Graham Platner Is Staying in the Race

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNBC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. Since Donald Trump's populist rhetoric first began to resonate with voters, particularly disaffected white voters, the Democratic Party has been looking for candidates who could talk more convincingly about economic insecurity and other related issues. It's been an emphasis on people who seem to be outside the party establishment, particularly working people and military veterans too. Grand Platner checked a lot of those boxes. He had served in the Marines and in the Army, and coming home to Maine, he took over a small oyster farming business. Platner was recruited to run for the Senate seat that's been held for a long time by Susan Collins. But early in his campaign, the picture got a little complicated. The text that Platner had made over the years on Reddit and elsewhere began to surface, and you probably heard about this. He called police officers bastards and said victims of sexual assault should quote, take some responsibility for themselves. He used homophobic slurs, and he made remarks about black people, rural whites, kind of everybody. And one of his tattoos was said to resemble a Nazi symbol, though he points out that he didn't quite realize that when he got it. Platner apologized and he apologized repeatedly. He covered up the tattoo. But some progressive groups have said, maybe this guy is just not cut out for the job. Grand Platner's campaign will be among other things, an indicator of how much the rules of politics have changed, and not only in the MAGA movement. I spoke with Grand Platner last week. And from what I know, you were recruited to run for Senator. And what was happening? You were driving around in your car and some guy calls you up and say, because we want you to run for Senator, tell me the story. No, not quite. No. My wife and I were down in Brooklyn, Maine, where we shook oysters at the Brooklyn General Store. And we were driving home. It's about a little over an hour drive. So it was, it was like nine o'clock at night, and they got a phone call from a unknown number. And it's a gentleman asking, or asking if it's me, and I said, yes. And saying that they were at my mother's restaurant. They stopped in for dinner. And that they wanted to talk to me about a project to recruit a candidate in Maine to run for US Senate. And I've been engaged in a lot of community organizing. And through that, I've made lots of friends around the state in the organizing world. So I assumed that they were just calling to ask me for names. And so I was like, that's late at night. We can't. So if you want to come over tomorrow morning before I go out on the boat for coffee, that sounds good. And they agree. And what time do you go out on the boat? Well, I wanted to come over at 430. But my wife told me, my wife told me that was too early to invite people up at the house. So I told them six, I think, or five thirty, something like that. So they came over and made it clear that they were part of this project with the main AFL CIO, a couple of labor union groups trying to recruit a candidate. And I started listing off names. And essentially they were like, no, you don't understand where we think you would be a good candidate. And my wife and I laughed and said, that's insane because it is. We make $60,000 a year. And the Senate is not for people like us, or at least we don't really, you know, I'd never thought of running for the United States Senate. But then essentially they came back with the harder sell and an idea about how this could actually look. And at that point we decided that it was the right thing to do. Tell me a little bit about your political experience. You refer to community organizing. You know, you're working a long day. Tell me about the time that you spent, you know, outside the work day and what you were doing. It's farming as farming as farming. So you've got your in season where you're out, like for me, I'm on the boat. Pretty much all day long, all summer. It's very busy. In the winter months, starting after December through April, I tend to have a bit more free time. And in that time, I put time into organizing around mostly local economic justice issues or social justice issues. And it's what I've been kind of at the extent of my politics outside of local governance, where I've been the chair of the planning board and also as a harbor master. And those are those are areas that I enjoyed thoroughly. I mean, it's it is something to be able to write policy, implement it, and then essentially see the outcome of it within a week's time. That only at the local level do I think you actually get to engage with things like that. So. Graham, tell me a little bit about you for a very brief time. We're at a pretty distinguished prep school. Very briefly. Didn't last very long. Yeah, what happened? I went to a very small rural middle school. And my mother wanted me to have a better education, I suppose. So she had me apply to a bunch of these like New England prep schools. We got a really good financial aid package from Hachkis in Connecticut. Right. So she sent me down there. I didn't want to go. I went down and just had a very good time. I went down and just had a, I'd never been around that level of wealth before. I felt out of place. And then I figured out very quickly that if I didn't go to class, then I got to go home. And that is exactly what happened. That was the