sff_corgi_lj | Once again, Garrison Keillor shows why he's The Man With the Words. (Reply)

He put his finger exactly on something that's been bothering me for some time - in Salon, here:

...It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland. It's an alien term, like Fatherland or Deutschland or Tomorrowland. Irving Berlin didn't write "God Bless Our Homeland." You never heard John Wayne say, "Men, we're going over that hill and we're going to kick those krauts out of there. And we're going to raise the flag of the homeland."
"Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland -- ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old USA.
But they couldn't call it the Department of National Security because there was one of those already, so they created this new Achtung bureau to make us take off our shoes and put the toothpaste in the checked luggage and dump the coffee.... (read the rest)