Garrison Keillor: Making a case for simple life in a small town

…You look at the Amish and you see the past, but you might also be looking at the future. Our great-grandchildren, faced with facts their ancestors were able to ignore, might have to do without the internal-combustion engine and figure out how to live the subsistence life. Maybe someone will invent a car that runs on hydrogen or horse manure, or maybe people will travel on beams of light like in old radio serials, but the realist in you thinks otherwise.

Fred Thompson, a vanity candidate for president, goes around sneering at the notion of global warming, pointing out that Mars is heating up too, but nobody who has read the scientists’ latest report on climate change is in a joking mood: It says that the situation will get a good deal worse before it gets better, if it ever gets better, and nobody knows just what “worse” means in this case.

The matter of greenhouse gases has to be addressed, and it won’t be while the country is stuck in the disaster that is Iraq. The way to get unstuck is for some intrepid Republicans to get off the bus and put their shoulders to it and push. It needs to back up. The Current Occupant has driven it into a mudhole and is spinning the tires. Human lives are being tossed away carelessly, a country is bleeding, and the big man behind the desk is dishonest, incoherent and incompetent. He might do well as mayor of this little town, but he might also turn the water department over to his buddy from high school and order the police to search the cars of visitors.

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