good question you drew. Much to my mother's sugar. How does she react? Poorly. She was very, I did not get to go on the family vacation that year. I had to stay home with my dad. How did they react to your decision to go into the military and tell me about that? Yeah. My dad became a teacher so he could not get drafted during Vietnam. He thought the war in Iraq was deeply stupid. I did too, to be fair. So he thought my joining the Marine Corps was just a, or enlisting, was a, was not a good use of my time. And he was afraid I was going to go fight and die in a stupid war. Like he had seen friends from his generation. Can you look back on it? Why did you go into the military? If you thought the war was stupid, it was just a thing that a young man can do to rebel in some way? Since my earliest memories, I wanted to be a soldier. I grew up loving military history. I did civil war reenacting. I really, and I, and I, and like, I don't know why. I don't have an answer. I think about this fairly often. It was just something that spoke to me. I mean, for me, it was, it was a, it was an innovative, inevitability. After graduation, I was working for the Appalachian Mountain Club. I'd spent two years in a professional trail crew in the White Mountains. So I went back to work for the AMC for the summer. And then I deferred a year to go to college to keep my parents happy. But I knew what I was doing. I knew that I wasn't going to go. How did the reality of Iraq and being a soldier match with what you had imagined? So I had, I went into it. I think in many ways more informed and already fairly cynical than most. I, I read a lot of literature from the Vietnam War in high school. One of my favorite books was The Bright Shining Lie by, uh, the El Shining Lie. Yeah. Um, about John Paul van, who was a very competent and, and great soldier who then found himself in a war that he thought was being fought, and fought poorly. Sure. So when I got to Iraq, early on, I thought it was working. I, I mean, I remember coming home from my first deployment and telling people that like, I was wrong because I've been against the war. Uh, and I was wrong that I was wrong. I was in fact, right the first time around. Um, but I, I really believe what I, what I interacted with was what I thought were tactical failures. I thought that we weren't doing the thing properly. I, I really believed in, in the concept of counterinsurgency by the time I got out of the Marine Corps in08, Patreus and, and General Mattis had written the counterinsurgency manual. There was this whole like, dream of thinking that the United States military really need to focus on this counterinsurgency concept. So I started reading all the old writings from the French and the British and Malayah. And I really believed, truly believed that we had just been doing it wrong. That it wasn't that it as a concept was a failure. And it's so funny now looking back on it because you can read guys in Vietnam having the exact same realization and then coming to the exact same realization that I eventually did too, which is that, it's not a tactical failure. This whole thing is a failed concept. It can't work. It's strategically. It's strategically it's not going to, it's not going to work. But, but you know, when you're young and you're engaged with something and you believe, and you want to believe in it, you want to make it work, um, I, I really, I threw my heart and soul into it. Graham, you know, I was thinking about you in the last couple of days knowing that we'd be talking. And I was this, this past Sunday was just a miserable day. You know, the news from Providence, Rhode Island and then the news from Sydney, Australia. And then the day ending with the murder of Rob Reiner and his, and his, his wife. And then what followed is the president of the United States issuing a truth social post that just betrayed. I mean, it wasn't surprising in a sense, which is part of what's so awful about it. Yeah. And it, it just, the idea that somebody holding that sense of responsibility would say something so morally bankrupt and, and worse. But we also know that human beings say some pretty stupid things over time. And you've had to contend with this. You know, your comments on Reddit from the past, um, came up, uh, issue of your tattoo became infamous because of the link to a Nazi symbol. And you've apologized, uh, repeatedly. How do you view the notion of what mistakes people can make and then still hold positions of real responsibility like Senate? Well, I think one, did you do it when you were in power? Mm-hmm. I mean, I think that that's a really important thing. But if someone knows that they're, that what they say has so much gravity because other people are paying attention, like what do you, how do you use that? How do you act in that manner? I, I do think that if we're going to, I'm an elder millennial. I'm 41. If we're going to rehash everyone's social media posts from their existence, people from my generation, I don't know what politics is going to look like. People, uh, will just never, we'll never get around to the policy part. So I think that there is a, I mean, there are, if someone spends 20 years being an avowed white supremacist, yeah, that's probably a sign. Uh, if someone over the course of their time on the internet uses slurs or stupid language and then ceases to do so, probably a sign of growth, probably a sign of how many of us change over. What do you, when you were making these comments on Reddit