If there isn’t already a Committee to Horse-Whip Garrison Keillor, somebody should start one.

His latest column isn’t much of a departure from his usual admixture of cringe-inducing sanctimony and overbearing sweetness of the sort that would cause immediate cavities if it weren’t saccharine. But, ye gods, the loathsomeness is turned up to 11 in this one. For starters, the woes of riding federally subsidized mass transit:

… Penn Station, America’s ugliest waiting area, made uglier by Amtrak’s infernal blockheadedness. It is a lovely thought, passenger rail service, but Amtrak has an uncanny ability to take a few hundred ordinary Americans and make them feel like refugees. One moment you’re in New York, 2008, and the next you’re in Warsaw, 1939, trying to squeeze aboard the last train to Sweden.

Warsaw, 1939? This is a particularly ugly violation of Godwin’s Law; bebopping around the country, in part on the taxpayers’ dime, is not very much like fleeing a Nazi invasion. Not very much at all. Keillor prefers the subway, but his preening faux folksiness goes into overdrive underground:

New York in July, hot and breezy, the smell of pizza and coffee in the air, and on the subway one is surrounded by women in light summer dresses, the bare shoulders of elegant young urban women whose shoulders tell you they never toted barges or lifted bales, never laid eyes on a barge or a bale …

Lifting bales? You know who lifts bales these days? Fellow by the name of John Deere:

But in the imaginary world inhabited by Keillor, who probably hasn’t lifted anything heavier than money in twenty years, Middle America is full of young ladies sporting Stallone shoulders because of all the time they spend throwing around bales. You know, Republicans decent small-town types.

But this being Keillor, this column isn’t really about the implicit joys of hay-baling or how riding Amtrak is like fleeing the Holocaust, it’s about the decay of … “our sacred institutions!” Whenever one reads Garrison Keillor writing about our sacred, government-subsidized institutions, it bears keeping in mind the government-subsidized institution that made him a millionaire: “public” broadcasting. In spite of living a short distance from New York’s Central Park (you didn’t think he actually spends his time in those claustrophobic small towns he romanticizes, did you?) Keillor apparently missed the memo that the park has became a safe place to hang out, thanks in no small part to the efforts of a short-fused Republican mayor; for Keillor, Central Park is a metaphor for the whole country, and the predators who used to rob, rape, and maim there are a lot like conservatives in Washington, in his view:

Why does a great city surrender this beautiful turf to predators real or imagined? And why should you and I surrender our beloved country to the predators who’ve plundered our sacred institutions in the name of conservatism? We have come to accept torture as American policy, accept the prison state and the loss of civil liberties, accept the privatization of public service, one blow to civility after another.

Imagine, if you can, the sort of mind it takes to believe that a successful, publicly subsidized entertainer, traveling between million-dollar homes, including a perch on the Upper West Side, free to move about, speak, publish, and criticize as he pleases, is the resident of a “prison state”? And that privatizing a government program (especially one that doesn’t work very well, cf. Amtrak, for Pete’s sake) constitutes a violation of the “sacred”? (And, given that the moneychangers-in-the-temple theme has particular resonance for the likes of Keillor, isn’t it a violation of the “sacred” to parley a media presence subsidized by the sacred state into a tacky jewelry-and-T-shirt business?) How exactly does one lose one’s sense of perspective so comprehensively?

So a guy who wants to engage in promiscuous Nazi metaphors, compare those who disagree with him politically to murderers and rapists, and enrich himself while enjoying the largess of “public” broadcasting, ends, of course, with a call for civility. The word “keillor” should denote a unit of measure for hypocrisy.