09-03-2004, 03:09 AM
We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/979/
By Garrison Keillor , In These Times, Thursday 26 August 2004
Something has gone seriously haywire with the
Republican Party. Once, it was the party of
pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed
spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were
devoted to their communities and supported the
sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They
were good-hearted people who vanquished the
gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid
Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and
Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner
element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a
genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK
for reasonable people to vote Republican. He
brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced
the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue
the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us
a period of peace and prosperity, in which
(oddly) American arts and letters flourished and
higher education burgeoned - and there was a
degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties
Republicans were giants compared to today's.
Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to
feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich,
the party migrated southward down the Twisting
Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of
public service and became the Scourge of
Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the
Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of
pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by
their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed
flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George
McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a
pass and made training films in Long Beach. The
Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger
pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who
rose to power on pure punk politics.
'Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,'
says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP.
'I don't want to abolish government. I simply
want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it
into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.'
The boy has Oedipal problems and government is
his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was
transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed
swamp developers and corporate shills,
faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies
with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance
racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking
midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in
golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop
tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks,
Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil
Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New
Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest
of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch
president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the
free flow of information and of secular
institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of
badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the
world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like
toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round
the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering!
Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists
sit in committee rooms and write legislation to
alleviate the suffering of billionaires!
Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the
moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this
hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age
reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great
wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for
reelection on a platform of tragedy - the single
greatest failure of national defense in our
history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with
box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a
failure the details of which the White House
fought to keep secret even as it ran the country
into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous
tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us
into a box canyon of debt that will render
government impotent, even as we engage in a war
against a small country that was undertaken for
the president's personal satisfaction but sold to
the American public on the basis of brazen
misinformation, a war whose purpose is to
distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth
taking place in this country, flowing upward, and
the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the
hands of the few is the death knell of democracy.
No republic in the history of humanity has
survived this. The election of 2004 will say
something about what happens to ours. The omens
are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear -
fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An
ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of
whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public
uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time
of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained
judges, strip the bark off the Constitution,
eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring
public education to a standstill, stupefy the
press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election
year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme
Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming
back to. It wasn't the 'end of innocence,' or a
turning point in our history, or a cosmic
occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security.
And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from
asking hard questions of the man who was
purportedly in charge of national security at the
time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying
along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway
local, hustling toward their office on the 90th
floor, the morning paper under their arms, I
think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how
he hopes to exploit those people with a little
economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama,
cruise to victory in November and proceed to get
some serious nation-changing done in his second
term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will
portray us Democrats as embittered academics,
desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
communards, people who talk to telephone poles,
the party of the Deadheads. They will wave
enormous flags and wow over and over the footage
of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade
Center and bodies being carried out and they will
lie about their economic policies with
astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year.
Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for
the Southern Baptists is not the same as what
Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus
Republicanii has humbugged us to death on
terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school
prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to
know what books we read and to dump their sewage
upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests
and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on
behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate
takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with
anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn't made so
by angry people. We have a sacred duty to
bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape
than however we found it. We have a long way to
go and we're not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is
reserved for those who in time of crisis remain
neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank
you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or
shine, and there is more to life than winning.
-------
Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A
Prairie Home Companion, now in its 25th year on
the air. This adapted excerpted from Keillor's
new book, Homegrown Democrat (© 2004) is
reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/979/
By Garrison Keillor , In These Times, Thursday 26 August 2004
Something has gone seriously haywire with the
Republican Party. Once, it was the party of
pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed
spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were
devoted to their communities and supported the
sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They
were good-hearted people who vanquished the
gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid
Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and
Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner
element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a
genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK
for reasonable people to vote Republican. He
brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced
the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue
the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us
a period of peace and prosperity, in which
(oddly) American arts and letters flourished and
higher education burgeoned - and there was a
degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties
Republicans were giants compared to today's.
Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to
feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.
In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich,
the party migrated southward down the Twisting
Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of
public service and became the Scourge of
Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the
Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of
pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by
their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed
flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George
McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a
pass and made training films in Long Beach. The
Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger
pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who
rose to power on pure punk politics.
'Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,'
says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP.
'I don't want to abolish government. I simply
want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it
into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.'
The boy has Oedipal problems and government is
his daddy.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was
transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed
swamp developers and corporate shills,
faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies
with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance
racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking
midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in
golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop
tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks,
Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil
Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New
Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest
of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch
president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the
free flow of information and of secular
institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of
badly sutured body parts trying to walk.
Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the
world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like
toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round
the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering!
Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists
sit in committee rooms and write legislation to
alleviate the suffering of billionaires!
Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the
moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this
hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age
reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great
wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.
Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for
reelection on a platform of tragedy - the single
greatest failure of national defense in our
history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with
box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a
failure the details of which the White House
fought to keep secret even as it ran the country
into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous
tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us
into a box canyon of debt that will render
government impotent, even as we engage in a war
against a small country that was undertaken for
the president's personal satisfaction but sold to
the American public on the basis of brazen
misinformation, a war whose purpose is to
distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth
taking place in this country, flowing upward, and
the deception is working beautifully.
The concentration of wealth and power in the
hands of the few is the death knell of democracy.
No republic in the history of humanity has
survived this. The election of 2004 will say
something about what happens to ours. The omens
are not good.
Our beloved land has been fogged with fear -
fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An
ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of
whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public
uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time
of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained
judges, strip the bark off the Constitution,
eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring
public education to a standstill, stupefy the
press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.
There is a stink drifting through this election
year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme
Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming
back to. It wasn't the 'end of innocence,' or a
turning point in our history, or a cosmic
occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security.
And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from
asking hard questions of the man who was
purportedly in charge of national security at the
time.
Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying
along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway
local, hustling toward their office on the 90th
floor, the morning paper under their arms, I
think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how
he hopes to exploit those people with a little
economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama,
cruise to victory in November and proceed to get
some serious nation-changing done in his second
term.
This year, as in the past, Republicans will
portray us Democrats as embittered academics,
desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
communards, people who talk to telephone poles,
the party of the Deadheads. They will wave
enormous flags and wow over and over the footage
of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade
Center and bodies being carried out and they will
lie about their economic policies with
astonishing enthusiasm.
The Union is what needs defending this year.
Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for
the Southern Baptists is not the same as what
Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus
Republicanii has humbugged us to death on
terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school
prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to
know what books we read and to dump their sewage
upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests
and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on
behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate
takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with
anybody who opposes them.
This is a great country, and it wasn't made so
by angry people. We have a sacred duty to
bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape
than however we found it. We have a long way to
go and we're not getting any younger.
Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is
reserved for those who in time of crisis remain
neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank
you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or
shine, and there is more to life than winning.
-------
Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A
Prairie Home Companion, now in its 25th year on
the air. This adapted excerpted from Keillor's
new book, Homegrown Democrat (© 2004) is
reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
I realise that I have a past to break with--an accumulation of inertia, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk. A great need of clarification, of mindfulness, or rather, of no mind. A need to return to genuine practice, right effort. Need to push on the great doubt. Need for the spirit. Hang on to the clear light.
Thomas Merton
