Two days after

[dreamshark]

Garrison Keillor sums it up.
I don't always resonate with Garrison Keillor, but this essay pretty much nails it for me.

I got a very sweet email from my youngest nephew in Germany expressing condolences and offering sanctuary for my family if we want to flee the country. I appreciate the thought, but I think I'm actually more worried for Eastern Europe than I am for my own country. We'll muddle through at home somehow, but I'm afraid some other country is going to have to step into the Top Nation slot and beat back the Soviet menace. And it might well be Germany, which seems to have become the de facto leader of Europe. I can't say I'll miss being the Only Superpower. But I feel bad for the Ukraine and Lithuania and all the rest of the once and future Soviet Republic.

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Have you read this one?

http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/im-a-coastal-elite-from-the-midwest-the-real-bubble-is-rural-america

I still don't know what to do about it though. I don't think rural life is actually incompatible with liberal ideals. In fact, I think most liberal/progressive/Democratic platforms would benefit rural folks as well as urban. That's the message that's gone totally missing. Maybe Democrats need some good community organizations out there helping people in tangible ways and redeeming the term 'Democrat' from the vile epithet it has become for so many.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Richard's family in Benson never talks about politics at family gatherings. I assumed that this meant that a lot of them were right-wing Republicans that preferred to avoid conflict with the more liberal City Cousins. I finally realized that pretty much all of the immediate Tatge family had been voting staunchly Democratic since the Non Partisan League hooked up with the Democrats in the 1940s (did you know that the NPL started out in 1915 as a wing of the Republican party?). Ever since the networks started using those red/blue coded maps for Presidential elections, our state has showed a little island of blue in a sea of red counties in western Minnesota. That was Swift County, and sometimes Pope County as well.

Until this year. This year the whole state west of the twin cities was red. I don't know how the Tatges voted.