(from Avengers Forever #9, August 1999)

Yeah, I know why you’re all hanging out by my back step. No need to be shy about it; you all want to know my thoughts on yesterday’s triumph for idiocracy. I’ll start off with the short version:

It sucks, but it’s going to suck a lot worse for Scott Brown in the near future.

The most irritating thing about the media coverage — both local and national — surrounding the special senate election was that it employed a mythic narrative involving preconceptions that contradicted the actual social and political culture of the Bay State. As I quipped on Twitter yesterday, they could as well have been talking about fucking Narnia rather than Massachusetts.

Though the distinction tends to be lost on the yowling muttonheads, the Commonwealth is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, not an overwhelmingly liberal one. That’s an important distinction to make as it encompasses a three ring circus of ideologies crammed under the big tent of a fractious coalition — everything from progressives to socially conservative lunchpail-labor types to blue-tinged small “l” libertarian sorts.

The dominance of the Democratic party in the state has become a self-perpetuating phenomenon. If you want access to the levers of legislative power, you have to play the game or risk being marginalized with an oppostion party whose seats number in the single digits.

While I’d normally be the last one to support a GOP resurgence here, I have to admit that this situation is politically unhealthy. It breeds arrogance, venality, and the tyrannies of petty power brokers…and is the reason why “Speaker of the Massachusetts State House” has become synonymous with “federal corruption probe in the making.”

The voters are painfully aware of this situation, but while they might blabber on and on about tossing the bums out, the ire is directed largely at “those bums in the other district” because “well, my rep is a solid guy ‘cuz he got my meth-addicted kid a union Massport job/into UMass Amherst/off light on a DUI rap.”

This stalemate of momentary interests inhibits any meaningful change, so the expression of resentment traditionally crystallizes around statewide offices, typically the governorship. It doesn’t matter if the GOP candidate is a reactionary cipher, spite and the blinding need to “send a message” are motivation enough.

It’s democracy as grudgefucking, and the weeping genital sores are small price to pay for making a statement….in the beginning, at least. The problem arises when the political gigolo inevitably mistakes the voters’ need for vengeance with sincere affection.

“So I was thinking we could rearrange the furniture in the apartment now that we’re engaged.”
“Are you still here, asshole?”

As I said, this usually plays out at the state level, but this time circumstances and opportunity made it possible to bring it to the national level. The economy is in the shitter, Ted K’s death left a wide open field, health care reform is going the way of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and the Democrats fielded a candidate disliked by huge portions of the party base — all Scott Brown needed to do was be photogenic and utter some populist platitudes. The out-of-state teabagger money and the media’s desire to spin the race into ratings-boosting competitiveness were simply icing on the urinal cake.

No one really thought too hard about what Brown’s positions truly were; they were tangential (and at cross-purposes) to his strengths as a candidate. The health reform vote aside (and honestly, the bill has been so exsanguinated and compromised that it should be taken out behind the woodshed lest it become an impediment to the real deal later down the line), Scott’s positions are going to be what fuck him over once the overblown honeymoon ends.

If he surrenders to the current GOP hivemind, his support among Bay State voters — a majority of which still hold a favorable opinion of the Obama administration — will wither on the vine. If he goes the Olympia Snowe/Susan Collins moderate route, he will be stabbed in the back by the reactionary forces that funded his victory. No echo chamber bloviating can hide the naked truth that Brown is a square peg elevated to a round hole by very specific circumstances.

As for those teabaggers who are currently jerking each other off over their supposed success? It has long been the rule that the shit-stirrers who kick off a populist revolution also tend to be its earliest victims.

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