America’s Military Heroes Have All Discreetly Tugged It in a Port-A-Potty
The implied part of military history
I’m not a Graham Platner fan; I think he has bad ideas and a long history of being an edgelord asshole.1 Platner’s old social media posts are something close to a bottomless pit of douchey behavior — right-wing sources are currently going through his old posts like any of us rifling through our host’s medicine cabinet when we use the bathroom at someone else’s house. Platner very much reminds me of Grandpa Simpson in this clip:
But the seemingly-bottomless pit of idiotic Platner statements must not actually be bottomless, because right-wingers are now trying to make something of old Platner posts that are, IMHO, totally innocuous. The posts in question involve Platner joking about masturbating in a port-a-potty while serving in the Army in Afghanistan. These posts are different from other Platner posts partly because his is joking — this isn’t the by-now-familiar Platner thing where he responds to evidence of him being a total dickhead with “haha don’t you guys get satire?” But the other way these posts are different is that absolutely nothing has been revealed. Perhaps Platner jerked off in a port-a-potty while deployed…shouldn’t that be assumed? He did four tours, folks — that’s years. This country needs to elevate our debate, we have to talk about issues that matter, so let’s not get bogged down debating an obvious truth: America’s brave service men and women have been strangling their weasels and polishing their beans adjacent to the great battles of history for the past 250 years.
Did you ever wonder how anyone can summon the bravery to storm a pillbox? I have — when I watch the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, I’m at a loss to understand how anyone could muster the will to charge forward. But one theory that makes sense to me is that those guys had been stuck on transport ships and trying to summit those Gibraltar-esque 1940s British gals for God knows how long — they surely needed a place to “scrub the barnacles off the U-boat”, so to speak. And those German pillboxes had four walls and no windows…that could work. I’m not saying that’s the only reason our brave soldiers climbed the seawall and began rolling back fascism, but I will say that the “D” in “D-Day” could plausibly stand for “decompression”.
There is clear evidence throughout military history that soldiers were unclogging their muskets at every opportunity. What does virtually every letter home from the Civil War contain (besides language that would get a person banished to the Marianas Trench these days)? That’s right: A request for a picture of the soldier’s sweetheart! One grainy, 2”x3” plate of some stout farm wench wearing a wool dress cinched up to her eyebrows — that’s better than nothing! And sure, those soldiers didn’t write “I gotta bust one” — they wrote “Dearest Clementine, my heart years for you like a sacred flame upon the altar, each gentle breeze that blows through the trees doth seem to whisper your name, and though the world appears drained of color in your absence, the mere thought of you brightens the drab palate of my existence with a fervor seemingly summoned from the paintbrushes of all the great artists in history.” But that’s just 1863-speak for “My nads are gonna explode like grapeshot canisters — HELP!”
Did you know that during World War 2, the Army commissioned a weekly pinup magazine called Yank? That’s true, and…come on! YANK??? I know the Army had plausible deniability there — this was an era in which it was risque to say “coconuts” on the radio, after all — but…YANK??? I would sooner believe propaganda from William Joyce than believe that no-one picked up on the double entendre there. And speaking of propaganda: Japan had Tokyo Rose and Germany had Axis Sally because they knew that the mere sound of a woman’s voice would be enough to arm most soldiers’ weapons; that was true even if the voice was saying “Americans are a mongrel race inferior to pigs.”2 These guys were painting women on their airplanes, for God’s sake — even a cartoon woman covered in engine oil and bullet holes was enough to inspire them to fire off a few rounds.
I personally find none of this obviously-true history at all shameful or sordid. On the contrary, it’s a testament to the hardships the soldiers endured. For obvious reasons, we focus on soldiers who paid the ultimate price, but even the “lucky” ones suffered in countless ways. Those hardships came in many forms, but certainly one of them — an unspoken one — was only being able to milk your rooster behind a tree to two kinda-round rocks. And if the enemy showed up right as the Sonata was reaching its crescendo — so to speak — you’d better hope they kill you, because if you bust while staring into a Wehrmacht officer’s eyes, you’re probably better off dead than trying to unpack the psychological ramifications of all that. Politeness keeps us from openly discussing this hardship, but let it be known that when we talk of soldiers’ sacrifices, I take this bleak reality to be implied.
So: If Graham Platner jerked off to a crude drawing in an Afghan port-a-potty, that’s probably the most normal and honorable thing he’s ever done. That’s Platner at his finest — that’s the aspect of him I respect. And all the other soldiers who discreetly emptied their clips into the dirt so that their heads would be clear for battle deserve our respect, too. They did their duty…all of it. Including that part. And though we will probably never honor that element of their sacrifice with a statue — or better yet, a fountain — when exercising that particular element of the freedom they earned for us, I think we should all use our one free hand to salute.
I’d still vote for him, because Susan Collins never stands up to Trump when it matters. In a perfect world, Platner would win, vote against Trump’s nominees for two years, and then immediately retire and let someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing have the seat.
And actually, that kind of talk was probably exactly what a small percentage of the guys were looking for.