When alienation has abjured even the residents of Lake Wobegon, and when it's been replaced by righteous outrage, you know the country is in trouble--and you know it knows. In today's Salon, Garrison Keillor uses the context of Paulson's Ploy to rip McCain on his hypocrisy, and scold the Republican Party for abandoning both its principles and its responsibility to the American people. Country first? Whose country? Keillor asks us to remember...and to question.
For those who aren't familiar, Keillor is the spokesman for Lake Wobegon--the (fictional) last bastion of rural, innocent America, "where where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Where the people remember the pleasantries of yesteryear, and where the children dream of adventure, and a prosperous tomorrow. Today, he asks us to look again at the "good old days," to look again at those who would put themselves in control of our future. In short, Keillor asks us to remember who McCain really is:
Mr. McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please -- remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators on behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush, the brother of the C.O., who, as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends and who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things? Mr. McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.
And asks us to question the man's integrity:
Some say the tab might come to a trillion dollars. Nobody knows. And Mr. McCain has not one moment of doubt or regret. He switches from First Deregulation Church to Our Lady of Strict Vigilance like you might go from decaf to latte. Where is the straight talk? Does the man have no conscience?
In the first chapter of his new novel, Liberty, that begins with a recap of Lake Wobegon's Fourth of July celebration, Keillor's narrator suggests the town has misplaced its attention on trivialities unrelated to the spirit of independence. Trivialities including lipstick, leftover food, and vandalism...and he calls them out for their false morality and false patriotism, when they "grumped,"
"maybe it’s time to rethink the Fourth of July and pull in our sails a little and not give bad apples an arena for their shenanigans."
But today, Keillor reminds us who the real bad apples are, why they're rotten to the core, and how we have a PATRIOTIC RESPONSIBILITY to refuse them the arena to conduct those shenanigans that, over the past twenty years have systematically swindled us out of our money, our homes, our livelihoods, our freedoms, and our integrity. This is the heart of rural America speaking, folks. The voice of our small towns screaming out against the lies of the McCain campaign and against the whole bullshit, deregulated, trickle-down philosophy.
Thanks, Mr. Keillor, for being a voice of wisdom.