and how do you look back on them? I might late 20s, early 30s. And, uh, I mean, okay, I was, is that not old enough to know better? Well, I mean, I, it, why get it, which comment do you mean? I made a lot of comments that I'm not, that I'm not, that I'm, I'm not like ashamed of. It's not, it's not as though I have this ream of comments in which I look back and I'm like, oh my god, I was a terrible person back then. So I, I guess, I'm, I'm comments about victims of sexual assault, for example. Yeah, well, one that comment, I made that right when I got out of the infantry and all the, I mean, I don't know if you've read it, but I sure have. Yeah. So the comment was is that I said that people, men and women, uh, shouldn't get too drunk and, uh, should take some personal responsibility. Uh, I also said that sexual assault didn't occur on the military as much as, as people said it did. Um, it does. I learned that very quickly. I came out of the infantry at the time it was a male only organization. I never interacted with it in the service. So I, for me, those governments were very much informed by my immature mindset coming out of my frankly, twenties in the combat infantry. Uh, I then very quickly met people and had conversations and realized that I was very incorrect. Uh, sexual assault occurred often in the military and was often covered up. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, those comments I made, uh, were at a time of my life where I was, yeah, I came out of the combat infantry. When you decided to run for the Senate, which is a gigantic leap for anybody, much less somebody who hasn't been in politics for a long time or conventional politics, did you think to yourself, I'm going to have a problem because of these past comments? No. Uh, if you, if you believe in transformational politics, which I do, you need to believe in the ability for people to change, for people to grow. If we are all just ossified in who we are right now, then there is no point to this. If we can't ever give people the ability to change minds, if we can't give people the ability to grow as human beings, then we're all in the world just stuck. I mean, what we also know this isn't true. People grow all the time. And for me, this as uncomfortable as it is and personally, unenjoyable to have to talk about stupid things that suddenly, internet 13 years ago, it also allows me to publicly model something. I think it's really important, which is that a lot of us go through transitions in life. A lot of us change our minds, have new experiences, meet new people, are informed by those experiences and come to different conclusions or politics change or views on the world change. And again, while it's not fun to do this for me, it also really gives me the opportunity to very publicly show that you can believe things once and then you can over time. You believe other things, you can change your language, change the way you think about stuff, change the way you talk. And I think that's a good thing to model, I think. And that that isn't something that is, that you should be ashamed of. You should be able to be proud of the fact that you can turn into a different kind of person. You can think about the world in a different way. I'm speaking with Graham Platner, who's running for a sentencing in the state of Maine. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker radio hour. So where are you? We're at Radio Lab. We go places. Writing in an elevator. From her bathroom. Walking through, shin-length grass. Are we on a boat? No, but we're going to be in the Mibia. On Mars. In my closet. Pachypsy New York. To Kolkata. Inside the loop. Wow. And everywhere. You guys are going to have lobster to eat. No, I'm just. You will keep your own leg. I'll do my part. I'll do my part. Radio Lab. Listen, wherever you get podcasts. This is the New Yorker radio hour. I'm David Remnick. And I've been speaking with Graham Platner of Maine. Platner is a Democrat and running for the Maine Senate seat held for 28 years by Susan Collins, the Republican. Now Democrats think that seat could be theirs in the next election if the right candidate runs against her. Janet Mills, the state's popular governor, is also running in the primary. Mills is 77 and considered more of a centrist. It's early to cite polls, but at this point, it looks like either Mills or Platner would be in a tight race in the general election against Susan Collins. I'll continue my conversation now with Graham Platner. I want to get into how you see the world. And I want to get a sense of how you see the Democratic Party these days and what you intend to do to help transform it. I think the Democratic Party today's biggest problem is that there is an element of it that has become as attached to corporate interests as the Republican Party is. And by the way, this isn't just like my opinion. I mean, everybody thinks this. Every, every, every, will you hear people say things like, I don't vote because it doesn't matter. It's the same. All that kind of stuff. And I don't, I don't agree with that. I mean, there's a reason I'm running as a Democrat. There's a reason I'm running. If I thought that none of this, if there was no hope, I wouldn't do this. I have an immense amount of hope. However, I do think that there is an innate contradiction in trying to be a party that represents working people, representing those that struggle, those that labor, those that are often exploited or taken advantage of. It is impossible to