Garrison Keillor - Worth Reading

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Big Lou

Garrison Keillor - Worth Reading

Post by Big Lou »

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
> By Garrison Keillor
>
> Something has gone seriously haywire wth 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.
>
>
>
>
Kris S.
Posts: 56
Joined: Tue Oct 07, 2003 7:29 pm
Location: Remus

Garrison Keillor

Post by Kris S. »

I read this and was reminded what a bright and articulate man Mr. Keillor is. He is going to be at CMU (in Mt. Pleasant) on 11/30, if anyone wants to make the drive.
"The trouble with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat." --Lily Tomlin
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