What Massachusetts Didn't Say ...

I proudly voted for Barack Obama last fall and built a giant 10 x 4 foot sign on the side of our house just before the general election.

But frankly, his decision to give no-strings-attached gobs of 100s of billions of dollars to the same billionaires who put this country into a deep recession and double digit unemployment and the highest foreclosure rate since the Great Depression was weak tea.

Unlike some of my friends and acquaintances, I am a Marxist. I believe in meritocracy especially as it applies to women and anyone who is considered ... err ... of non-white Anglo Saxon Protestant ilk, or someone who is gay. Meritocracy is supposed to mean what it says, not like Humpty Dumpty says in "Through the Looking Glass," whatever Humpty Dumpty means it to say at that particular moment.

I intend to live in a United States no longer stained by racism and sexism and homophobia; where the injured, old and unfortunate due to past insults going back years, decades or centuries are not kept down perniciously and considered underclass and are told to be glad for the crumbs "we" give them or the beatings will continue until morale improves. This is what my mother and father taught me the U.S. is supposed to be.

I do not buy into the idea that my self-worth is enhanced by the extent to which I can kick someone else with impunity. Nor is my ego so fragile that I feel threatened if somebody happens to make more money than me because of the career they have chosen. As a writer, I deliberately chose a path I knew would not make much money because I enjoy the freedom of not having to make money and fulfill all the demands that such a job entails.

I am at least a fifth generation native of Massachusetts and my family is from about 15 miles from Wrentham, where Senator-elect Scott Brown is from. I now live in Maine, a former colony of Massachusetts.

As a fellow Masshole, I'm not particularly pleased to learn Mr. Brown has been running around saying proudly that waterboarding a human being is not torture, when the U.S. Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law explicitly say that it is torture. Mr. Brown's statement speaks ill of his intelligence and morality or most likely both. It certainly does not demonstrate his understanding of the U.S. Constitution, suggesting that he fell asleep in his basic American History and civics classes in ninth grade. But hey, that's Wrentham for you. Maybe people were peeing too much in Lake Pearl when Scott was learning the butterfly.

I guess puffing up your collapsing, fattening white chest in one or all of your five houses and bragging about how you would like to torture children is the new "No New Taxes" that plays well among the mentally and morally out to lunch.

I'm just a stickler for details, but guys who brag about how torturing children makes their dick hard, and hope that saying it in public might make my dick hard, don't seem like the kind of folks I want peeing in my pool, even when I'm not looking, and even if I don't have a pool.

Scott Brown's is not the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Samuel Adams worked so hard to create: