beach and fun

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

His supposed principles are most obvious with his support of Graham Platner, the Senate candidate Sanders endorsed in Maine and has refused to abandon through a Totenkopf tattoo modeled on an SS insignia and a New York Times report in which multiple women described disturbing behavior, including an accusation of rape. Sanders waved off the tattoo as a distraction from "one or two more important issues" and asked the country for "a little bit of forgiveness." A Jewish senator campaigning for a man with Nazi imagery on his chest has no standing to lecture anyone about principles. It is all politics and Sanders pivots his towards where the wind is blowing. 

Picture a young socialist challenging him the way DSA candidates now challenge every establishment Democrat: career politician, out of touch, wealthy, doesn't represent the people anymore — the standard toolkit, and every word of it fits his record. Thirty-five years in federal office, a net worth in the millions, multiple properties, a movement he built now being primaried from further left by people who consider him a relic of the system he claims to be fighting. An AOC figure would eat him for lunch.

He wouldn't even need to imagine what that looks like. Scott Wiener already lived it. Wiener had called Israel's campaign in Gaza a genocide, voted against military aid, and stepped down as co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus to appease exactly this crowd. None of it mattered. Activists chased him out of San Francisco's Trans March, screaming about his "Zionist handlers" and his "tainted bloodline," days after another activist cornered him at a bar and demanded he say "Free Palestine" on camera. Total capitulation bought him nothing, because the target was never his positions. It was that he's a Jew who hadn't disappeared.

Sanders, for all his purported principles, did not say a word in Wiener's defense. Because if he would, the same machine he helped build that attacks a young gay Jew with an impeccable progressive record would go after an older wealthy Jew in a nanosecond. He knows that better than most, because the knives have already come out for him.

When the socialists Sanders supports today inevitably turn on him tomorrow,  the country he's spent a career denouncing won't be there to save him. The Jewish state that he regularly demonizes, though, would welcome him.