We have a good guy in the White House, a smart man of judicious temperament and profound ideals, a man with a sweet private life, a man of dignity and good humor, whose enemies, waving their hairy arms and legs, woofing, yelling absurdities, only make him look taller. Washington, being a company town, feasts on gossip, but I think the Democratic Party, skittish as it is, full of happy blather, somehow has brought forth a champion. This should please anyone who loves this country, and as for the others, let them chew on carpets and get what nourishment they can. End of sermonette.
The beauty part of my week (not that you asked) was a visit to the warehouse district north of downtown Minneapolis where, in my boyhood, I used to ride my bike past printing plants and barrelworks, small factories, a slaughterhouse, lumberyards, auto salvage yards, fascinated by the sight of men at work, and where, now, a new ballpark has arisen where, on April 12, though we are still knee-deep in snow, the Minnesota Twins will open the 2010 campaign, against the mighty Red Sox and their nation.
On Monday I snuck into the park through a door left ajar and attached myself to a group of suits on tour and got to see the whole joint, the steep left-field bleachers, the spruce trees in deep center, the skyboxes (each with a porch, so the nabobs can get fresh air), down to the locker room (with batting cage and pitching machine nearby, just like at a carnival), the spot where the statue of Killebrew will stand, and to me, a skeptic when it comes to public works, this looks to be the Eighth Wonder of the World, a temple on the order of Wrigley or Fenway or the Acropolis, a beautiful little bandbox of a ballpark tucked snugly into streets of old warehouses and the Burlington railyards, with commuter trains running to its front door, a sight that fills me with unmitigated dizzy delight.
We Minnesotans have been watching baseball in a basement for 28 years, under a fabric dome on a plastic field designed for football, and come April, we'll be sitting in sunlight, or under the stars, with the handsome towers of downtown Minneapolis just beyond center field, and we'll mill on the great concourse just behind the loge seats and eyeball the game while ordering a steak sandwich or an old-fashioned Schweigert hot dog. Hallelujah. Wowser.
That this beauty was accomplished through public financing -- $392 million of the $544 million total paid through a sales tax approved by the Legislature -- is some sort of triumph, and to an old Democrat like me, who believes that government can indeed do some good things right and is not a blight upon the land, this ballpark is an enormous pleasure, and so I headed south to my favorite medical clinic to make sure I'd live until Opening Day.
Southern Minnesota was fully swathed in snow. I listened to the Beatles' "White Album" on the way down to Rochester, past miles of small farms where people live by stern realities that don't forgive mistakes easily, listening to playful music ("Why Don't We Do It in the Road," "Rocky Raccoon," etc.) from back when I was a bright young thing, before I got ponderous and hoofy. At the clinic I was tapped and bled and X-rayed and examined and some barnacles were removed by freezing with liquid nitrogen, and that was all good. When you hang out at a medical clinic, you notice the thoughtful people around you sitting in prayerful silence, and you see scenes of pure marital devotion, a healthy mobile spouse pushing an immobilized one, and the banter of camaraderie of the long married, though one is in dire straits and the other apparently not. The stern realities of life, for all to see.
And then I was sprung loose. They opened the gate and slapped my haunch and I raced north toward the city, toward April 12, toward spring and summer and the bright future of the beloved country. It was during "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" that I smelled the skunk. He expressed himself powerfully, richly, for almost a mile. Nothing says spring like a big stink. A Republican skunk protesting big government, and he got in the way of a big vehicle that knocked him out of this world, and I wish his species well but did not stop for the memorial service.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Ever since that night in June when we filed onto the football field in our mortarboards and gowns and the distinguished speaker (what was his name?) informed us that we were entering a time of rapid and unparalleled change, we've been waiting and hoping, but here we are, all grown up, and the same soupy music is dripping from the ceilings of lobbies, the internal combustion engine rules the land, ditto the hamburger, fashion is retro, movies tend to be remakes, and Congress is more like itself than it ever was before. The same stuffed peppers are harrumphing and pontificating and posing for photos with the 4-H'ers and the winners of the 2010 Western Regional Wiener Eating Contest and reading prepared statements on C-SPAN denouncing folks who would throw grandmothers down the stairs and meanwhile hustling the money and working the angles and keeping their eyes focused on their very own tasseled loafers.
