[Dialogue] What Really Makes our Nation Strong

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Thursday, September 7, 2006 by the Baltimore
<http://www.baltimoresun.com>  Sun (Maryland) 

What Really Makes our Nation Strong 

by Garrison Keillor 

 

Growing up in the '50s, we imagined our country defended by guided missiles
poised in bunkers, jet fighters on the tarmac and pilots in the ready room
prepared to scramble, a colonel with a black briefcase sitting in the hall
outside the president's bedroom, but Sept. 11 gave us a clearer picture. We
have a vast array of hardware, a multitude of colonels, a lot of
bureaucratic confusion, and a nation vulnerable to attack. 

The Federal Aviation Administration has now acknowledged that the third of
the four planes seized by the 19 men with box cutters had already hit the
Pentagon before the FAA finally called there to say there was a problem. The
FAA lied to the 9/11 commission about this, then took two years to ascertain
the facts - a 51-minute gap in defense - and released the finding on the
Friday before Labor Day, an excellent burial site for bad news. 

So America is not the secure fortress we grew up imagining. Perhaps it never
was. What protects us is what has protected us for 230 years: our
magnificent isolation. After the disasters of the 20th century, Europe put
nationalism aside and adopted civilization, but we have oceans on either
side, so if the president turns out to be a shallow, jingoistic fool with a
small, rigid agenda and little knowledge of the world, we expect to survive
it somehow. Life goes on. 

It's hard for Americans to visualize the collapse of our country. It's as
unthinkable as one's own demise. Europeans are different: They've seen
disaster, even the British. They know it was a near thing back in 1940. My
old Danish mother-in-law remembered the occupation clearly 40 years later
and was teary-eyed when she talked about it. Francis Scott Key certainly
could envision the demise of the United States in 1814 when he watched the
bombardment of Fort McHenry. Abraham Lincoln was haunted by the thought. We
are not, apparently, though five years ago we saw a shadow. 

We really are one people at heart. We all believe that when thousands of
people are trapped in the Superdome without food or water, it is the duty of
government, the federal government if necessary, to come to their rescue and
to restore them to the civil mean and not abandon them to fate. Right there
is the basis of liberalism. Conservatives tried to introduce a new idea -
it's your fault if you get caught in a storm - and this idea was rejected by
nine out of 10 people once they saw the pictures. The issue is whether we
care about people who don't get on television. 

Last week, I sat and listened to a roomful of parents talk about their
battles with public schools in behalf of their children who suffer from
dyslexia, or apraxia, or ADD, or some other disability - sagas of ferocious
parental love vs. stonewall bureaucracy in the quest for basic, needful
things - and how some of them had uprooted their families and moved to
Minnesota so their children could attend better schools. You couldn't tell
if those parents were Republicans or Democrats. They simply were prepared to
move mountains so their kids could have a chance. So are we all. 

And that's the mission of politics: to give our kids as good a chance as we
had. They say that liberals have run out of new ideas - it's like saying
that Christians have run out of new ideas. Maybe the old doctrine of grace
is good enough. 

I don't get much hope from Democrats these days, a timid and skittish bunch,
slow to learn, unable to sing the hymns and express the steady optimism that
is at the heart of the heart of the country. I get no hope at all from
Republicans, whose policies seem predicated on the Second Coming occurring
in the very near future. 

If Jesus does not descend through the clouds to take them directly to
paradise, and do it now, they are going to have to answer to the rest of us.


Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights
on public radio stations across the country. 

Copyright C 2006, The Baltimore Sun

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