A real hermitage, I’ll forbear the map, since I think this chap probably likes his privacy. But it’s near my anchorage a couple of nights ago. I don’t know whether you can see his woodpile in the pic. It’s very well-stocked. I saw the chap himself out early in the morning, surveying the fine view from the rocks in front of his door, but I didn’t want to take a pic of him. What he sees out his window on a wild winter night must be pretty feckin sublime.

Happy Bastille Day to those who celebrate, as I always do.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Note how each nuances the others? Liberty? And yet, Equality. Only possible if you also have Fraternity. Liberty, I mean liberty for all, not just for a few — implies Equality. And Fraternity is the heart-deep understanding that this is so; that my true freedom necessitates and entails yours.

When the old boys got it right, they got it really, really right.

Turns out you can boil eggs in sea-water — Maine sea-water, anyway — and they’re very good that way.

Roberts Harbor, on Vinalhaven. Not the prettiest harbor in Maine, though that bleak windswept island certainly shows one of Maine’s characteristic expressions, to wax a bit Jamesian. But it’s our home for tonight, and we love it. Map.

Platner waved more red flags than the track marshals in a hundred auto races.

— The Nation magazine

Shown above, Katrina van den Heuvel, heiress, graduate of Trinity School on the Upper West Side, a pestilential institution in that nabe second only to Columbia University, and publisher of The Nation, a venerable open sewer of liberal self-congratulation.

I would not have thought it was possible for me to hate The Nation more than I have for the last forty years or so, or the sort of people who read it and write for it, but I discover with some pleasure that the juices still flow in my shrivelled old semi-corpse, and hatred can actually go past incandescent into something that perhaps only astrophysicists have a word for.

South of Bold Island, near Stonington: 44.152010°/ -68.614904°. Clearly a popular spot, especially in a brisk NW evening breeze. A somewhat interactive map.

There are, no doubt, many dirty stories about the contemptible ratfucking the Democratic Party and its junior woodchucks in DSA gave Graham Platner, but one of them, I think, that deserves notice, is petit-bourgeois social snobbery.

PMC pwogs don’t like to think of themselves as repressed, joyless, rigid, uptight prigs, but unfortunately, they very often are. And of course if you think about it in class terms, it’s precisely the petite-bourgeoisie who for excellent reasons hate and fear the working class in a personal, intimate way.

A really rich, socially confident aristo, with grandparents and so on, can hobnob – perhaps a bit de haut en bas, but still – hobnob with a plumber, and even genuinely enjoy his company. In fact it’s rather a shibboleth of the aristo manner. The common touch! Ahhh, Squoire Allworthy, a fine man, always a kind word for the ploughboy.

But the PMC are only one step removed; the sheepskin, the SAT scores, the luck of attending an okay suburban high school, even if it was in New Jersey, the even greater luck of marrying-up – absent any of these, they’d be trailer-trash deplaaaarables too. And on some more or less repressed level, they know it.

So the indecent, lascivious, prurient rejouissance of the merit class in Platner’s takedown really makes perfect sense.

Which doesn’t make it any less nauseating.

Last night’s anchorage. Besides being a crummy pic (sorry about the solar panel) it doesn’t do justice to how snug and closed-in the place feels.

Also, the darkest skies I’ve seen in a long, long time. I saw stars that I had forgotten existed.

Mainers – I can now include myself in this category – have never had much use for the Democratic Party. We have long memories, you see, and we remember the Civil War. Joshua Chamberlain (shown above) is quite a local hero; I knew a rich guy who paid to have a statue of him put up, in Brunswick I believe. My rich acquaintance (since departed to join the Majority, I’m sorry to say, because I liked him a lot, and he wore his riches modestly) was in no sense a Lefty, or even a Pwogwessive, or even a liberal, but he wasn’t some MAGA nut-job either.

The space of human possibilities is larger than some of us would like to think.

But Democrats. Mainers also remember FDR. Accurately. So Democrats are well, maybe, sorta kinda OK. Sometimes. Or were.

But Mainers also liked Graham Platner. A lot.

And as I said, we have long memories. The sandbagging of Platner by the DP machine and its lapdogs in DSA is not something we will soon forget.

Your goose is cooked here, for a generation at least.

And you probably won’t last that long. Anywhere.

The Democratic Party’s sandbagging of its wildly popular candidate, Graham Platner, continues apace. With, I strongly suspect, though I can’t prove, a big assist from DSA.

