[Dialogue] We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

[Stuart Hampton]

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

By Garrison Keillor,  
 <http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/979/>
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/979/" 

 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.

 © 2004 In These Times


submitted by Stuart Hampton