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quite good article on the modern republicans and the election
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
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.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
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.
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
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.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
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.
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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.