By Garrison Keillor August 26, 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 for 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,
free lanceracists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio,
tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brown shirts 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 drum beat 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.
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