The WorldCom scandal is a bit hard to understand, but basically, as I grok it from my daily perusal of Salon.com, it goes something like this. Businesses have two types of expenses: Operating expenses (such as salaries, utility bills, Web hosting fees, etc.), and capital expenses (the physical stuff you need to produce your goods or services, such as computers, factories, dump trucks, etc). When you do the spreadsheet for your profits and losses each quarter, operating expenses are deducted from your gross income for that quarter. Capital expenses, on the other hand, can be spread out, sort of like car payments, so that if one year you buy, say, $1 million worth of dough-mixing machines for your bagel bakery, you can figure $250,000 against your first quarter profits, $250,000 against your second quarter profits, and so on. That way, the $1 million expense doesn't make such a big hole in your bagel-making venture.

So, what Worldcom founder Bernie Ebbers, chief financial officer Scott Sullivan, and their buddies supposedly did was to take some of their operating expenses and move them around into capital. Whereas this may seem trivial to us, it's apparently a Big Deal to accountants, since when we say they "moved" the money, it's more like they "moved it to their underwear drawer, where they hid it in a 12-pack of Trojans so their mom wouldn't find it, and then misreported the company's financial status accordingly." Also, the amount of money they stuck in their metaphorical undergarment drawer—$3.8 billion—is more than the budgets of some third-world countries. With $3.8 billion dollars, you could build a rocket to Mars, establish a base there, fly home, and still have enough left over for a slice of pizza and a Vanilla Coke. Hell, you could even pay for cable modems for you and all your friends for life-oh, wait a minute, no you couldn't, BECAUSE WORLDCOM FUCKED UP ALL THE CABLE MODEMS, DIDN'T THEY?!?!?!?!

The thing is, no one cares about Worldcom, except for those pocket-protector-wearing accounting nerds at KPMG, and, of course, the 587,431 Americans who are going to lose their jobs over this one way or another. (Note: when we say "no one," we really mean "no one in the New York media world, which exists in its own asshole anyway." If you want to read what actual journalists at Dotcom Scoop say about the Worldcom thing, click here.)

But seriously, who wants to hear about buccaneer accountants on the high seas? We want to see Martha Stewart sent to jail!

Oddly, compared to the Worldcom inanity, what Martha Stewart did wasn't so bad. Martha (who, like other royalty such as Queen Elizabeth, Fergie, and Oprah, apparently only has one name) supposedly received a hint from ImClone head Sam Waksal that maybe she ought to think about selling her stock. Since Waksal has supposedly dated both Martha and her daughter, we can pretty much surmise that was a pretty good friend of the family, in a very scary, daytime talk-show kind of way. (It's no wonder why he went from mom to daughter, though: You might THINK that Martha would be really creative in bed—"Look, I made some macramé manacles out of old toilet paper rolls and elbow-shaped pasta!"—but you know she's a total ice queen.)

So, Martha sold a few million in stock—big deal, ethical or not, it happens all the time. She might have even plausibly based her sale on publicly available knowledge. Sure, she used to be a broker and she should have known how to cover her skinny white ass a bit better, but do we really think that the rich don't discuss this shit with each other the way we talk about our day at the office? Stock trading makes about as much ethical sense as running numbers games out of the corner bodega, anyway: It's just a fancier way of separating the rubes from their money, and pretending it's a level playing field is like pretending the Red Sox have an equal chance at the pennant.

No, the stock trading isn't why Martha's going down. Martha Stewart is going down, to put it bluntly, because she isn't a mere mortal like the rest of us. She's one of the Elect, one of God's Frozen People. She makes money off of the most banal little aesthetic exercises, carefully calculated to hide the calculating profit-and-loss occasion with cozy little comfort tchotchkes and artistically tossed salads. As a living personification of the American dream, She strides over the sterile, frozen landscape like some Episcopalian AT-AT walker, shooting laser beams at lesser mortals. She's a homemaker-cum-entrepreneur-cum-media personality-cum-energy-dynamo, sublimating her emotional energy into making precious little spoon holders and crochet toilet paper cozies.

And that is why we are so happy to see her dragged through the gutter.

Martha tells us that she's what we all want to be and should be, and therefore what we all feel we ought to be. She'll gladly sell you the gear for your brand new life, available at discount prices at Kmart: Martha Stewart dishes and Martha Stewart cutting boards and Martha Stewart quilts and a shiny new Martha Stewart soul, which you pick up at the pharmacy department (it's called "Valium"). But the truth is, we don't really want to be perfect Martha Stewart people, with perfect mates and perfect jobs and perfect children and perfect homes. For starters, most sane people realize this goal isn't realistic. Deep down inside, we know that living in Martha Stewart World is a fantasy as much as is living in Barbie World, even though we'll do anything to keep pursuing the illusion. Deep down inside, we don't really want to be Stepford Wives. We know we're not perfect. And we're SO glad to see Martha isn't, either.

So, fuck Martha Stewart, I say. Fuck her right in her constipated little bum. Let's get a new role model. Someone more like us. Someone imperfect and human and a bit lumpy, who might have cat hair on the couch and doesn't iron her socks.

Jean Teasdale, we're ready for you. Lead us to enlightenment.