The Right believes that if you throw enough mud, some will stick, and if you characterize health care reform as an evil plot by one-eyed space aliens, you can defeat the thing. The fact is that there are 40 million uninsured Americans and soon, if nothing is done, there will be more. This is a moral dilemma, the same as if habeas corpus only applied east of the Mississippi or that green-eyed children will only be educated through the sixth grade. Not acceptable in the country I live in. And it's up to people who care about the common good not to be scared off.
The Right is operating in the grand old irreverent American middle-finger spirit of contrarianism. The kids who drive country roads busting mailboxes with baseball bats express the same freewheeling spirit, and the computer hackers and graffiti artists and every conscientious rock 'n' roll band for the past 50 years.
But the price of being an angry jerk is that nobody wants to invite you over for supper except your mother, and even she feels a little uneasy. It's simple: The anonymous bums in the bleachers can abuse the umpire, but the players can't because they have numbers on their backs. Bold contrarians get thrown out of the game. The American people, by and large, don't admire wackos. A few wacko congressmen can't do much harm, but you wouldn't want them on the county board. You want sober people who can add and subtract. And you don't want one to marry your sister.
The angry guy in a lather about Mr. Obama to the exclusion of rational thought will have to go to the weenie roast alone, and nobody is going to dance with him except out of pure pity, and I'm not sure he's going to enjoy that.
Garrison Keillor's column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is oldscout@prairiehome.us.