represent their interests while also trying to represent the interests of those that exploit them. I think that that is a fundamental contradiction that you cannot get past. And my problem is that the Democratic Party used to be the party that represented those people. It was the party of labor unions. It was the party of thinking of large structural change that brought about things like so security or Medicaid and Medicare. It was the party that understood that protecting working people was going to require some form of imposition on those with wealth and power. When do you think the Democratic Party, in your view, abandoned that? In the 1990s. In the clenicment. I think the lesson that was learned after Reagan was that, and it was the, I believe it was the wrong lesson, but it's other people can disagree. The lesson that was learned was that, oh, the money matters. And we do have to kind of lean into this government's bad. We should lean into the kind of deregulation, corporate side of things. And in doing so, the party sold out organized labor. And the party in many ways sold out that kind of, that the movement side of our politics. Did you feel that Barack Obama, for example, was in the same camp as Bill Clinton in that way? I think so. I mean, 2008 financial crisis happens, right? There was a moment. I mean, and Obama's on record saying this. There was a moment where there were two options. We give money to homeowners or we give money to the banks. And we chose to give the money to give the money to rescue the banks. To rescue the banks. And that was an option. And for me, that's just kind of indicative of this creeping influence in the Democratic party. And this is why I think why we often find ourselves in this weird, everybody so confused as to what we're trying to do. Because we go from the, we have Zora Mandani on one end and Joe Manchin on the other. The argument which you well know is that the only kind of Democrat that's going to win in West Virginia is a Joe, Joe Manchin Democrat. Otherwise you're going to get a, you know, a mega Republican in West Virginia. My counter to that is that I think you can win someone in West Virginia if you run on working class populism. But Joe Manchin also very much did not represent the, I mean, he's the reason that we didn't get or we couldn't renew the child tax credit. And then we just chose not to, not to go, not to continue doing that. That's not the behavior of someone that's representing the interests of working people. Do you, are you getting a lot of love from the leader of the Senate caucus from Chuck Schumer? No, I am not. How would you describe the lack of love there? It's just been a lack of anything. I've made it very clear that I would love to have a conversation, would love to talk about what we're trying to do here. No one's reached out. We're almost five months into this thing. Not a single phone call, not a single email from the, from the national party organization. From the, yeah, from either Chuck Schumer or from the DSCC and the Senate. The Senate or you'll campaign committee. I continue to not have been contacted. Governor Janet Mills has decided to run and you've got a hot race there. Is she getting the love from the Democratic Party establishment? Well, the DSCC set up to fundraise with her the day after she announced. So my assumption is yes. That would be, that would be. It looks like Schumer and the, and the, and the DSCC is going to endorse Janet Mills in the, in the primary and you've got endorsements from Bernie Sanders and Rokana and others. How does that look on the ground in Maine? What are Maine Democrats actually feeling? How are the polls looking for you? Where are you having success? Where are you having difficulties? To be frank, the, the polls continue to be great for us. And on, in that mirrors what I feel on the ground. Like there is a, people are fed up. People are disgusted with the system as it stands. And they don't think that the answers are going to come from establishment politicians who've been chosen by Washington DC. How will you run against Susan Collins, presumably, she's the Republican nominee. And she's, she's been in that office for a very long time and incumbents have all kinds of advantages. Essentially the exact same way. We are building a campaign that is focused on field organizing. We're focused on building the ground game. We've held 35 town halls around the state of Maine the past couple months. We've talked to tens of thousands of Maynors already. We have 12,000 volunteers. Maine's not a big state, but it is geographically, but it doesn't have a lot of people. And these people are from all over the state. So for me, this is very much a much, it's a larger project than merely a Senate seat. This is about rebuilding organization. In communities, organization and cooperation between existing groups like labor unions, community organizations, the party itself, we re, in my opinion, we need to reconnect with that kind of politics, the politics of movement building. And that speaks to what people are feeling right now. People, myself included, I mean, why I'm doing this. We feel unrepresented. What do you want to get done in the Senate? What does say three top policies that you would concentrate on? Because you can't concentrate on everything. No, continue pushing for universal healthcare, Medicare for all. We also need to restrict the ability of senators and congresspeople to trade stocks and bonds. It's essentially legalized corruption and it needs to end. And we also need to fix the tax code because we cannot continue to tax wages at a higher rate than we tax wealth. That's a math equation that when you run to the end, it's easy to see who winds up with all the money. So those, I think those three things are going to be priorities for me legislatively. I know Medicare for all is going to be a heavy lift. The other two, I think, are going to be a much easier lift. I mean, we've already got some Republicans who are happy to come over on the stocks and bonds issue. Josh Hawley put something forward not too long ago. So I think there's definitely opportunity for wins there. Now, you've run an ad talking about how you refuse to accept money from A-PAC. Are there any other groups that you won't take money from? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Fossil fuel packs. I mean, frankly, any large corporate pack, any dark money pack, we don't take money from them. All the money we're taking in is individual donations. We will take money from labor packs, any kind of pack that exists that's kind of, you know, not part of the corporate dark money apparatus, but that's it. So we need to know where the money comes from. That's important for us. I want to ask you a couple of questions in view of your military experience. We had former Secretary of Defense and former head of the CIA, Leon Panetta on the show recently. And he said this about having thousands of troops stationed off the coast of Venezuela. He said, we're putting our men and women in uniform and harm his way. We have to assure them that the orders we give them are not going to violate the law. What we're going to, in fact, defend our national security in a way that is not legally questionable. What do you make of this, especially coming from someone who saw America's forever wars really up close? I agree wholeheartedly. I mean, at this point, what we're seeing in Venezuela is just a rehash of what we saw with Iraq, but somehow even worse and even dumber, which is magnificent to behold. I was even worse and even dumber. I mean, with Iraq, we at least had, I know, 10 years of previous engagement. We had UN hearings. It was at least this sort of well crafted propaganda machine that a lot of people ate up. This is just laughable. We're just murdering people. I think the death count now is up to 95. We're just murdering people. No declaration of war, no concept of why this is a war. It's all happening, frankly, because the Republicans know that their policies are failing. The economy is getting worse. People are not happy. The best thing to do is just drum up a war for political purposes. I think a lot of people can see it, including a lot of Republicans. That's what I mean by dumber. It's less sophisticated. The run up to the Iraq war, I think, was a sophisticated operation in propaganda. This is just, they realize they have the power and they can do it. So they're doing it. And that's it. How long were you in the military? Active. Eight years, though. Well, I was four years in the Marine Corps, four years in the United States Army National Guard. With that experience behind you, you've seen a lot of military leaders on the ground and you've experienced them from afar as well. And you look at Pete Hagset, who's the Secretary of Defense, or he calls himself Secretary of War. What view do you have of him? I view a guy who is deeply insecure about his military service. Mardi B in secure about his military service. I don't know. I'm always curious about that. I mean, look, he was an infantry officer. He served at Guantanamo and I think he did a deployment to Iraq. Not every deployment to Iraq is the same as other deployments to Iraq. I'm not sure what his was like. But you definitely get the feeling that this is someone who is trying to make up for something, is trying to be this like vision of masculinity and warrior prowess that he frankly does not represent at all. If he did, why didn't he stay in? Why didn't he continue? Why didn't he go be a special forces officer? Why? There were other places in the service to go to really embody that and he didn't. He got out and became a talking head on television. What was your deployment like? I did four. Two of them were fairly violent. One of them was kind of violent. What does that mean? Well, that's a good question. I was in Ramadi in 2006 with Keelah Company, Thurbatayan, Ipanates. That was a very, very violent deployment. We were the pretty bombat. You were in active combat. We were at the government center in downtown Ramadi. It was a place that was the well, it was the government center for Al-Ambar Province. You had a grievance with the coalition or the Iraqi government. You came down and expressed it generally using direct fire RPGs or suicide car bombs. You were in the line of fire for an extended period of time. I was a machine gunner. I usually say I saw more combat than most less than some. There are currently 20 members of the Senate who are veterans. What do you think you all could be doing if you, assuming you get elected and you don't well mind? What should you be pushing for in terms of legislation for soldiers and veterans? I think the number one thing we have to do is claw war powers back from the executive branch. I mean, this is something that is... This has been going on for decades. Decades. As ridiculous as what's happening in Venezuela is right now, we have to remind ourselves that this is the outcome of Congress abdicating its role in war