Can This Guy Craft A Sentence, Or What?

I should have read this essay a couple of weeks ago when Bruce Perry blogged a link to it, but for some reason I didn't. To be specific, "some reason" was that the author of the essay is Garrison Keillor. I can't explain why I've never really been a fan. That "folksy charm" of his doesn't work for me, I guess. But I've known deep down for a long time that he is a great writer, and this is great writing.

Bruce had mentioned that his sister sent him the link. My sister emailed me the text today. The first two sentences just sucked me in. The man can turn a phrase with the best of the. Right at the beginning, there's "pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships". And later on, "There is a stink drifting through this election year." Look at this beautiful monster of a sentence:

" The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. "

And this one:

" Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully. "

The next time an editor tells me -- or I tell myself, for that matter -- that I need to shorten my sentences, I'm pulling this essay out. It's not necessarily a matter of cutting down those monster sentences. If the writer is good enough, the sentence can go on forever. I know that I don't write as well as Garrison Keillor. Few do, but I sure want to.