Mark Shea links to this Winfield Myers take on some Garrison Keillor thing. Myers has a nice discussion of Keillor’s misquotation of Dante (first put out there by man of letters John F. Kennedy; I particularly liked Myers’s line about the “Potemkin Camelot.”)
But here’s what I want to know:
Keillor lampoons the right as the home 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.”
I guess I would be counted among those on “the right;” which one of those am I? I don’t doubt the authenticity of the moon landings; I don’t drive a Lamborghini; I don’t have a hairy back (no matter what Robert might imply). I don’t play golf; my husband does, but he’s hardly a nihilist. I’m not a tax cheat (though we must be rich, since we got a tax refund.) I would certainly not qualify as one of Newt’s “evil spawn”, since I first signed on to the vast right-wing conspiracy in (gasp!) 1984.
I guess in Keillor’s taxonomy, I’m a fundamentalist bully with a Bible (though “real” fundamentalists would beg to differ.) Maybe I’m an “aggressive dork” (though “contentious geek” might be more on the mark.) I wonder how he would classify the guileless pro-life manicurist I met in Fargo last summer? Keillor’s gentle-rhubarb-eating-son-of-Minnesota pose is wearing a little thin with me.
From the excerpt given, I’d say he has a lot in common with Michael Moore. Maybe writes a little better.
Aww, I’m sorry. There’s a much dirtier joke about Sopranos that I could tell if you’d like.