When Al Franken ran for the Senate, people questioned his credentials, but good grief, people, comedy is hard work compared to harrumphing. It takes brains and elegance and courage to make people laugh. A comedian who joins the Senate has taken a step down on the social scale and everybody knows it.
Congress needs to do a few simple, sensible things just to show us they are alert and on the job. Could we start by passing a resolution ordering the Transportation Security Administration to immediately cease the P.A. announcements in airports warning people against accepting packages from persons unknown to carry aboard an aircraft?
This is an insult to the American traveler. It's like telling people to please not approach the security checkpoint at a fast trot while yelling "Allah is great." People know not to do this. If they are likely to accept a box from a stranger who wants them to carry it to Denver and mail it, then they should not be traveling around unescorted.
Unparalleled change? I don't see it. You walk into an icy-chill shopping mall in the middle of July and imagine the consequences of all that refrigeration, our descendants living in an arid country, living in abandoned office parks by the ruins of freeways and wondering how their ancestors could have been so dense. Nothing new about selfishness, nor about paranoia: For the rest of our lives we will be removing our shoes and waiting on the other side of the scanner while a nice woman wipes our laptop with a swab and puts it into an expensive machine to test for plastic explosives, meanwhile our children go to school at 6 a.m. to save money on buses and they doze through history and algebra.
Our healthcare system could be fixed by smart public-spirited people in a weekend, but in our current democracy it is very hard to budge the blockade, and things may need to get much worse and Republicans be boosted back into power and they can propose the very same legislation they are adamantly opposed to now and the system will change a little bit.
Unreality remains pretty much the same, and its appeal in politics is as strong as ever. Look at the recent powwow of the conservative choir in Washington. Their goal is to reduce government to where it was in Coolidge's time. They are sticking to this, though their presidents, Reagan and Bush II, only succeeded in enlarging government. As for their foreign policy, it's the old Flag In Your Face, Nuke The Whales, Talk Loud, Walk Tall, Proud To Be Dumb & Who Gives A Rip Anyway, Republican bravado that's all for domestic consumption and makes perfect sense if you're a shut-in and your TV is locked on Fox News but not if you are ambulatory and able to read English.
Meanwhile, our president, who is more or less forced to live in the real world, has seen his numbers drop alarmingly because unreality is so beautiful to so many people, such as the tea baggers. The conservatives should, in all decency, lie low for a few years. When you've driven the car into the swamp -- up to our eyeballs in debt, fighting two wars on behalf of shaky regimes, trying to keep a lid on Iran, Congress in a frozen stupor -- and then you throw mudballs at the tow-truck driver, you are betting on the electorate having the memory of a guppy. You can parade up and down stark naked and pretend it's very fine silk and fool a lot of people, but eventually word will get around.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
If you wake up in the morning with the blues because people treat you mean, you could sing a song about it, or you could shop around for an enormous conspiracy that has denied you your constitutional right to liberty and happiness -- and how about Central Standard Time? What gives the feds the right to set your clock for you? It's tyranny.
So you join the Free Time movement. You go to meetings. You tune in "The Bob Glenn Show" every day on Fox for your marching orders and set your clock as you darn well please and feel liberated from lockstep uniformity.
Before, you were worried about your novelty taxidermy business and the declining sales of mummified mice on tiny surfboards, but now that it's gone under, thanks to Obama's bank bailout, and you lost your mansion on Wyandotte Lane and Joan took the kids to Toledo and you moved into a studio rental, you have time to write scorching letters to authorities and attend Free Time rallies and go to the shooting range preparing for the Revolution.
You used to be a Republican, a Kiwanian, a Presbyterian, a go-along get-along kind of guy, but now, at age 62, you've awakened from decades of indifference -- which, you now know, was caused by chemicals the Department of Agriculture puts into snack foods to induce torpor, and so you only eat dried organic veggies ordered from a Patriot company in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho -- and you are filled with enormous energy. You join the good fight on all fronts. You are anti-union, opposed to the eight-hour workday, the 24-hour clock, the Gregorian calendar and the New York Times.
