Showing posts with label garrison keillor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label garrison keillor. Show all posts
Aug 20, 2013
Let's Celebrate National Radio Day
Garrison Keillor is one of the pioneer for bringing back old-time radio show with his A Prairie Home Companion Show. Here's Fred Newman (sound effects) and Garrison Keillor:
Feb 4, 2009
Garrison Keillor: Bereft
Getting a note of appreciation from John Updike could buoy you up for weeks. Now who's left to bless us?
By Garrison Keillor
Feb. 4, 2009 | Ten a.m. A phone call from my daughter's school, and instantly the father's mind goes to Dark Foreboding, but no -- this is her teacher calling to say that the child scored 96 on the spelling test. The child's instant reward is the phone call home and the words of praise. She sits at her desk pretending not to listen, basking in the acclaim. Well done.
Having begotten a good speller is no small matter to a writer. Writing is an act of paying attention, and if you don't care about the difference between "their" and "there" or "needle" and "noodle," then I am sorry for you.
The teacher's praise of my child is a large moment in the day. I live with fear as any parent does. I know people who've gone through catastrophes -- schizophrenia, the suicide of a child -- the skin shrivels at the words, and so the life of a parent is one of constant wordless prayer. Today, my child scored 96 on spelling. A good day.
It has been a good winter with plentiful snow. The skiers are grateful, so are the men with snowblowers. The people who loathe winter are happy in their loathing and can practice the fine art of grumbling and grousing, and we who love a winter night can bundle up and walk the streets of St. Paul in the friendly lamplight past billows of snowdrifts and the houses concealing the lives of our neighbors, though of course we can speculate -- this unscraped sidewalk, is it not a sign of alcoholism? And I think of John Updike, who illuminated private lives and wrote so lovingly of the world, who called snowfall "an immense whispering" and compared a brilliant snowy day to overdeveloped film. Who re-created the backyards and clotheslines of small-town 1940s Pennsylvania and described the way a girl walked in the hall of high school carrying her books against her body, and in a great story, "My Father's Tears," three years ago in the New Yorker, he gave us his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform. Nothing was beneath his careful attention.
I saw him a year ago in New York, and my wife and I rode the subway with him from 155th Street down to 72nd, and he grinned all the way, a white-haired gent of 75 in a tan raincoat, like a boy going away to school, and a little nervous. As it turns out, that was my very last chance to tell him, standing above him, the train swaying, that "The Centaur" and the Rabbit Angstrom books are permanent masterpieces and also his Olinger stories, and I didn't tell him that. I opted to be cool. And then a gaggle of college kids boarded and crowded around him, not recognizing him, and in all that chatter and attitude, Updike sat soaking it all up. Material.
He was the great American man of letters of the second half of the 20th century, critic, poet, novelist, master of the short story, and a man of Lutheran virtues, cheerful, hardworking, self-deprecating, ever grateful for opportunity. He was a charming and generous interview though he claimed to dislike being interviewed. He was dark on the subject of celebrity -- "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face," he wrote. "As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen" -- but as a Famous American Writer, he was a champion, worthy to wear the belt.
He was the cheerfullest writer in the world. He mourned the loss of a wide readership -- he loathed the term "literary fiction," which seemed to quarantine serious writers like him (why not just call it "fiction you won't enjoy"?) -- but he was full of gratitude and appreciation. He was a great appreciator. And if John ever wrote you a note of appreciation for something you had written or done, it buoyed you up for weeks.
This is what the obituaries leave out. The giants fall and we leave them behind but who is left to bless us? Nobody. As long as John was in the world, you could imagine him calling up one morning and saying, "That was good. I liked that." And now the phone is dead. I feel bereft.
By Garrison Keillor
Feb. 4, 2009 | Ten a.m. A phone call from my daughter's school, and instantly the father's mind goes to Dark Foreboding, but no -- this is her teacher calling to say that the child scored 96 on the spelling test. The child's instant reward is the phone call home and the words of praise. She sits at her desk pretending not to listen, basking in the acclaim. Well done.
Having begotten a good speller is no small matter to a writer. Writing is an act of paying attention, and if you don't care about the difference between "their" and "there" or "needle" and "noodle," then I am sorry for you.
The teacher's praise of my child is a large moment in the day. I live with fear as any parent does. I know people who've gone through catastrophes -- schizophrenia, the suicide of a child -- the skin shrivels at the words, and so the life of a parent is one of constant wordless prayer. Today, my child scored 96 on spelling. A good day.
