Oh, what a little Moonbeam can do for an ailing nation

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I wasn't all that eager to meet him. His reputation preceded him. He is Mr. Southern California, Mr. Moonbeam, not a person to be taken seriously.

Not that many of the presidential candidates should be taken seriously. With the exception of Paul Tsongas, they are all the same. Same suits. Same smiles. Same empty promises.

Jerry Brown, a.k.a. Mr. Moonbeam, different. But not in a negative way, as much of the media would have you believe. He is a man who, after governing California for eight years, studied in Japan and volunteered with Mother Teresa in Calcutta because he wanted to learn, because he wanted to experience not just life in America, but life in the world. He is a man who believes that people are equal, that no one is better than anyone else, that everyone deserves the same opportunities.

The press ridicules him for being a leftover of the '60s. In the '60s we believed that all children deserved an equal education, that all people deserved the dignity of a job; that food and shelter and health care were not privileges but rights. What is wrong with these old ideals?

Reporters who think that "tie" is only a verb make fun of Brown for wearing turtlenecks with his suits. They write about this instead of the fact that he won't accept contributions of more than $100, that he refuses to be bought and owned by the banks and businesses that control this country and that have led us into debt. Jerry Brown has principles. The problem is that principles don't make for interesting television clips.

Let's be honest. The presidential race has become nothing more than a Miss America pageant for men. Television has changed all the rules. Intelligence is out the window.

Seriousness is allowed only in small doses. Depth is to be discouraged. People don't want to think. They want to be entertained. The requisites for political success are a pretty face, a sincere-looking smile, a touch of indignation now and then, and an impassioned mention of God and country.

Forget all about principles.

Television is actually an enemy of the principled man.

The American public is accustomed to seeing on TV.

And so pretense has become reality. People who aren't actors don't seem real. They talk funny. They mumble. They look ordinary and unpolished.

So it is that Paul Tsongas, a good man who's been given a second chance at life, who is using this second chance to educate a country, to get people to wake up and get involved and react to the crises around us, is disregarded. So he's intelligent. So he has a sensible, well thought-out economic plan. He's too serious. He's too dull. You have to pay attention to what he is saying. And in a country that judges its books by their covers that is a fate equal to death.

You have to pay attention to Mr. Moonbeam, too.

He says things like, "The body politic has a pathology that has to be healed." Some people think the American public is too stupid to understand this statement. He says, "It's not that we're poor. It's that the system is dysfunctional."

You bet your life it is. Brown talks about 1 percent of the country having all the wealth. He talks about the big corporations paying for their candidates. He talks about the common people not even bothering to vote because they're cynical, because they believe they don't count.

He says they do count, that if the 60 percent of Americans who don't vote did, they could change the system.

This is Samson tugging at the pillars of corruption and greed and self-interest. This is Samson struggling for principle.

His critics call him Moonbeam to denigrate him. But they honor him, for what's a moonbeam, anyway, but a ray of light that illuminates the darkness, a beacon that points the way?