CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Platner’s Critics Kept Attacking the Messenger While Ignoring His Message

Photograph Source: m Spiess – CC BY 3.0

I appended the following paragraph to the incomplete ending of this article.  It speaks for itself:  

I stopped working on this piece at this point when news of the rape allegation broke and Platner suspended his campaign.  There’s an abundance of reporting and commentary on this allegation available on the internet, and I will not go into its merits here; my own opinion is that this was the ‘kill shot.’

I stopped working on this piece at this point when news of the rape allegation broke and Platner suspended his campaign.  There’s an abundance of reporting and commentary on this allegation available on the internet, and I will not go into its merits here; my own opinion is that this was the ‘kill shot.’

At that stage, this was still work in progress and – if you have a chance to read it – should be read as such.  In places, it was not even ready for polishing, the sequencing and transitions needing attention to more clearly link the diverse themes I was addressing.  That said, there is still I believe much of value in this effort, not least is bringing Graham Platner’s ptsd more centrally into the conversation; it was an area in which, on close observation, I felt the campaign had ignored to its detriment, an argument for another occasion.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

Graham Platner, 41, typically identified as a combat veteran and oyster farmer,  is the Maine Democratic Party candidate who hopes to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins in the midterm elections this November.   Platner has been diagnosed with combat-related ptsd (post-traumatic stress disorder).

 In “The Broken Veteran Excuse” (The Atlantic, June 14, 2026), Mike Nelson accuses Platner and his “surrogates” of exploiting that diagnosis to cover “a decade-long trail of questionable behavior,” to include having once had his chest inked with a Totenkopf, the ‘death head’ – skull and crossbones in the vernacular – adopted as a symbol by Nazi SS units during World War Two.

Nelson, like so many other pundits and commentators who’ve piled on Platner about his “trail of questionable behavior,” puts a special emphasis on this tattoo to disqualify the candidate.  Platner has denied knowledge of the Nazi link to the tattoo, and has stated repeatedly that he abhors Nazi ideology.  A Marine buddy got a matching tatt during the same drunken episode in 2007 on shore leave in Croatia because he thought “it was cool” and they wanted to do “something to commemorate their comrades who’d fallen in Iraq.”  Platner, was 23 at the time, and had already served multiple combat tours.

I will take issue with Nelson on a number of points, somewhat circuitously; first, his play of the goodie-goodie card.

Viewed in wider contexts, social and cultural, that skull and cross bones is on the costumes donned by virtually all the child pirates on Halloween Eve.   When some of these boy pirates transitioned to members of the Hell’s Angels near where I lived in the East Village in the seventies that symbol was still cherished among them.  In contemporary movies or series in which biker gangs are portrayed, the presence of similar regalia is not uncommon.

The juvenile delinquent was a stock character of the fifties from Blackboard Jungle to Rebel Without a Cause.  Here’s one origin story that long predates that fifties’ social archetype: For a quarter century, beginning in the 1880s, tales of a mischievous boy – indeed “a vicious little swaggerer”  who carried practical jokes to an extreme – were consumed with relish by a wide readership in the U.S.   On my own grandfather’s bookshelf when he died in the mid-fifties there was a copy of Peck’s Bad Boy.

“The “bad boy” represents an iconic figure in American culture (and I’ll assume in cultures globally as well).   We identify these errant protagonists one dimensionally and diametrically.  The “ bad boys stand in contrast to the “good boys.”  One insidious fallacy embedded in the smears against Platner is that rebellious boys and young men, if not the rule, are also hardly the exception.  As adults they adapt in their fashion.  That’s all commonplace.  The great change is that what was once shared by only a small circle might now be displayed to an infinitely larger universe in the digital world.  We all live in glass houses.  So, on that score, the self-righteous goodie goodies, indeed the whited sepulchers we are warned of in Matthew 23:27, can go stuff it.

Veterans with ptsd aren’t broken; and neither is Graham Platner.  We suffer from a mental health condition that is not infrequently a result of experiences in warfare.  Platner sticks mostly to his own story, and when he speaks of other vets, it’s not around their ptsd but as a defender of the Veterans Administration against Trump’s predatory depredations.  Nelson nonetheless manufactures a fantasy, and expresses it in apoplectic prose, that Platner’s discussion of his flaws in the context of ptsd is “insulting to veterans…[who] despite… their wartime experience” not only return from combat without that diagnosis, but “are among our nation’s most accomplished, ethical, hardworking , and patriotic citizens and leaders.”

 Ten-Hut! ........

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