We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

[Guest guest]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/979/

 

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify

into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their

Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose

philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts

trying to walk?

 

 

 

August 26, 2004

 

We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

By Garrison Keillor

 

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.

 

Author Bio

 

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.