making. We have handed off more and more power to the executive branch over decades. Now we're at a point where there's just dropping bombs and people's boats. That shouldn't even be an option, but it is because we've let it become one. I'm a firm believer that we need to be passing legislation that is going to make clear that congressional input is necessary for military action. We cannot continue to go down this road. It's a constitutional duty. The Constitution lays out clearly who is supposed to be in charge of war powers. It is the bodies that represent the American people most directly, which is Congress. We have a fair number of senators and Congress people that come on this show. I invariably asked them about... If this job is so awful and they all complain about it, they're one of many, they can't get anything done, there's no party discipline, there's a list of frustrations, there's endless. That... No one seems to want to give it up. Very, very few. Very, very few. In the Republican Party, if you look at it and the MAGA movement and how it has pushed people into being something they might not have been ten years ago, they're willing to give up some chunk of their soul. What makes you believe you can come to Washington, put on a suit and a tie if that's what you choose to do? I will, unless you're not going to go the federal government room. Well, I mean, I want... I would like to be a senator that accomplishes things and to do that, you have to be on the floor at some point. There's no reference. But what makes you think that you as one of a hundred people and as a junior senator will be able to get much done? Because I think we are coming into a different era in American politics. I think we are entering an era of an... I think we've already entered, actually, an era of American politics that in many ways is going to look a lot more like that of the late 19th and early 20th century than the last 50 years. But we're entering it into an era of politics of power, an understanding of what power actually is. It's not merely knowing the rulebook. It's about understanding how to organize people and how to utilize a relationship between activists and organization on the ground and the more structural levers of power. Where does Trump and Trumpism fit into your view of these eras of American politics? Is this a post-Trump era where did Trump in his own way exploit that? No, I think Trump exploited it. The reason for it is much like the end of the gilded age, there is an immense amount of working-class angst in this country. And for good reason. This is something that I find very telling. I go around the state of man. And what are people talking about to you? Independence, Republicans, Democrats. If you ask any of them, do you think you live in a political or economic system that benefits you? Nobody says yes. What would they have said 20 years ago? I think 20 years ago they probably would have said yes. Most of them might have said yes. What changed? What changed is the fact that life got harder down here and we're also witnessing the ultra wealthy and corporate interests consolidate wealth and power in ways that we can hardly comprehend. I mean, everybody understands that everything is owned by five companies now. People know that. And go around, ask the average person, they know. People understand that the reason that their healthcare is collapsing here in rural Maine is because of corporate greed. But people are getting denied because an AI program gets run and tells them a life-saving procedure isn't covered. Meanwhile, the people that run those systems go home with millions of dollars. What changes that we can see it? What changes that us down here in the real world were not idiots. The will has not been pulled over our eyes and we're angry about it. And what Trump did, as Trump came along and he told people that what they knew was true was true. Which is that they are being robbed. That the system is not representing them. He's giving them all the wrong answers. He's laying the blame on the feet of all the wrong people. And those of us who don't agree with anything Donald Trump does, except for maybe a little bit of nationalizing of some companies. Public money gets invested into a company. Public ownership should come with it. It seems fair. But besides that, I don't agree with very much. However, I do understand why people voted for them. Like my neighbors voted for them. And I get it. They're pissed because they feel like this whole thing does not represent them. Have they stayed with them? And it doesn't. It's cracking. Like the rising costs are just impossible to ignore. There's going to be an element of the base that's never going to leave them. But I think there are a lot of working people right now. They wanted, they voted for change. She was a change candidate. Change did not come. Not in the way they wanted. I mean, we are watching our healthcare system in rural Maine collapse at the moment. Hospitals are closing as we speak. Services are diminishing. People's paychecks are going less far in the housing crisis continues to be a problem in a rural state like this, which is wild. When you look at it systemically, do you think the problem is distorted capitalism somehow, or is it natural to capitalism? And do you consider yourself a democratic socialist like Mom Donnie or Bernie Sanders? I don't consider myself a democratic socialist. I do say that I certainly have a critique of capitalism. Would it be possible to have a viable