Bravo. I heard about this statement and am glad someone posted it to this
group.
Jamey
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
[mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Larry Dick
Sent: Monday, September 13, 2004 11:13 AM
To: Windows File Systems Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntfsd] Fw: WHAT GARRISON KEILLOR SAID
----- Original Message -----
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Swaidner [mailto:xxxxx@nehomes.com]
From: xxxxx@aol.com [mailto:xxxxx@aol.com]
Subject: WHAT GARRISON KEILLOR SAID
We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
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 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, peoplewho 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 institution 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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