As so often happens, the weapon of choice is toxic feminism. A disgruntled ex-girlfriend named Racicot has suddenly come forward, five years or so after the alleged fact, and a few days before a critical moment in the election cycle, to report that Platner supposedly “sexually assaulted” her one evening, after which he spent the night in her bed. Drunk, or so she says. (She didn’t want him driving home in that condition, and maybe hurting somebody, you see. Very high-minded. Ahh, the difficult choices life presents us with!)

This incident has, of course, been characterized, with the usual sloppy use of words, as a “rape”. Now rape is, rightly, a crime. But no such crime was reported, much less prosecuted, and nobody, obviously, was ever convicted of it.

So what we have is a rather murky allegation – I stress, allegation – about one supposed incident, from one individual, that’s said to have taken place some years ago.

This rather tawdry “scoop” was put together by Politico, a well-known stenographic agency for the management of the Democratic Party, which has always despised Platner and done everything possible to undermine him. As it does with all insurgent candidates, and particularly those who don’t toe the party’s cuck line on Israel.

Quite apart from the manifest, squalid, gutter-raking machinations of the Democrats, there’s actually an issue of principle here.

Anybody, obviously, can allege anything about anybody else. As a general rule, we don’t assume that just because an allegation is made, it must therefore be true. Some are, of course. But some are motivated by malice, self-interest, attention-seeking, or manipulation and subornation by malign actors.

That’s why we have procedures for assessing and sifting allegations, standards of evidence, principles like burden of proof and presumption of innocence. But in the case of supposed sexual misconduct, all these have been thrown right out the window. All is takes is an “allegation”, and the object of it is damned to civic death.

This seems downright demented to me.

But it is the dominant mentality in what Alex Cockburn memorably called the “pwogwessive” world, and Platner has fallen foul of it. Or rather, the metoo execration machine has been revved up and turned on him, by people who are past masters of such practice. All the proggie heroes, including the detestable and long out-of-warranty Bernie Sanders, are climbing over each other to pile on.

Of course these are all Democrats, so whaddya expect. But people who don’t, as far as I know, think of themselves as Democrats, or not really Democrats, just now and then, in an election year – they’ve joined the baying pack too.

My favorite is a casual acquaintance of mine, who I believe considers himself a staunch Marxist of some kind, if not a downright Commie. This chap breathes the rather precious air of Park Slope or Carroll Gardens or some such place, and he recently treated the world to the sage observation that he’d always had a “bad vibe” about Platner.

Now Platner would certainly be very out of place in the good-schools, goody-two-shoes milieu of Pwog Brooklyn, so my acquaintance’s “bad vibe” is probably genuine enough. But in my ear, the smarmy, self-congratulatory, complacent, Pharisaical, holier-than-thou tone of this obiter dictum is simply nauseating.

It has not escaped my notice that many of these piler-onners are in or adjacent to DSA. I’ve always had rather mixed feelings about that organization. They’re very well-run and have had some remarkable electoral successes, and I personally am not such a hard-line Commie that I would turn town some nice Swedish-style social democracy if it were on offer. But DSA’s political strategy relies on the Democratic Party, and I’m convinced this is a disastrous and fatal blunder.

Platner was never DSA’s boy, and he’s certainly not DSA’s social type, insofar as my acquaintance with DSA cadre extends. I wonder whether DSA haven’t anointed themselves the gatekeepers of permissible insurgence.

And Platner has been found decidedly wanting. Though he broke all records for a primary victory in Maine. But maybe not quite there for the entire laundry list of DSA desiderata.

And also, let’s face it, a bit… uncouth.

I have rather mixed feelings about the Fourth of July.

Or no; that’s not true; I detest it. I suppose I have a kind of lukewarm patriotism, for what is, after all, my native land, like it or not. I like the dropped ‘r’s and soft broad ‘a’s of Southern and Midcoast Maine speech – the aggressive buzzsaw rrrrrs of Hillary Clinton’s dialect, less so. I like fried chicken and collards and cornbread and even, in a dim uncomprehending way, baseball. And of course Moby-Dick, a thing of wonder and admittedly inconceivable in any other setting.

Fireworks, I can take or leave. And ours has got to be the absolute worst national anthem ever. All about a fucking flag, for heaven’s sake. Whose idea was that?

So on this day of days I tend to be a Grinch. I console myself with reading Frederick Douglass’ amazing speech on the occasion.

Everybody knows about Douglass, of course, who needs no encomia from the likes of me. I would just like to say, though, as an aspiring scribbler, that he has a prose style to die for. Not to mention a clear illusionless and yet large-hearted view of our mostly ill-omened national adventure. He’s more kindly-minded toward us than I think I would have been in his place.

A few excerpts (OCR errors silently corrected):

It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act that day….

My business, if I have any here today, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now….

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work….

What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

All this time later – 174 years, to be precise – and still as true as the day it was spoken. We have, as this very great man said, our work yet to do.

Some friends & I are reading a book called “Wannabe Fascism”, by a chap called Federico Finchelstein (what a name, eh?).

The book is making me squirm a bit. Among other things, the author seems to believe there’s such a thing as “Trumpism”, which like every over-estimation of Trump, annoys me. So I decided to set down, in some kind of order, a few thoughts on Fascism that have been knocking around in my head for a while.

1.0 Fascism is not a thing.

1.1 Analogy: Is bad weather a thing? What is bad weather? All weather is more or less bad and more or less good. But we don’t speak of almost bad weather or wannabe bad weather, unless we’re being humorous. We speak of bad weather, and worse weather, and weather that’s actually not very bad at all.

1.1.1 Was Hurricane Sandy the real thing, and other storms mere wannabes?

1.2 Of course weather can get so bad that it’s hard to imagine it getting worse. So with Fascism. It’s hard to imagine anything more Fascist than say Nazi Germany.

1.2.1 But as the Yiddish proverb says, “It could always be worse”. There’s no limit to bad weather, and I don’t think there’s any limit to Fascism. That is, there’s no consummate or ideal or compleat Fascism, such that once achieved, nothing more Fascist is possible.

1.2.1.1 Cf. Woody Allen: In Hollywood there’s an award for everything. And the Oscar for Best Fascist Dictator goes to… ADOLF HITLER!!!

2.0 Fascism is inherent, endemic, an ineluctable immanent tendency of developed capitalism.

2.1 Therefore all capitalist social orders are more or less Fascist.

2.1.2 Therefore Fascism is not necessarily a response to crisis, or a “crackdown” when our reptile overlords feel threatened. They like to go that way anyhow, even if there’s no effective resistance to them and no crisis.

3.0 There is no particular connection between Fascism and “violence”.

3.1 “Violence” is perennial and universal.

3.1.2 The State itself is classically defined as “the entity that claims a monopoly on violence”.

3.2 It’s not difficult to imagine a social order that’s Fascist but not especially violent, except in the sense that all states are violent (they have cops, soldiers, prisons etc., and they punish lawbreakers). The US imprisons more people per capita than any state in history, as far as I know. Is it the most Fascist? More than Nazi Germany? The Oscar winner itself?

3.3 We Reds like violence too, under the right circumstances. 1649, 1789, 1917, 1949. Need I go on?

4.0 Fascism doesn’t have a fixed or stable ideology.

4.1 It takes advantage of whatever it finds to hand.

4.1.1 So for example Fascism need not be anti-Semitic or misogynist. Israeli Fascism, for example, is wildly philo-Semitic, one might even say Jewish-chauvinist. And quite feminist, too, at least in one sense of that highly polysemic term. Israeli propaganda makes much of the tough girl-boss Israeli soldier chick. One might also mention the astonishing Melanie Phillips. Who could easily be the sharp-tongued up-yours yenta next door in any UWS apartment building.

4.1.2 It does often take advantage of nationalism and ethnic prejudice, of course, since these are endemic in every society and hence always available.

4.1.2.1 But nationalism can have a positive side too, from a Left point of view. Consider national-liberation struggles, for example, which the Left generally approves of. The Soviets always called WWII the Great Patriotic War, and I believe Russians still do.

4.1.2.2 Ethnicity is generally a more negative and complex thing, but don’t most Lefties value expressions of authentic ethnic culture – music, food, language etc.? Communism in the 1930s was at great pains (perhaps, in retrospect, a bit too great) to take the “national question” seriously, and “national” in this context was pretty much synonymous with “ethnic”.

5.0 Fascism does have a style, a sort of recognizable flavor.

5.1 You can tell Fascist architecture, for example, at a glance. Most official architecture in the US since the early 20^th century has been highly Fascist.

5.1.1 Other art forms, curiously, don’t have such a clear-cut Fascist version. Nazi painting, for example, often looks a bit uncomfortably like Soviet Socialist Realism, at least in style if not in subject matter. I wouldn’t know how to tell Fascist music from non-Fascist music, apart from the texts.

5.1.1.1 I wonder why? Architecture, perhaps, is the most civic of the arts?

6.0 There’s also a Fascist personality, or maybe, more accurately, a personality type that’s more strongly drawn to Fascism than other types might be.

