We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
Posted: Mon Sep 06, 2004 1:02 pm
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 anti papist anti foreigner 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 up tick, 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.
> 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 anti papist anti foreigner 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 up tick, 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.