political career in the state of Maine if you did call yourself a democratic socialist? No, probably. It would. But it's not one of my politics. What I would say is that we need to engage with our economic system in a way that does not allow the worst version of it to run rampant, which is essentially where we are right now. Whether it's through taxation, whether it's through regulatory structures, whether it's through anti-monopoly law, which we already have on the books, we just choose not to enforce. These are mechanisms that we need to be utilizing to make our system not be one that is purely built on the exploitation of working people, which is what we have right now. Tell me about your own life. You say you and your wife have an income of $60,000? Yeah, roughly in the aggregate. What's your experience of not to put a two-fine point on it? What's your experience of being screwed by the system in recent years? When I got out of the service, I was going to college on the GI Bill. I went to George Washington, on DC. There was a moment where I, at the time, I still wanted to go work for an intelligence service, or maybe federal law enforcement. That was my plan. Although because of my combat service, I became quite cynical and jaded and began to not want to do that anymore. So I was in school. And then living in Washington, DC, I just became close enough to the power. I saw, I met people, I had interactions, and I was like, you're the ones I fought a war for. You guys sent, oh, I mean, the fact that like these people didn't seem to care about the human cost. To them, this was all political stuff. They were just making decisions based upon like, well, this might be good for us in next election or something like that. And I'm like, people are dying. We're killing people. I mean, this is not like, the toll is not, it's not theoretical. The human cost is real. And yet in Washington, nobody seems to think like that. Well, there's some. But like, on the whole, it really does seem that like all of this is just being become so academic. And when you got back to Maine and started building your life there, what was your experience as a veteran? Oh, no. And so this is where, this is why my politics are the way that they are. The reason my life is the way that it is is because I am lucky enough to be a disabled combat veteran. I get health care. I don't think about it. I don't deal with insurance companies. I don't deal with copays or premiums when I need help. When I just, when something feels a little funny, I go to the doctor and I do not think about the cost. It is provided to me by the VA. And if it wasn't for that support, I would not have been able to build the life I lived. But because I didn't have to go get a job that was going to provide me with health insurance, so I could get treated for things, it gave me an immense amount of freedom. It gave me the freedom to take some time and think about what kind of life do I actually want to live. And I found that I wanted to work on the ocean. And then I got to put the time into working on the sea. I became a diver. I became an oyster farmer. I got to learn the skills, how to fix outboard engines, how to do fiberglass work, how to dive in the cold and murky waters of the Gulf of Maine. Technical skills, real things that take a lot of time and commitment, quite frankly, to mastering. I got to do that because the VA gave me health care. And I look around at a community that I'm from, where I was born and raised, full of extremely hard working creative people who don't get to start those businesses, who don't get to figure out how they want to live, who don't get this kind of freedom to live a life that fulfills them, that brings them dignity. Instead, they are stuck just scraping by, trying to make it, trying to afford rent. In your area, what does scraping buy look like? I have a friend of mine. She works three jobs. Her rent is 60% of her monthly income. Jesus. Her rent just went up because rent everywhere is going up. But the reason she told me is because she's thinking about moving. The problem is she doesn't know where to move to. Where would you go to? Exactly. I mean, this is like, this is Eastern Maine. I mean, this is a, we're a poor community. There are already not a lot of options. And the fact that people here are struggling and can't make it. Like where does somebody with that kind of income go? Where else in the state or the country is she going to go? And more importantly, why should she have to go anywhere? This is where she's from. This is her home. And I refuse to believe that I've watched people in my community watch their material conditions deteriorate at the exact same time that we watched Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk exist. I refuse to believe that these two things are not connected. I'm sorry. I just can't, I fundamentally cannot believe that I'm watching my community suffer and become harder and harder to live in for working people. While we watch the richest people in the history of people exist, those two things are not disconnected. Grand Platinum, thank you so much. Thank you, David. I really appreciate it. Grand Platinum is running for the Senate seat currently held by Susan Collins. He's a veteran of the Army and the Marine Corps and he runs an oyster farm in the state of Maine. Now are you the kind of oyster guy who is so sick of oysters he can't stand the side of him or do you eat him all the time? No, I eat him all the time. Straight up. Okay, no cocktail sauce bullshit. No, no. The cocktail sauce is heresy. I agree. I will allow occasionally maybe a spits of lemon or some minionette, minionette can be quite nice. This is the New Yorker radio hour with more to come. From WQXR and Carnegie Hall comes classical music happy out. A new podcast hosted by me, ManiX. Each episode will speak with a special guest about their lives, listen to musical gems, answer your classical queries and take part in playful musical games. So grab a drink and press play on the new podcast celebrating our love for all things classical. