Supporters listen as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign stop at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum, Sunday, May 1, 2016, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. (photo: Darron Cummings/AP)
"Let the fearful and uneducated have their day - a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president."
11 November 16
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality.
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he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy
have won out, and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character
problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this
election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage
cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks. The
Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the
media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up” — we elitists just
stood and clapped. Nobody chanted “Stronger Together.” It just doesn’t
chant.
The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win
the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and
yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or
two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some
spotted owls. It was pleasure enough for them just to know that they
were driving us wild with dismay — by “us,” I mean librarians,
children’s authors, yoga practitioners, Unitarians, bird-watchers,
people who make their own pasta, opera-goers, the grammar police, people
who keep books on their shelves, that bunch. The Trumpers exulted in
knowing we were tearing our hair out. They had our number, like a bratty
kid who knows exactly how to make you grit your teeth and froth at the
mouth.
Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring
on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The
uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones, and they
will not like what happens next.
To all the patronizing B.S. we’ve read about Trump
expressing the white working-class’s displacement and loss of the
American Dream, I say, “Feh!” — go put your head under cold water.
Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity. America is still the
land where the waitress’s kids can grow up to become physicists and
novelists and pediatricians, but it helps a lot if the waitress and her
husband encourage good habits and the ambition to use your God-given
talents and the kids aren’t plugged into electronics day and night.
Whooping it up for the candidate of cruelty and ignorance does less than
nothing for your kids.
We liberal elitists are now completely in the clear.
The government is in Republican hands. Let them deal with him. Democrats
can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading
Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and
let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China
and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can
go for a long, brisk walk and smell the roses.
I like Republicans. I used to spend Sunday afternoons
with a bunch of them, drinking Scotch and soda and trying to care about
NFL football. It was fun. I tried to think like them. (Life is what you
make it. People are people. When the going gets tough, tough noogies.)
But I came back to liberal elitism.
Don’t be cruel. Elvis said it, and it’s true. We all
experienced cruelty back in our playground days — boys who beat up on
the timid, girls who made fun of the homely and naive — and most of us,
to our shame, went along with it, afraid to defend the victims lest we
become one of them. But by your 20s, you should be done with cruelty.
Mr. Trump was the cruelest candidate since George Wallace. How he won on
fear and bile is for political pathologists to study. The country is
already tired of his noise, even his own voters. He is likely to become
the most intensely disliked president since Herbert Hoover. His children
will carry the burden of his name. He will never be happy in his own
skin. But the damage he will do to our country — who knows? His
supporters voted for change, and boy, are they going to get it.
Back to real life. I went up to my home town the other
day and ran into my gym teacher, Stan Nelson, looking good at 96. He
commanded a landing craft at Normandy on June 6, 1944, and never said a
word about it back then, just made us do chin-ups whether we wanted to
or not. I saw my biology teacher Lyle Bradley, a Marine pilot in the
Korean War, still going bird-watching in his 90s. I was not a good
student then, but I am studying both of them now. They have seen it all
and are still optimistic. The past year of politics has taught us
absolutely nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada. The future is scary. Let the
uneducated have their day. I am now going to pay more attention to
teachers.
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