[Peace-discuss] We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

[Lisa Chason]

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.