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is the New Yorker radio hour, I'm David Remnick. Old age is no joke, but it can feel like one. You look everywhere for your glasses until your wife points out that you're wearing them. I'm reading from a piece by Calvin Tompkins published in this week's New Yorker and is called Becoming a Centenarian. He goes on, I turn 100 this year. People act as though this is an achievement and I suppose it is sort of. Nobody in my family has lived this long and I've been lucky. I'm still in pretty good health, no wasting diseases or Alzheimer's and friends and strangers comment on how young I look, which cues me to cite the three ages of man, youth, maturity and you look great. It was a piece of fiction. Calvin Tompkins, tad to his friends, first contributed to the New Yorker when he was a journalist of 32. He contributed short pieces for a while, but over as many decades at the New Yorker, tad developed a specialty, writing about visual artists. Not so much as a critic, but as both a master of the profile form and as an endlessly curious viewer, always eager to understand what drives an artist, what makes an artist original. tad Tompkins practices the form at a level that nobody else can touch. I knew nothing about contemporary art. I had not intended to write about art or artists. It just happened that way. It sort of took hold of me. The early 60s. It was a very interesting moment in contemporary art. There had been a long jam with abstract expressed and the critics thought this was what art could be and was. The new work that was coming out of Rochdenberg and Cage and of course, Dusha, I had the feeling that the period we were in was very much like it must have been in Paris in the 20s. His first of these profiles was of the sculptor Jean Tanglee in 1962. Tanglee had recently done his first piece in the US, Amage to New York. A crazy, huge, unbelievable machine with many moving parts. The whole purpose, as he said, was to destroy itself in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. The idea that art could be that funny and that destructive, just thrilled by you. And then in fairly quick succession, I did John Cage, Bob Rochdenberg, Murse Cunningham, Namjoon Baik. Now what's extraordinary is that Tomkins' fascination with artists didn't end with the great men of his own generation. He kept going to shows over and over, meeting young artists, asking questions and writing profiles. In recent years, he's been writing about people whose influence in the art world is just peeking now. Simone Lee, Salmon Tour, the experimental video artist, Ryan Tracartin. Almost a year ago, as Tomkins turned 99, he profiled Rashid Johnson, who's about half his age. Tad has never lost his passion for the new, for the thrill and risk of starting over again and again. I don't know what I'm doing. I never have known what I'm doing. It's writing game. You can't. There's no lessons that are of any use at all. You just have to keep trying. Keep pushing out the words. This year, Tad Tomkins decided to chronicle the experience of turning 100, and it's in the same year as the New Yorker magazine itself turned 100. I'm starting a month and a half in, he wrote in February, because the journal idea didn't come to me until yesterday. January was a preview of the next four years, which may well end up being the worst in American history. But Tad goes on to say, I'm not going to spend much energy groaning about Trumpery in these pages. Plenty of capable people do that every day, and I don't have the time. This has been from Sydney, Australia, to Providence, Rhode Island, to Los Angeles, a week of misery, of tragedy. The 100th birthday of a wonderful person like Calvin Tomkins does too little to erase that, but I do think reading his diary is because it's so full of life, so full of decency and character, a small inspiration of the kind that we all need. You can find becoming a centenarian at New Yorker.com. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbis of Tunearts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnell, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Summer, with guidance from Emily Boateen and assistance from Michael May, David Gabel, Alex Barish, Victor Guan and Alejandra Decke. We had assistance from Jamie York and special thanks to Paul Moclin for his interviews with Calvin Tomkins. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. Hi, I'm Rebecca Ford, Senior Awards correspondent at Vanity Fair and co-host of Little Gold Men. Oscar season is upon us. Little Gold Men takes you behind the scenes of the race for the biggest prize in Hollywood. There's a hundred wrestlers in the room, but only one can be Oscar nominated. Whether you're a movie lover or an industry buff, Little Gold Men for Vanity Fair has everything you need to know about this year's Oscar race. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.