[Rhodes22-list] We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

[Robert Skinner]

Here's another view, folks, admirably expressed.

-----------------------------------------------------

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

By Garrison Keillor

August 26, 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 
institution 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" (c 2004) is reprinted by arrangement with 
Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

-- 
Robert Skinner