Celebrity

Today's Scott Brown is tomorrow's Tiger Woods.

Politics

Scott Brown, the faux-commoner, nude poser and shill for the national Right Wing, is now the U.S. Senator-elect from Massachusetts. This is the political game in 2010 in America. The Democrat establishment has reaped the returns of its naivete and smugness. Obama is not the Messiah of a New Age. This is a good lesson for them and for those on the Left.

The battles for gay rights, universal rights to health care, just immigration policy and a peace-oriented foreign policy are still undecided. The powers of violence, fundamentalist hatred, greed and sexism are still alive and well in America. Those powers will pepper the airwaves with reactionary propaganda. They will spout liberal views in public and fund reactionary candidates in private. They will spur the resentful to the polls in January sleet in once-progressive Massachusetts. Politics are duplicitous. Nature of the game.

While I find the arrogance of Mr. Brown's duplicity particularly distasteful, I welcome the potential effect of this wake-up call. Neo-Liberals, like Coakley, have been shown to be ineffectual, monotonous and Republican-lite. The national political soup has been well stirred by this little Massachusetts election. I, for one, say, "Let it boil."

Democracy

Life is often a beauty contest. Perhaps this accounts for the snail-pace of human progress.

Our eyes are programmed for choosing sexual mates. Our brains, however, will decide ultimately what happens to the human species. A just, functional and happy human species will depend upon those who have the intelligence, compassion and inventiveness to apply science and ethics to daily life.

Democracy is a lofty concept. Mob rule is not. When democratic institutions are used by angry mobs to vent their rage, they cease to function for the good of all the people they represent. There is an ugly mood in the U.S. at present: A group tantrum by those who have become lured into superficial materialism by Wall Street and mortgage bankers. The American middle class threw away their own national dignity abroad, their own equity, their own privacy and their own power as laborers in the Bush era. What did they get? They got LCD TVs, polluting Hummers and barn-like mini-mansions, made of junk materials.

So, as these willing victims of the 'greed-is-good' con game rage at having to pay the piper, they look to vent their regressive anger upon the progressive politicians who are trying to help them clean up their mess. They kick their feet and scream as government tries to relieve them of the burden of unaffordable health care. They throw their support behind scheming opportunists, who represent the same creeps who stole their money in the first place. They look for new scapegoats and the same old ones, like gay people, African-Americans, immigrants and others.

So, politics begin to resemble high school prom-queen and prom-king competitions. Sarah Palin, a woman who has glaringly obvious deficits as an intelligent leader, gets into the political sphere because she looks pretty and has done all the conventional 'right' things as a wife and mom. Scott Brown, the U.S. Senate candidate in Massachusetts, gets into the political sphere because he was a jock, a nude poster-boy and drives a pick-up truck. Those whose lives peaked and plateaued in high school rally to the flags of these pubescent icons.

Meanwhile, democracy and the people's real needs are discarded. They are successfully sabotaged once again by the evil forces behind the doctrine of personal greed and materialism, who gladly fund and promote this process of regression. The bankers slink away to their gated mansions with a cynical laugh at their willing dupes, the Tea-Party-style fanatics.

Today is Martin Luther King Day. Martin Luther King, who was the most inspiring man in my adolescent life, was not a pretty man. He was no prom-king candidate. He did not advocate rage or tantrums. He did not advocate selfishness or materialism. He did not support free-market capitalism. He did not whine and rant about what he wasn't getting. Martin Luther King spoke to the hearts of those who yearned for progress, social equality and economic justice for all through civil, progressive government. And, he was killed for it by the same characters who are currently funding efforts to subvert peace, the Obama administration, human rights for all and universal health care.

Make your choice. Will you indulge your own negativity? Will you go on justifying your own materialistic selfishness? Will you continue to begrudge paying taxes for social welfare programs in America while not even blinking when your taxes needlessly kill civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq? Who will you support in the voting booth?

WTF?

Yes, this usually reserved blogger could think of no more appropriate title for this posting about the Massachusetts U.S. Senate race for the seat vacated by the esteemed and deceased Senator Ted Kennedy.

In one corner, we have a prim Massachusetts Attorney General, whose record includes involvement in a case of pedophile-paranoia in a day-care molestation case, which years later appeared to have been contaminated by child-witness coaching and infantile imaginations. Martha Coakley, whose political stance has seemed neo-Liberal at best to some observers, has managed to garner centrist support from the Democratic mainstream.

In the other corner, we have a former nude model/beauty contestant for Cosmopolitan Magazine, Scott Brown, a Bush-Cheney-style Rightist, now that he's clothed. Think of crossing Mitt Romney with Sarah Palin. Scott, a living Ken doll, brags about driving a pick-up truck with 200,000 miles on it. However, he is an attorney and is married to a local TV reporter, a woman.

Sound Palin-esque enough for you? How does this anti-gay, family-values, pro-life, pro-gun, Republican, nudy pin-up get a pass when he could potentially break the 60 vote Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate? I personally haven't heard any reference to this in the media. Doesn't it point to some potential for hypocrisy to anyone but me?

Perhaps these are the End Times. At least, it is beginning to seem so to this Massachusetts voter, looking to the special election on January 19th.