crazyforgoofy
Finally - Isabella's forever Mom! 9/08/05
- Joined
- May 11, 2002
- Messages
- 6,273
We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
By Garrison Keillor
In These Times
Thursday 26 August 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 how ever 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
In These Times
Thursday 26 August 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 how ever 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.