6.1 I think it’s probably what Freud called the “anal-retentive” type, characterized, he famously says, by “orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy.”

6.1.1 Coincidentally these are the character traits that also make good accumulators of capital, particularly if you extend “orderly” to “control-freak”, and “parsimonious” to “greedy”.

6.1.2 If you add “punctual”, “eagerly compliant”, and “deferential to authority”, you have the ideal capitalist employee and middle-management snitch. These are also the character traits we try to inculcate in schoolchildren.

6.2 I would also add an obsession with cleanliness and dirt.

6.2.1 So metaphors of contagion, malignancy, infection, etc. often figure largely in Fascist rhetoric.

6.2.2 Fascism therefore coexists nicely with a lot of healthy-lifestyle faddery. No foreign substances in my body, or my body politic!

6.2.2.1 Hitler, notoriously, was a vegetarian.

7.0 Fascism and populism have nothing to do with each other.

7.1 The latter long antedates the former.

7.2 Making the connection is a sure diagnostic sign of chronic and probably incurable liberalism.

8.0 Another sure sign of liberalism: opposing Fascism to “democracy”.

8.1 Personally, I don’t know of any state anywhere in the world that could genuinely be called “democratic” in any meaningful sense.

8.1.1 The US is certainly not a democracy and never has been. This isn’t even open to plausible question.

8.2 Fascist regimes can be and often are quite popular.

8.2.1 Hitler notoriously became Chancellor through the orderly “democratic” processes of the much-nostalgified Weimar republic.

8.2.1.1 About half of those who voted for the Nazis in 1932 were women.

The AI bros seem to be envisioning a world in which agents multiply pretty much without limit, exchanging crypto tokens. And this effectually becomes the economy.

It’s kind of a real-world test for the labor theory of value, isn’t it?

Is a world possible that consists entirely of wealthy rentiers and asset-speculators, manipulating machines and notional properties, without any actual humans to exploit? Making the rest of us surplus to requirements – that is, we’re not even needed as objects of exploitation any more?

Of course I suppose that’s what Communism is, in a sense. Except that it’s for everybody, not just a handful of weird-looking transhumans like Thiel and Musk. Given Communism, everybody becomes a rentier on the expropriated store of capital, taken (let’s hope) with some degree of salutary violence from its former private expropriators. And nobody is an object of exploitation any more. (Let’s also hope the speculators are all gone; but maybe that could just be considered a harmless game, like poker. Played for ready cash. No markers.)

AI is quite good at a lot of things – better than I would have expected; I’m a dyed-in-the-wool techno-skeptic, and I’m constantly being proven wrong. I’m quite sure AI will soon be able to drive cars better than human drivers, for example. And the ideal job for it would be sorting out the different components of single-stream recycling. I’m certain it would be very good at that, and do it really fast, and make that process fairly close to cost-free. I bet it would be at least as good as people are at air-traffic control, and probably better. Anything that’s pretty deterministic, and doesn’t have many variables in the mix at any given time.

It’s already better at writing New York Times op-eds than the supposed humans currently burdened with that unsavory task.

But there will always be things for people to do, I suspect, and so in my robo-Communist world people might still work, but it would be because they wanted to or chose to, not because they had to. Some would do more, some would do less. Some would accumulate a bit, being characterologically anal and liking the idea; or maybe they’d like to buy a boat. And others would get and spend.

It’s weird how much effort has been spent to make this clearly desirable state of affairs seem like a bad thing, or an impossible one. Surely the rational approach would be to find out whether it is possible. And the only way to find out is to give it a try.

I’m thinking that in my Communist world capital accumulation might still take place, though of course it would be social capital, not private capital. That is, the capital stock we all own and collect our rent from could continue to grow, relative to population, and the social dividend per capita grow with it.

Is that scenario possible without surplus value, in Marx’s sense – i.e. value produced by uncompensated human labor? Of course in the Communist case the surplus would become everybody’s property, so it might be alienated in the sense that it was no longer one’s individual own, but it also didn’t become another’s. Sublated, then, rather than alienated. Taken, but returned, transformed. Ye olde negation of the negation.

So yeah, maybe it is a world full of AI agents, hondling with each other and niggling over micro-tokens. For the sake of efficiency, which is a value, though a very secondary and comparatively unimportant one. When I buy a loaf of bread, my agent and the baker’s haggle over the price, blessedly unseen by either of us. But we Communist Spartiates won’t have to worry about what the Helots are doing, with their unfeeling annealing. Unlike the actual historical Helots, who were made of flesh and blood and had desires and loves and hates, knew pain and pleasure, frequent hunger and occasional satiety, the agents are just … code.

