Just plain good writing.
By Garrison Keillor, Thursday, October 9, 2008
One bomb after another
We Americans are a stalwart and stouthearted people, and never more so
than in hard times.
People weep in the dark and arise in the morning and go to work. The
waves crash on your nest egg and a chunk is swept away and you put
your salami sandwich in the brown bag and get on the bus.
In Philly, a woman earns $10.30 per hour to care for a man brought
down by cystic fibrosis. She bathes and dresses him in the morning,
brings him meals, puts him to bed at night. It’s hard work lifting him
and she has suffered a painful hernia that, because she can’t afford
health insurance, she can’t get fixed, but she still goes to work
because he’d be helpless without her.
There are a lot of people like her. I know because I’m related to some of them.
Low dishonesty and craven cynicism sometimes win the day but not
inevitably. The attempt to link Barack Obama to an old radical in his
neighborhood has desperation and deceit written all over it.
Meanwhile, stunning acts of heroism stand out, such as the fidelity of
military lawyers assigned to defend detainees at Guantánamo Bay -
uniformed officers faithful to their lawyerly duty to offer a vigorous
defense even though it means exposing the injustice of military
justice that is rigged for conviction and the mendacity of a commander
in chief who commits war crimes.
If your law school is looking for a name for its new library, instead
of selling the honor to a fat cat alumnus, you should consider the
names of Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, Lieutenant Colonel Mark
Bridges, Colonel Steven David, Lieutenant Colonel Sharon Shaffer,
Lieutenant Commander Philip Sundel and Major Michael Mori.
It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman
for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could
skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth
emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never
thought about. The American people have an ear for untruths. They can
tell when someone’s mouth is moving and the clutch is not engaged.
When she said, “One thing that Americans do at this time, also,
though, is let’s commit ourselves just every day, American people, Joe
Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band
together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken
advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us
these dollars,” people smelled gas.
Some Republicans adore her because they are pranksters at heart and
love the consternation of grown-ups. The ne’er-do-well son of the old
Republican family as president, the idea that you increase government
revenue by cutting taxes, the idea that you cut social services and
thereby drive the needy into the middle class, the idea that you
overthrow a dictator with a show of force and achieve democracy at no
cost to yourself – one stink bomb after another, and now Governor
Sarah Palin.
She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her
vacuity, and she was John McCain’s first major decision as nominee.
This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his
candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career
making personal appearances for 2040 grand a pop, and she’ll become a
trivia question, “What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise
based on being able to see Russia from her house?” And the rest of us
will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.
Your broker kept saying, “Stay with the portfolio, don’t jump ship,”
and you felt a strong urge to dump the stocks and get into the money
market where at least you’re not going to lose your shirt, but you
didn’t do it and didn’t do it, and now you’re holding a big bag of
brown bananas. Me, too. But at least I know enough not to believe
desperate people who are talking trash. Anybody who got whacked last
week and still thinks McCain-Palin is going to lead America out of the
swamp and not into a war with Iran is beyond persuasion in the English
language. They’ll need to lose their homes and be out on the street in
a cold hard rain before they connect the dots.
