. A gender gap exists among polltakers who back each candidate: 54% of women and 42% of men support Platner, while Collins earns the support of 35% of women and 51% of men. 

And of course they hate Trump, the Iran war, and the price of gas, And it's their decision. It's interesting he has so much less support from men, and it may have something to do with his earnest denial of the toxic masculinity he started with (I'm sure his main reason for joining hte Marines was to piss off his sensible bourgeois parents),, and use of therapeutic language, his continual admission that he used to be bad (this was the campaign tactic I was urging him to adopt in May, and he's done it—also it's completely unlike John Fetterman, who has never acknowledged doing anything wrong, and also adopted a more "popularist" list of policies compared to Platner's openly leftist one). He's working on it, and that doesn't happen in a straight line and may not happen at all, but you're not getting certainty.

Platner's done plenty of retail politicking, Maine-style, and they feel they know him. I kind of doubt the new stories have changed that significantly any more.than the earlier ones did. I'm not saying I believe his story in detail or I don't, I'm saying at this point it's none of my business, but I'm absolutely convinced it could work out just fine, OK?

Autopsy-Turvy

So I bet a lot of you thought the official party autopsy of the 2024 presidential election, released on Thursday, was probably concealing some awful ideological truth the DNC didn't want you to know, and that's why Ken Martin wanted to keep it secret, but it turns out it was merely incompetent, assigned to a writer who either didn't know how to do it or didn't have time, and produced a document that was woefully incomplete both in form (a lot of the chapters promised in the table of contents don't seem to have been written at all) and in content—as Michelle Goldberg wrote for The Times,

What’s most striking is its utter lack of substance. The words “Israel” and “Gaza” don’t appear once in its 192 pages. It offers little insight into why the Democratic Party lost large numbers of Black and Latino men, or its failure to speak to disconnected, irregular voters. Much of it is a string of platitudes, like this: “It’s imperative that Democrats meet the moment — by identifying and preparing the leaders and organizers who will deliver positive change for America.” I wondered if it was written by A.I....

and so poorly conceptualized that Martin felt the DNC couldn't take responsibility for the thing and festooned it with red marks like an angry professor reacting to a bad term paper.

Leaving the rest of us largely mired in the same old debate as to whether we ought to pull our wagon out of the rut and over toward the middle of the road or out to the left shoulder for the next phase of the journey, as if that humble metaphor provided an adequate characterization of all the human possibilities, only with even less hard information than usual.

Rant

John Bull farting merrily in the face of a portrait of King George III in response to the 1798 suspension of habeas corpus rights in Britain (passed by Parliament to allow the king to order the arrest without evidence for sedition of the members of English Jacobin clubs during the war with France) while a neighbor accuses him of treason, as President Trump accused The New York Times's David Sanger of treason last week for suggesting that Trump's Iran war might not be a brilliant victory, at least not yet. Caricature via Wikipedia by Richard Newton, who was not arrested for the work, though he sadly died that year of typhus, at the age of 21.

JD Vance argues that Democrats don't actually believe in "No Kings" because they didn't protest King Charles 🥴🥴🥴

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 19, 2026 at 2:31 PM

Uh, no. Charles III isn't the kind of king we have in mind. The last time Britain had a king comparable to Trump, particularly in the line of trying to bypass the parliamentary power of the purse and making spending decisions on everything from disaster relief to public architecture without consulting the legislature, especially imposing taxes without their consent as Trump keeps trying to do with his stupid tariffs, they cut off his head. 

Notes on Platner

Note: Revised this quite a bit for the Substack version, too lazy to redo it here,

All-electric zero-emission Freightliner Cascadia 2025, by Daimler Truck North America, via Beverage Industry.

Over the weekend, presumptive Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner released his "Take Back American Power" energy plan, attacking the ferocious rise in energy prices that Americans including Mainers have been suffering with over the last couple of years for heating, driving, and running farm equipment: he offers to cut prices by eliminating the federal gas and diesel tax; subjecting oil companies to the windfall profits tax proposed by the Biden administration in 2022 and currently pushed under the leadership of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Ro Khanna, which is supposed to encourage them to stop price gouging; and inviting states to freeze or lower their electrical utility rates in return for money to finance low-cost clean-energy infrastructure projects (carrying on the legacy of the Biden Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021). 

And a bunch of other stuff, including a genuinely socialist-sounding supplement to the Biden Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program but bypassing the private capital, which

would issue debt backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government, and partner with state lending authorities to provide cheap capital directly to utilities, rural electric co-operatives, public energy authorities, and other developers of low-risk clean energy projects. Developers of fully permitted, shovel-ready transmission lines or offshore wind projects, for example, could tap the Infrastructure Fund at rates close to the federal funds benchmark – considerably lower than their borrowing costs on private debt and equity markets – and pass tens of billions in savings on to ratepayers.

That's an Elizabeth Warren proposal, and the most interesting thing in the list to me, though I'm pretty enthusiastic about the windfall profits tax (per barrel of oil, charging 50% of the difference between the prices of the current year and the previous year), which has a realistic prospect of passing if we elect a Democratic Congress in November, which is of course more likely if Platner takes the Maine seat from Concerned Susan Collins.

The canceling of the federal gas and diesel tax, in contrast, seems more than a bit off target, given the tax's aim of discouraging fossil fuel use while funding clean energy projects. Whitehouse-Khanna have a better proposal with their version of the windfall profits tax, offering cash rebates to everybody (including nondrivers). Besides, the federal gas tax is apparently a pretty modest part of the cost of driving, substantially less than state and local gas taxes, to say nothing of what drivers have been paying on top of that for Trump's Iran war, per this NBC report (whole chart at the link):

Gerrymandering for Democracy

Michigan's notorious old 14th District (2013-2023), drawn after the 2010 census to squeeze two districts' worth of Democratic voters into one district. I guess that would be fine with the Supreme Court since it was partisan in intent, though it also concentrated the state's Black, Arab, and Bangladeshi voters, but the newly founded Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission got rid of it after 2020, creating a map that has divided the House delegation into 6 Democratic and 7 Republican seats.

Somewhat weird perspective on the consequences of the Supreme Court's ruling in Callais v. Louisiana and the "race to the bottom" it has sparked, in a piece by The New York Times's Nick Corasaniti, who was also on the radio talking about it the other morning:

In Florida, Republicans could hold 24 of 28 congressional seats after they approved a new map this week that was drawn in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decision. The math is stark: In a state where Vice President Kamala Harris won 43 percent of the vote two years ago, the G.O.P. could control 86 percent of House seats. 

Democratic state lawmakers mentioned that lopsided statistic often on Wednesday as they tried unsuccessfully to stop the new map.

“You think that this is just about preserving a Republican majority in the midterm,” State Representative Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, the House minority leader, told her Republican colleagues. “I stopped by to tell you today that you are destroying democracy with this vote.”

Yet Democrats did something similar in Virginia last week, most likely giving their party 10 of the state’s 11 Congressional seats, or 90 percent of the congressional delegation, in a state where Mr. Trump won 46 percent of the vote.

Like, "Yet the Ukrainian military has been doing something similar in Russian-occupied territory and even Russia itself, targeting Russian forces with all the ferocity they can muster." Don't they know there's a war on?

Trump Administration War on Housing

 

From Don Moynihan's Substack, urging folks to submit official comments to the Federal Register on the proposed work requirements rule for federal housing rental assistance by midnight tonight if they want it to be counted, here (I'd advise reading Herd's and Moynihan's post, as I did, before preparing your own—it's full of valuable facts and links).  Don't think I've made such a formal move before, and I feel pretty good about it.  I'm failing to do much for today's May Day General Strike, though my shopping will be very limited, and I don't suppose this is "substantive" enough to get a return comment, but I'm happy to have added at least to the numbers. 

I'm writing to express concern about the HUD's proposed rule for imposing "work requirements" as they are called on beneficiaries of housing rental assistance, that their effect will be to make the ongoing housing crisis even worse than it already is. There seems to be a perception at HUD that there is a large segment of the population that needs rental assistance because they are too lazy to work, but nothing could be further from the truth: better than half are elderly and/or disabled adults, and most of the rest are adults with children who can only work if they have expensive and hard-to-find childcare. Most of these do in fact work, but have difficulty nevertheless, because the real problem is that their wages are too low and their rents are too high to allow them to find a place that won't cost them more than 30% of their monthly income (which is what the existing program asks them to pay, subsidizing the rest--it's not giving them apartments for free, it's making them affordable).

The requirements that already exist in filling out paperwork for the program--proving your age, your income, your ability or inability to work, the ability or inability to take care of your children, etc.--is already so burdensome that three out of four people qualified for the benefit don't get it. Moreover, the authorities are badly understaffed and the wait times for receiving benefits stretch out for years in many states, and many landlords refuse to accept the terms of the program, and the program thus fails a large majority of those citizens who need it most. Adding a "work requirement" will only make that failure worse, as so many of those have multiple  irregular or "gig economy" jobs that are unpredictable and sometimes very difficult to document.

This is exactly what happened when Arkansas adopted work requirements in its Medicaid program: 95 percent of those targeted by the program were already employed or should have been exempted due to disability, but the work requirements in the state reduced Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and at the same time failed to increase labor force participation, and majorities of Arkansans who lost their Medicaid coverage ended up facing serious medical debt, delaying care, or skipping medications, because they couldn't afford healthcare. A rule like the proposed, expanded to all 50 states, will only increase homelessness and probably joblessness as well (it's a lot harder to hold a job when you're living on the street). Children, who have nothing to do with the problem, will suffer the most.