Though Richard Dawkins may not think so. But of course he’s a well-known idiot.

I was reading somebody recently who insisted, rightly I think, on the distinction between wealth and capital. Capital is a kind of wealth that enables its owner to expropriate surplus value from others. Which is what I understand Marx to mean by it. I might have a gold brick buried in the ground. That would be wealth. But it’s not Capital until I put it to work expropriating surplus from other people. That’s how I get a return on it.

Say in the Smithcommunist world you have a lottery, just for fun. Every year some rando gets a bazillion Commiebucks. He’s suddenly wealthy. Watching him spend it becomes a form of public entertainment, maybe. But there’s no way he can use it to exploit other people, because people have become un-exploitable. Thanks to Communism.

Maybe the new bazillionaire offers to give somebody a million to do something kinky for him. Maybe the person does it, because he wants the million. Or even likes the idea. Or would enjoy the notoriety. But crucially, he doesn’t have to.

Needless to say, this would imply the final liquidation of the concept of debt, except perhaps as an accounting abstraction, or a purely personal sense of obligation. Under Smithcommunism, the only debts are debts of honor, or quids-pro-quo – pay your loans back if you want to get more loans. Or debts that involved a lien on some kind of property – a house lot or a boat, say.

But debt, as it now exists, is, obviously, just slavery under another name. They used to imprison people for it. We don’t usually do that any more, but we often do thrust people into involuntary servitude for it.

Now if I were Kim Stanley Robinson, I could spin 300,000 words or so out of this. In a weekend.

Fortunately for you, dear reader, I am not. But hey, Kim, if you’re reading this – take it and run with it. Mention me in the acknowledgements.

That’s all you’ll owe me.

Turns out the poor thing just needed some watering. Who knew?

Since my memory has become extremely fallible lately — not that it was ever any good to start with — I recently had occasion to double-check Stephen Dedalus’ famous quip about history being a nightmare one wants to escape, etc. (Turns out, surprise surprise, I hadn’t remembered it quite right.)

Here’s what I got from my friendly non-local AI:

Whether you are wrestling with personal memories, the collective trauma of the world, or just having a heavy day, processing it can be incredibly draining. Sometimes the best way to wake up is to shift your focus to the present moment or to let yourself step away entirely.

If you’d like to share, let me know:

• Is there a specific situation or memory that’s weighing on you?

• Would you prefer to focus on a distraction, or talk through ways to reset your current mood?

I can help you find some actionable ways to clear your headspace and move forward.

I love her up-to-date lingo. “Heavy day” might be a bit dated, but “reset [my] mood”, “actionable”, and “clear [my] headspace” do seem like something you might expect to hear from the next table, in a certain kind of restaurant.

Ginger dealing with a bit of breeze and chop at her mooring. I do rather wish I had put the second pennant on, and those fenders hanging over the side are very lubberly. But I don’t feel like taking the dinghy out in this. I think she’ll be fine.

Our favorite girls: Venus and Luna.

Ordinarily this would provoke a sonnet, a sort of infra-meta-physical one, but I’ve been so preoccupied today with digging holes in the ground and schlepping stuff onto the boat that the Muse has abandoned me in disgust.

Still, one does occasionally look up, and say Wow, and make a little muffled obscure actio gratiarum.

Ginger on the house float. Only possible at high tide; at low, the float sits on the mud. Range is about ten feet hereabouts, depending on the vagaries of that most fickle Lady, da Moon. Ginger draws four and a half feet, so ten foot water is fine, but there’s not a lot of manoeuvring room. Catch a bad gust of wind, and we’d be on the rocks in no time. And the float and its pilings are not used to accommodating broad-beamed girls with Ginger’s… heft. Even creeping in catfoot, she swings some momentum. Displaces five tons or so. Kayaks are more the design target for this piece of infrastructure.

Baby tailing along behind the Ginge. Little Spice Girls reference there, for all you old-timers. Through the pretty waters of Townsend Gut.

Entrance to Townsend Gut (or today, the exit). You don’t want to get on this girl’s bad side.

Indiantown Island. As far as I am aware, no PC renaming is had in contemplation. There are Abenaki shell-middens behind that bluff on the right.

Ginger back on home base — I need to change the hailing-port lettering — and rather in need of a good tidying abovedecks.

And again, looking picturesque.