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

[Saroj]

I'm not particularly fond of Garrison Keillor and he got pretty ranty in the
latter half, but I apprecaite you sharing a different perspective.

Saroj
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Skinner" <robert at squirrelhaven.com>
To: "Rhodes 22 mail list" <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2004 9:08 PM
Subject: [Rhodes22-list] We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore


> 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
> __________________________________________________
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