journey something

Published on Thursday, October 26, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun
Bush Closes the Gap Between Freedom and Terror, but there is an Upside
by Garrison Keillor

We are engaged in a struggle between freedom and the forces of terror, and mostly I side with freedom, such as the freedom to look at big shots and stick out your tongue and blow, but of course terror has its place too. The dude strolling down our street at night does not break into our house to see what’s available because he is terrified that if he’s nabbed, his girlfriend Janine will run off to Philly with her ex-boyfriend Eddie, who’s been hanging around. She’s the best thing in Benny’s life right now. So he walks on by and leaves our stereo be.

The terror of everlasting hellfire kept me away from dances until I was 12 years old and away from smoking cigarettes until I was 15. So that’s good. Dancing was briefly thrilling, and then I caught sight of myself in a mirror and I haven’t gone to a dance since. Fear of ridicule is powerful too.

A lack of terror may encourage crooks to operate brazenly, knock over the candy stand, trip the nuns, hurl garbage over the balcony, and that’s why you have cops. But now the federal government is extending the frontiers of terror with the Military Commissions Act, legalizing torture and suspending habeas corpus and constructing a loose web of law by which you and I could be hung by our ankles in a meat locker for as long as somebody deems necessary.
“Any person is punishable … who knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States,” the law states, and when it comes to deciding what “knowingly and intentionally” might mean, or who is the enemy, that’s for a military commission to decide in secret, with or without you present. No Fifth Amendment; hearsay evidence admissible; no judicial review.

People came to America to escape this sort of justice. The midnight knock on the door, incarceration at the whim of men in shiny boots, confessions obtained with a section of hose, secret trial by Star Chamber.

Not that this is a bad thing. Who am I to say? Maybe we’ve been too lenient with enemies of the state. A period of stark repression might be a rich and rewarding experience for all of us. But when the Current Occupant signed the bill last week, the difference between freedom and terror did suddenly shrink somewhat. It makes you wonder: What if Dick Cheney does not wish to give up power two years from now? Maybe he has other priorities. If an enemy of the United States – a Democrat, for example – appeared to be on the verge of election, perhaps Mr. Cheney, for the good of the country, will be forced to take the threat seriously and head for an undisclosed location and invoke his war powers and shovel a few thousand traitors into camps and call up his friends at Diebold and program the election results that are best for the country – or call the whole thing off.

OK by me if it’s OK by you. I don’t imagine that coffee sales will be affected or that Paris Hilton will be, like, “Whoa, this is so not cool,” and, like, text-message her buds to join her on a hunger strike. The greeters at Wal-Mart will still smile, and the football season will go on. They might flash a bulletin at halftime, “Terror Threat Forces Postponement of Election,” and most people would be OK with that. If Mr. Cheney thinks it necessary to suspend the Constitution for a while, surely he has his reasons.

They won’t have to torture me to get a good confession. I am a professional writer of fiction, and if they turn the bright lights on yours truly, beans will spill by the bushel, names will be named. Everybody who ever done me wrong, I am going to implicate them up to their dewlaps. A trial with hearsay evidence allowed and no cross-examination is tailor-made for a novelist.

Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.

Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun

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Published on Thursday, September 7 by The Baltamore Sun
by Garrison Keillor

Growing up in the ’50s, we imagined our country defended by guided missiles poised in bunkers, jet fighters on the tarmac and pilots in the ready room prepared to scramble, a colonel with a black briefcase sitting in the hall outside the president’s bedroom, but Sept. 11 gave us a clearer picture. We have a vast array of hardware, a multitude of colonels, a lot of bureaucratic confusion, and a nation vulnerable to attack.

The Federal Aviation Administration has now acknowledged that the third of the four planes seized by the 19 men with box cutters had already hit the Pentagon before the FAA finally called there to say there was a problem. The FAA lied to the 9/11 commission about this, then took two years to ascertain the facts – a 51-minute gap in defense – and released the finding on the Friday before Labor Day, an excellent burial site for bad news.

So America is not the secure fortress we grew up imagining. Perhaps it never was. What protects us is what has protected us for 230 years: our magnificent isolation. After the disasters of the 20th century, Europe put nationalism aside and adopted civilization, but we have oceans on either side, so if the president turns out to be a shallow, jingoistic fool with a small, rigid agenda and little knowledge of the world, we expect to survive it somehow. Life goes on.
It’s hard for Americans to visualize the collapse of our country. It’s as unthinkable as one’s own demise. Europeans are different: They’ve seen disaster, even the British. They know it was a near thing back in 1940. My old Danish mother-in-law remembered the occupation clearly 40 years later and was teary-eyed when she talked about it. Francis Scott Key certainly could envision the demise of the United States in 1814 when he watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry. Abraham Lincoln was haunted by the thought. We are not, apparently, though five years ago we saw a shadow.

We really are one people at heart. We all believe that when thousands of people are trapped in the Superdome without food or water, it is the duty of government, the federal government if necessary, to come to their rescue and to restore them to the civil mean and not abandon them to fate. Right there is the basis of liberalism. Conservatives tried to introduce a new idea – it’s your fault if you get caught in a storm – and this idea was rejected by nine out of 10 people once they saw the pictures. The issue is whether we care about people who don’t get on television.
Last week, I sat and listened to a roomful of parents talk about their battles with public schools in behalf of their children who suffer from dyslexia, or apraxia, or ADD, or some other disability – sagas of ferocious parental love vs. stonewall bureaucracy in the quest for basic, needful things – and how some of them had uprooted their families and moved to Minnesota so their children could attend better schools. You couldn’t tell if those parents were Republicans or Democrats. They simply were prepared to move mountains so their kids could have a chance. So are we all.
And that’s the mission of politics: to give our kids as good a chance as we had. They say that liberals have run out of new ideas – it’s like saying that Christians have run out of new ideas. Maybe the old doctrine of grace is good enough.

I don’t get much hope from Democrats these days, a timid and skittish bunch, slow to learn, unable to sing the hymns and express the steady optimism that is at the heart of the heart of the country. I get no hope at all from Republicans, whose policies seem predicated on the Second Coming occurring in the very near future.

If Jesus does not descend through the clouds to take them directly to paradise, and do it now, they are going to have to answer to the rest of us.

Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.

Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun