A Prairie Home Companion: "Homegrown Democrat", Chapters 1-4

An "adapted excerpted" that Ken found somewhere:

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How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt
Gingrich¹s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid
man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to
walk?


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 today¹s. 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. ³Bipartisanship is
another term of date rape,² says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the
GOP. ³I don¹t 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.² 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 Armstrong¹s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little
honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt¹s 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 we¹re 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 president¹s 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 isn¹t the Florida
recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it¹s 9/11 that we keep coming
back to. It wasn¹t the ³end of innocence,² or a turning point in our
history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And
patriotism shouldn¹t 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 wasn¹t 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 we¹re 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. It¹s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life
than winning.

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Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, now in
its 25th year on the air. This adapted excerpted from Keillor¹s new book,
Homegrown Democrat (© 2004) is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a
member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc