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A PLAN TO SAVE THE COUNTRY
By Garrison Keillor
Baltimore Sun,
August 31, 2006
It's the best part of summer, the long, lovely passage into fall. A
procession of lazy, golden days that my sandy-haired, gap-toothed little
girl has been painting, small abstract masterpieces in tempera and crayon
and glitter, reminiscent of Franz Kline or Willem de Kooning (his early
glitter period). She put a sign out front, "Art for Sale," and charged 25
cents per painting. Cheap at the price.
A teacher gave her this freedom to sit un-self-consciously and put paint
on paper. A gentle, 6-foot-8 guy named Matt who taught art at her
preschool. Her swimming teachers gave her freedom from fear of water. So
much that has made this summer a pleasure for her I trace to specific
teachers, and so it's painful to hear about public education sinking all
around us.
A high school math class of 42! Everybody knows you can't teach math to 42
kids at once. The classroom smells bad because the custodial staff has
been cut back. The teacher must whip his pupils into shape to pass the
federal No Child Left Untested program. This is insanity, the legacy of
Republicans and their tax-cutting and their hostility to secular
institutions.
Last spring, I taught a college writing course and had the privilege of
hanging out with people in their early 20s, an inspirational experience in
return for which I tried to harass them about spelling and grammar and
structure. My interest in being 21 again is less than my interest in
having a frontal lobotomy, but the wit and passion and good-heartedness of
these kids, which they try to conceal under their exquisite cool, are the
hope of this country. You have to advocate for young people, or else what
are we here for?
I keep running into retirees in their mid-50s, free to collect seashells
and write bad poetry and shoot video of the Grand Canyon, and goody for
them, but they're not the future. My college kids are graduating with a
20-pound ball of debt chained to their ankles. That's not right, and you
know it.
This country is squashing its young. We're sending them to die in a war we
d on't believe in anymore. We're cheating them so we can offer tax relief
to the rich. And we're stealing from them so that old gaffers like me, who
want to live forever, can go in for an MRI if we have a headache.
A society that pays for MRIs for headaches and can't pay teachers a decent
wage has made a dreadful choice. But health care costs are ballooning,
eating away at the economy. The boomers are getting to an age where their
knees need replacing and their hearts need a quadruple bypass -- which
they feel entitled to -- but our children aren't entitled to a damn thing.
Any goombah with a Ph.D. in education can strip away French and German,
music and art, dumb down the social sciences, offer Britney Spears instead
of Shakespeare, and there is nothing the kid can do except hang out in the
library, which is being cut back too.
This week, we mark the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the Current
Occupant's line, "You're doing a heckuva job," which already is in common
usage, a joke, a euphemism for utter ineptitude. It's sure to wind up in
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, a summation of his occupancy.
Annual interest on the national debt now exceeds all government welfare
programs combined. We'll be in Iraq for years to come. Hard choices need
to be made, and given the situation we're in, I think we must bite the
bullet and say no more health care for card-carrying Republicans. It just
doesn't make sense to invest in longevity for people who don't believe in
the future. Let them try faith-based medicine, let them pray for their
arteries to be reamed and their hips to be restored, and leave science to
the rest of us.
Cutting out health care to one-third of the population -- the folks with
Bush-Cheney bumper stickers, who still believe the man is doing a heckuva
job -- will save enough money to pay off the national debt, not a bad
legacy for Republicans. As Scrooge said, let them die and reduce the
surplus population. In return, we can offer them a reduction in the estate
tax. All in favor, blow your nose.
Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights
on public radio stations across the country.
Copyright 2006, The Baltimore Sun
Gazette Fair Use
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