Garrison is an American Treasure, imo. Peace, D. Mindock
Published on Thursday, August 31, 2006 by the
Baltimore Sun (Maryland)
A Plan to Save the Country
by Garrison Keillor
It's the best part of summer, the long, lovely
passage into fall. A procession of lazy, golden
days that my sandy-haired, gap-toothed
little girl has been painting, small abstract
masterpieces in tempera
and crayon and glitter, reminiscent of Franz Kline
or Willem de Kooning (his early glitter period). She put a sign
out front, Art
for Sale, and charged 25 cents per painting. Cheap
at the price.
A teacher gave her this freedom to sit
un-self-consciously and put
paint on paper. A gentle, 6-foot-8 guy named Matt
who taught art at
her preschool. Her swimming teachers gave her
freedom from fear of
water. So much that has made this summer a pleasure
for her I trace
to specific teachers, and so it's painful to hear
about public
education sinking all around us.
A high school math class of 42! Everybody knows you
can't teach math
to 42 kids at once. The classroom smells bad because
the custodial
staff has been cut back. The teacher must whip his
pupils into shape
to pass the federal No Child Left Untested program.
This is insanity,
the legacy of Republicans and their tax-cutting and
their hostility
to secular institutions.
Last spring, I taught a college writing course and
had the privilege
of hanging out with people in their early 20s, an
inspirational
experience in return for which I tried to harass
them about spelling
and grammar and structure. My interest in being 21
again is less than
my interest in having a frontal lobotomy, but the
wit and passion and
good-heartedness of these kids, which they try to
conceal under their
exquisite cool, are the hope of this country. You
have to advocate
for young people, or else what are we here for?
I keep running into retirees in their mid-50s, free
to collect
seashells and write bad poetry and shoot video of
the Grand Canyon,
and goody for them, but they're not the future. My
college kids are
graduating with a 20-pound ball of debt chained to
their ankles.
That's not right, and you know it.
This country is squashing its young. We're sending
them to die in a
war we don't believe in anymore. We're cheating them
so we can offer
tax relief to the rich. And we're stealing from them
so that old
gaffers like me, who want to live forever, can go in
for an MRI if we
have a headache.
A society that pays for MRIs for headaches and can't
pay teachers a
decent wage has made a dreadful choice. But health
care costs are
ballooning, eating away at the economy. The boomers
are getting to an
age where their knees need replacing and their
hearts need a
quadruple bypass - which they feel entitled to - but
our children
aren't entitled to a damn thing. Any goombah with a
Ph.D. in
education can strip away French and German, music
and art, dumb down
the social sciences, offer Britney Spears instead of
Shakespeare, and
there is nothing the kid can do except hang out in
the library, which
is being cut back too.
This week, we mark the anniversary of Hurricane
Katrina and the
Current Occupant's line, You're doing a heckuva
job, which already
is in common usage, a joke, a euphemism for utter
ineptitude. It's
sure to wind up in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a
summation of his
occupancy.
Annual interest on the national debt now exceeds all
government
welfare programs combined. We'll be in Iraq for
years to come. Hard
choices need to be made, and given the situation
we're in, I think we
must bite the bullet and say no more health care for
card-carrying
Republicans. It just doesn't make sense to invest in
longevity for
people who don't believe in the future. Let them try
faith-based
medicine, let them pray for their arteries to be
reamed and their
hips to be restored, and leave science to the rest
of us.
Cutting out health care to one-third of the
population - the folks
with Bush-Cheney bumper stickers, who still believe
the man is doing
a heckuva job - will save enough money to pay off
the national debt,
not a bad legacy for Republicans. As Scrooge said,
let them die and
reduce the surplus population. In return, we can
offer them a
reduction in the estate tax. All in favor, blow your
nose.
___
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