MONTANA 003

I can’t believe I missed it. Actually, I can’t believe my liberal acquaintances allowed me to miss it. Grace of my newfound relationship with the Public Library, I recently read Garrison Keillor’s Homegrown Democrat. And I thought that after Running with Scissors, nothing new could induce the high vapors.

Published just before the 2004 presidential election, and undoubtedly intended to influence it, the book accomplishes what together Air America, Move-On.org, the Times’ of NY and LA, and Media Matters have been unable to achieve. The normally passive Minnesotan stages an attack on Republicans that words like savage, vicious, spiteful, and malicious cannot begin to accurately portray. Lest you think I exaggerate:

“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.”

Keillor is described as an obsessive workaholic on the road some 32 weeks a year who arrives on location with Prairie Home Companion entourage on Monday, and stays locked in a hotel room subsisting on fast food and writing his Saturday script until emerging sometime Thursday for rehearsal. He rarely smiles. Little wonder. Homegrown Democrat clearly shows that this American wit has lost his grasp of humor.

Now I can visualize the smirks and a bit of giddiness out there, but look for a moment at what we have here. Keillor makes abundantly clear, consistently throughout the book that he is talking not about Bush, Gingrich, DeLay and Company, but all Republicans. He allows that there may have been a few passable ones around the time of Lincoln, but they’re long dead, and not since Teddy Roosevelt has there been a smidgen of compassion or basic humanity in the black hearts (Republicans apparently don’t have souls) of any who associate with the Grand Old Party.

Be ye liberal and excessively so, (and assuming this weapon does not already grace a prominent position on your bookshelf) you should run, not walk, to Barnes & Noble or your favorite used bookshop – the library won’t do, as you’ll surely want to read and re-read, then circulate it to all your friends, and yes, place it between the covers on cold winter nights as it will surely warm your toes as it has your psyche. Others may find the library an acceptable alternative and thus not be confronted with disposal options at its conclusion.

I recall in my lifetime when great political orators like Everitt McKinley Dirkson, James William Fulbright, Robert C. Byrd, Daniel Patrick Moynahan, Mike Mansfield, Howard Baker, and a legion of others could argue for hours with passion and conviction, and then repair to Jim Wright’s commodious House office for bourbon and branchwater, further debate, and finally, in comity, to hammer out a compromise acceptable to all and good for the Nation. And they went away proud of their accomplishments and not incensed over what they had given up.

Somewhere at some time all that changed. I trace the beginning of the end to January 3, 1995, when, after 40 solid years of Democrat legislative rule, the other guys finally got a chance. And it has been downhill from that date. It seems that the folks who ruled the playground were in no mood to share, and that has led to what we have today, a mentality (on both sides of the political aisle) where “my team is perfect and the other side is composed of naught but scum-sucking low lifes”.

I find this not promising for the Nation nor any of its individual constituencies. Screeds are not helpful to a national dialogue. We are becoming more like the Bloods and the Crips, the Jets and the Sharks. No one wins in gang warfare. Not for long, anyway.

Those wishing a more reasoned dialogue might read Daniel Patrick Moynahan’s Miles to Go. The (now departed) New York Senator was considered one of the twentieth century’s most liberal politicians, yet he was a scholar, a statesman, a great thinker and master of compromise. He was what we were; now we are Keillor. Those were the days, my friends.

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There was a time I found it unsettling to so enjoy the immense musical talents of Streisand and the sparkling humor of Keillor, when their personal views seemed so shaped by hatred and single-minded values. And then it came to me that in the same way that the physically challenged find compensation elsewhere – the blind with an acute sense of smell, the deaf with exceptional sight or touch, and the mentally challenged, sometimes called savants, who can multiply eight-digit numbers accurately to six decimal places -- Mother Nature (or your preferred deity) has elected to compensate for deficiencies by assigning advantages.

And so it must be that great artistic talents are penalized in other areas. This surely explains Hollywood, and allows me to freely enjoy the strains of “The Way We Were” or the Sunday humor of Prairie Home Companion.

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And, as promised, more metaphors chosen from actual high school essays:

“They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with a picket fence that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.”

“The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.”


…the adventure continues…