You don't necessarily agree with all the other Free Timers, e.g., the religious wing that says Only God Can Know The Time and is opposed to the use of the future tense, or the wing that believes Barack Obama is using metal detectors at airport security checkpoints to program the minds of all who pass through, but these minor differences disappear in the joyful enthusiasm of the rallies and marches, which focus on Washington's attempts to rule our daily lives and its indifference to you and to others in the novelty taxidermy business.
Meanwhile, your health insurance runs out and your gut hurts and it takes you 20 minutes to empty your bladder. You go to the E.R., but they want to check your prostate and you happen to know, thanks to Bob, that the digital prostate exam is how the CIA inserts GPS chips into Patriots to monitor their movements, and so you go home and suffer.
And then the New York Times publishes a big story about the Free Time movement. All your fellow Patriots are thrilled. Sarah Palin is quoted as saying that the movement has raised important questions and that we must look to God for answers and put our clocks in His hands. David Broder says Free Time is an authentic voice of grass-roots anger. The chairman of the Republican National Committee meets with Free Time leaders and is "deeply impressed." Democrats, meanwhile, are silent, confused, disheartened by the fact that Free Time has a 23 percent approval rating in some polls.
But in your own heart, you know that the crest has passed. Once the Times has recognized you, you're on the way down. It's the kiss of irrelevance. Meanwhile, your old friends avoid you, your own mother doesn't call. You've burned through your savings and Joan is talking divorce.
And then a job offer. Teaching science to middle-schoolers, $900 a week through June 10. Your brother the school board liberal twisted an arm and you have two hours in which to decide. Congress doesn't care what you do, neither does the president. Will you continue donating your life to Bob, or will you be a dad to your kids? They miss you. You may be a wingnut, but your kids don't care about that. They love you deep down in their hearts, Daddy, and they always will.
And that's what you're going to do, pal. I've been there. I know.
I was with Che Guevara in Bolivia, selling T-shirts and fomenting revolution, and I got the offer to write a weekly column and had to decide: Do I want to die in the jungle and become an icon, or would I rather live in Minnesota and enjoy macaroni and cheese and quarter-pounders with cheese and deep-fried cheese curds. Call me a coward but I chose cheese.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc
It is a large moment for Democrats, learning to stick with a good man through a rough period when the people who crave disillusionment have become disillusioned. It's like a winter vacation in the Caribbean when it rains buckets and you eat some bad shellfish and a shrieky teenager says you've ruined her life forever. You smile, take a shower and organize a volleyball game. You have to work at it. It's work.
We the people are fond of hustlers and slick operators and the reverend with the diamond-studded Rolex and Sarah Palin slipping into Nashville and collecting a hundred grand for a 40-minute speech of no distinction whatsoever ("I'm so proud to be an American. Happy birthday, Ronald Reagan") to a roomful of happy tea partiers. You didn't have to pore over it line by line to know that no work went into it: It was butterscotch pudding made from a box, add hot water and stir.
History does not record that Samuel Adams charged a fee for addressing the rally at the Old South Meeting House on Nov. 29, 1773, at which he rallied the Sons of Liberty to resist the British, leading to the Boston Tea Party. But that was then and this is now.
Miss Sarah knows where the cameras are, and she has pizzazz, and the tea partiers whooped and yelled for her standard Republican stump speech, which is like paying $750 for a hotel room and finding no clean towels and a lot of dead cockroaches and then circling Excellent Excellent Excellent on the customer questionnaire.
Well, this is the country we live in. Hard work is not held in such high esteem as it once was. Look at Warren Beatty. A recent biography claims that he slept with 12,755 women, which cannot possibly be true, but even if it were half that number, what a labor of love: the delicate work of seduction, the pats on the arm, the flattery, the exquisite timing of the kisses, then the zippers, the bra clasps, the stockings, and then the performance itself -- which, if you are Warren Beatty, will be judged by a higher standard than if you are Ralph Nader or Archbishop Tutu -- and then the obligatory post-coital glow in which you help the woman believe that this time, THIS time, was of all your many couplings the one that really zinged your strings and rang your chimes, and then coaxing the babe from your bed and into her clothes and into a cab, so you can freshen up in time for your 11:30 assignation.
Mr. Beatty, through his lawyer, says the number is not accurate. But the number 12,755 is out there, emblazoned in our memories. And so Mr. Beatty gets credit for work he did not do. A lazy Casanova who lets another man write his story and inflate the workload, and then, by denying the story through a lawyer, publicizes it further.
I know something about fiction, and I believe Mr. Beatty slept with 15 women, maybe 18, 25 tops, and considered himself lucky. But I admire him for creating this enormous legend.
And so did J.D. Salinger, may he rest in peace. No American author ever held onto such fame for so long for having done so little work. The junior members of the firm, John Updike and Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, were busy, busy, busy, year after year after year, while Mr. Salinger lounged in Cornish, famous for not wanting to be famous, and sales of his slender "Catcher in the Rye" kept chunking along, his slender "Nine Stories" and "Franny and Zooey" still adored by the faithful. What a perfect dodge for a guy who is tired of working so hard! You leave town in a huff and become a celebrity recluse and you get to spend 50 years enjoying leisurely breakfasts and maintaining your bird feeders while collecting buckets of royalties. And when you die, it's huge.
I still believe in hard work. It's more fun and it's a better way of life. I don't have much patience for Democrats who grab hold of defeat and find vindication there. They long to be a heroic voice in the wilderness, crying out against selfishness and cruelty and going nobly down to defeat, and for their obituaries to say they were visionaries and ahead of their time. I'd rather they were in their time and did the hard work.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
There they all were on the Sunday-morning chatfests, droning on about the anger of the American people as shown by the election in Massachusetts of a pickup truck to the U.S. Senate -- ever ready, as pundits are, to take one good story and extrude it into a national trend portentous with meaning. One could draw other conclusions from that election -- the importance of actually campaigning, for one, and not vacationing in the Caribbean -- but OK, maybe anger was a factor. Nobody looks on the marathon healthcare debate as a noble chapter in political science. No legislator is going to have a hospital named for him in honor of his heroic work. (Maybe a parking ramp.)
Meanwhile, one-sixth of our population is without health insurance, and Republicans have decided that defeating Mr. Obama is more important than the welfare of 50 million Americans: Let them die and decrease the surplus population and be quick about it. That's the long and the short of it. And now they have won a Senate seat in a Democratic stronghold and feel revived and are smelling the bacon and looking forward to November.
This is good. The midterms will require Republicans to decide who they are. Are they interested in unemployment, healthcare, banking regulation and the long-term health of the planet? Or are they just angry that a non-citizen and practicing Muslim got elected president so he could send death panels around to enslave us in the chains of Marxism?
Running on anger is not such a great idea. For one thing, it's hard to sustain if, God forbid, the economy springs back. And as Republicans well know, government does not change when you yell at it. The world doesn't run on slogans, it runs on paperwork. Federal agencies are full of old Reaganauts and Bushites in civil service positions who went to Washington with high ideals of making government smaller, but government can't get smaller, there being so many of them, and these conservative ideologues gradually turn into weary old bureaucrats with dandruff on their shoulders, same as the liberal ones.
Populism is a stiff liquor (Power to the People, Down With the Meritocracy, Into the Tumbrils with the Elitist Media), but in the end it fails to give you useful directions. In North Dakota, in the '30s, the populist Non-Partisan League took power and put their folks into state jobs, including running the insane asylum in Jamestown, and the poor inmates suffered at the hands of the People. So did universities suffer at the hands of students who took over campuses back in the day. It was fulfilling to sit in the president's big armchair and smoke his cigars, but then what? They had no idea what.
Be as anti-elitist as you like, but when the surgeon comes in to open up your skull to see what that big dark spot on the CT scan was, you don't want him to be wearing a humorous T-shirt ("Hey It IS Brain Surgery") and eating Jujubes. You board the DC-10 to London and you'd like to see a lean guy with a military-style crew cut, an overachiever, not a guy with hair in his eyes who is really, really into his own music. Your life may depend on an arrogant elitist who happens to know what he's doing.
I'm in Peoria as I write this, having just left Sheboygan, two factory towns (Caterpillar and Kohler) hit hard by the recession and by the southward migration of manufacturing, with plenty of "For Lease" signs on industrial buildings. And yet I haven't met anyone here who imagines that Obama is the cause of it all. There was a previous administration, during which regulation of banks and the securities trade was negligible, that had a hand in it, too.
Meanwhile, the lights are still on, beer is still coming out of the taps, and the genial gentlemen at the bar are talking about a big bump in corporate profits in 2010, maybe 25 percent. My heart was gladdened by an official-looking sign in the Milwaukee airport, just beyond the TSA checkpoint, hanging over where you put your shoes and coat back on and stuff your laptop back in the case: The sign said, "Recombobulation Area." The English language gains a new word. Recombobulate, America. Pull yourself together, tie your shoelaces, and if your pilot is wearing a button that says "To hell with the FAA," wait for the next flight.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
The tea partiers are enjoying their day in the sun, but coffee is the beverage preferred by most Americans, and we don't have time to gang up and holler and wave our arms -- we prefer to sit quietly with coffee in hand and read a reliable newspaper and try to figure out what's going on in the world. Great heaps of dead bodies are moved by front-loaders and dumped, uncounted, unidentified, into open pits in a stricken country while people feast and walk treadmills on enormous cruise ships sailing a hundred miles off the coast en route to the Bahamas and Jamaica. That's the real world, not the paranoid hallucinations of the right.
The problem for Democrats right now is that nobody can explain healthcare reform in plain English, 50 words or less. It's all too murky. The price of constructing this intricate web of compromises for the benefit of Republican senators (who then decided to quit the game and sit on their thumbs) is a bill with strange hair and ill-fitting clothes that you hesitate to bring home to Mother. Like all murky stuff, it is liable to strike people as dangerous or unreliable. And demagogues thrive in dim light.
The basic question is simple: Should healthcare be a basic right or is it a privilege for those who can afford it? Rush says it's a privilege -- pay or die -- and for his colonoscopy, they use a golden probe with a diamond tip, but most Americans agree that healthcare is basic, like education or decent roads or clean water. Holy Scripture would seem to point us in that direction. And yet the churches, so far as I can see, have chosen to stay aloof from this issue. Churches that feed the hungry and house the homeless dare not offend the conservatives in their midst by suggesting that we also tend the sick. And the opposition has beaten on garbage cans and whooped and yelled and alarmed the populace, which they're quite good at. These people look at a clear blue sky and see a conspiracy.
Arousing alarm is easy, teaching is tough. It takes patience and discipline to teach; any bozo can drop a book on the floor and make people jump. This is true even in Massachusetts. And in Nevada, where Sen. Harry Reid is facing a tough challenge in the fall.
Reid is the gentlest and most patient soul in the U.S. Senate and his presence there in a colony of bull walruses is a tribute to Nevada. He's a soft-spoken man from hardscrabble roots in the mining town of Searchlight who possesses Western honesty and openness and a degree of modesty startling for a senator, and if he goes down to defeat to some big bass drum, the Republic will be the poorer for it.
Sometimes you despair of common sense when you see an empty helmet like former Mayor Giuliani strutting up to the podium, or hear the Rev. Robertson opine on the earthquake in Haiti, or the lunatic congressman from Michigan who intimated that the president is somehow responsible for the Fort Hood massacre -- you just roll your eyes and hope these guys have friends who will take away the car keys.
Paranoia sells better in January than in November, however. And Sarah Palin was not elected vice-president, and she is not in the West Wing advising President McCain on foreign policy. It didn't happen. She is investing her windfall profits from the book about how the Eastern media beat up on her, but we the people decided she was not vice-presidential material. We don't choose our family doctor based on his ability to yodel, and we don't elect a woman vice-president because she's perky.
And your high school civics teacher would not have given you a high mark for saying, as the Rev. Robertson did, that the earthquake in Haiti was God's judgment on voodoo. God has tolerated voodoo in Washington for years and not seen fit to shake the city yet. Priests and mojo men dance around the Capitol every day, waving skulls on sticks, scattering their magic powders, trying to stop progress with a hex, and God is content to observe them. So do we coffee drinkers. Government is in the hands of realists and in the end we shall prevail.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Thoughts on Keillor’s Christmas Rant
For god's sake, don't become a "writer"
unpacking my life
Their Father is a Transsexual Woman
The plight of the single, middle-aged newcomer in Smalltown
