As always, your poetry doesn't obscure your message, and Salon is lucky to have you.

This time you really hit it on the nail.

"...both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were."

That's why a rich kid from Maine can get into the Texas National Guard and still pass himself off as a war hero compared to an acutal war hero. It's the same reason said rich kid can pretend to be a cowboy and get the votes of actual cowboys. It's why their are christians who care more about the Old Testament then their are who care about the New Testament. Obama will not get these people's votes because he doesn't hate gays and muslims, McCain can pretend to be that kind of christian and he will.

If and when Obama loses this election, I seriously think that Keillor is going to find some Norwegian woman for his fifth or sixth wife and move back to the land of the midnight sun.

This kind of rant can only be the product of his serious concern about Obama's fading prospects. After all, Keillor is too honest as a writer to pretend to be an expert about most things, and there's no reason to think that he's got some sort of principled policy dispute that makes him produce such hate-speech about McCain.

What it is, is Keillor's lingering, wandering, Bush-hatred. A Bush-hatred so deep and profound that GK may be beginning to wonder where it will go after next January. It isn't politics, or business as usual. It's personal. The notion that George W. Bush could have done so much that GK never did (prep school, Yale, a Harvard graduate degree, flew a fighter jet, had a dad who was The President), and now threatens to produce a Reagan-like record in history (two terms in office, and successfully delivering the White House to his party upon his exiting the White House) must drive Keillor crazy. And to think that it happened to a guy who has genuine disdain and disregard for everything that Keillor holds so dear; the New York Times, the New Yorker, Manhattan, the warm and fuzzy parts of church life in America, literature...

Garrison Keillor is worried that McCain will win, and it will be a re-confirmation of the past eight years. Keillor's taxes won't go up under McCain, and they probably won't go down, either, with a Democratic Congress. The war in Afghanistan won't be any different. The security of Iraq won't be much different. Almost inarguably, Iraq will be more secure and more stable under McCain. McCain won't appoint the kinds of judges that Obama would, but what does that mean to GK? How often does he get sued by shareholders? Does he fear "literary malpractice" lawsuits? Please don't expect me that Garrsion Keillor is worried, in anything other than a cocktail-party kind of way, about offshore drilling, or capital gains taxes, or school choice, or any bailout for GSE lenders.

You see, Garrison Keillor's rage can't be explained rationally. It is all about him. Him, and the Current Occupant. That's not much of a mandate for the next four years.

That someone could care about issues that don't directly affect them individually, I mean? Why do you have to make elaborate speculations of someone's motives for professing to care about the future? He has children, for one thing, and even if he didn't he would still care about the future because he is a caring human being. So many people have a cold and lonely existence because they can't bring themselves to care about what doesn't directly affect them. I understand that it's scary, but trying to keep that urge to care alive is part of remaining a whole person, isn't it?

Don't even joke. It is WAY too hard for Elephantman to imagine that a person might care about issues that don't directly affect them. That's like asking a snake to imagine what it must be like as a mouse, as it's about to eat the mouse.

As I cycle through my Riverboat Gambler phase again I am near tears of joy after having read this just about perfect bit of observation on our great, wondrous and must perplexing country. Sweet Jesus, how do you do that? From the Lost Downtown to the fact that Lost Downtown contains the Lost Freestanding Department Store, to seersucker suits and bow-ties to the types of specimens (and I'm sure this is what got Elephantman going) who wear those getups, or at least used to (and I remember them with a sense of joyous horror), to (my digression here) insurance salesman-turned politico, probably someone who looked a lot like the guy who hunt-and-pecked the brief for the prosecution of the Rosenbergs, and who is now occupying the pale, near-translucent body (and brain) of Mad John McCain as he tries desperately to knock Mister Obama's tophat off with a snowball -- in high summer, yet.

God, give me this once a week and I'm good to go. We've got it made. This is a country in which such a surreal skit is possible on the public stage, and it is, at once, the country which gave us, among such luminaries as Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce, one Garrison Keillor.

This is a nation dreamed up by Salvador Dali with soundtrack by Ornette Coleman. The universe has truly blessed us with both the genius writers and the bizarre-yet-true stories to tell us.

Huzzah, sir!

That's what I meant. Glasses got all steamed up....

A beautiful piece of work, thanks so much. But let's not all dump on Elephantman. He read the column ... he read the column ... thank the lord for small mercies ... and some of it is bound to go in and do the dude good. This is how, over la longue duree, people are changed.

It's not so amazing - it's called 'projection', a defined psychological concept in which a person accuses others of the very qualities despised in themselves. It's the essence of hypocrisy and self-delusion. It's why Jesus said to take the timber out of your own eye before you criticize the mote in another's.