Everyone should read this article.

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-08-2004
Everyone should read this article.
1
Wed, 09-15-2004 - 7:53pm
This is very long, but worth reading. My favorite line is "This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people."

What Happened to the Republican Party


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, 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.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-18-2004
Thu, 09-16-2004 - 4:00am

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