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

[Steve Alm]

I've been an avid fan of GK since the 70's, but then I'm from Lake Wobegone.
(Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the
children are above average.)  Still, I thought he was funnier and more
poignant in his sarcastic rants on "Why I'm a Republican."  When he dumps
his wit and humor and tries to get serious, he loses me.  Too much venom and
not enough substance.  Michael Moore, he is not.

Slim

On 9/2/04 9:14 PM, "Saroj" <saroj at pathfind.net> wrote:

> 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