It has been a good winter with plentiful snow. The skiers are grateful, so are the men with snowblowers. The people who loathe winter are happy in their loathing and can practice the fine art of grumbling and grousing, and we who love a winter night can bundle up and walk the streets of St. Paul in the friendly lamplight past billows of snowdrifts and the houses concealing the lives of our neighbors, though of course we can speculate -- this unscraped sidewalk, is it not a sign of alcoholism? And I think of John Updike, who illuminated private lives and wrote so lovingly of the world, who called snowfall "an immense whispering" and compared a brilliant snowy day to overdeveloped film. Who re-created the backyards and clotheslines of small-town 1940s Pennsylvania and described the way a girl walked in the hall of high school carrying her books against her body, and in a great story, "My Father's Tears," three years ago in the New Yorker, he gave us his father bidding him goodbye on a train platform. Nothing was beneath his careful attention.
I saw him a year ago in New York, and my wife and I rode the subway with him from 155th Street down to 72nd, and he grinned all the way, a white-haired gent of 75 in a tan raincoat, like a boy going away to school, and a little nervous. As it turns out, that was my very last chance to tell him, standing above him, the train swaying, that "The Centaur" and the Rabbit Angstrom books are permanent masterpieces and also his Olinger stories, and I didn't tell him that. I opted to be cool. And then a gaggle of college kids boarded and crowded around him, not recognizing him, and in all that chatter and attitude, Updike sat soaking it all up. Material.
He was the great American man of letters of the second half of the 20th century, critic, poet, novelist, master of the short story, and a man of Lutheran virtues, cheerful, hardworking, self-deprecating, ever grateful for opportunity. He was a charming and generous interview though he claimed to dislike being interviewed. He was dark on the subject of celebrity -- "Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face," he wrote. "As soon as one is aware of being 'somebody,' to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen" -- but as a Famous American Writer, he was a champion, worthy to wear the belt.
He was the cheerfullest writer in the world. He mourned the loss of a wide readership -- he loathed the term "literary fiction," which seemed to quarantine serious writers like him (why not just call it "fiction you won't enjoy"?) -- but he was full of gratitude and appreciation. He was a great appreciator. And if John ever wrote you a note of appreciation for something you had written or done, it buoyed you up for weeks.
This is what the obituaries leave out. The giants fall and we leave them behind but who is left to bless us? Nobody. As long as John was in the world, you could imagine him calling up one morning and saying, "That was good. I liked that." And now the phone is dead. I feel bereft.
Dec 2, 2008
Garrison Keillor: What were you thinking?
This is a really funny essay. It talks about the recent men's-room sex between two drunken football fans. What were they thinking? They weren't thinking and Keillor nicely makes fun of the situation.
Midwesterners usually go south to misbehave, not to the handicapped stall in a Minneapolis men's room at halftime.
Dec. 3, 2008 | I've been trying not to think about the man and woman from Iowa who had sex in the men's room at the Iowa-Minnesota football game in Minneapolis a week ago and to think about the environment instead, or the future of American fiction, but it is hard to put something like lavatory sex out of your mind. And the environmental impact is slight. Some paper towels, that's about it.
The Iowans apparently did not know each other until they got really, really drunk and ran into each other on the concourse. Probably their shared Iowaness in enemy territory was an initial bond -- Minnesotans tell the same jokes about Iowans that used to be told about Polish people -- and they were a little happy about the fact that the Hawkeyes were walloping the Gophers (55-0 was the final score), and somehow the 38-year-old woman and the 26-year-old guy wound up in a handicapped stall in a men's room and had intercourse, which drew a crowd who cheered them on.
They were interrupted by a security man who spotted two pairs of feet under the partition and saw underwear on the floor and called police, who arrested them for indecent conduct, a misdemeanor, and released the male perp to the custody of his girlfriend and the woman to her husband. That is mostly all we know, except that the woman has told reporters, "It's ruined my life," which is pretty much what a nice Midwestern lady should say after she's gotten drunk and had sex in public with a complete stranger. It shows good manners. You can't have drunken public sex with a stranger and say, "I don't know what got into me!" You are supposed to sit in the ashes and rock back and forth for a while.
Midwesterners have always needed to go elsewhere to misbehave and so when people head south to Florida or Arizona in January, purportedly for the warm weather, we know better. "Warm weather for what?" we ask. Public sex, most likely.
This is one area of life that American literature needs to explore. You read about the Iowans and you think, "I would never do such a thing as that. No no no no no no no." And it's the job of the novelist to create empathy and to write this story so as to put the reader into the toilet stall with a heart full of passion and his or her drawers on the floor.
I'm going to put them at a Minnesota Orchestra concert instead of a football game. He's there with a girlfriend he's trying to break up with. He's had two glasses of Merlot at dinner. Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" is the opener, and at intermission he brushes against a lady in the lobby and quickly apologizes, and she says, "Are you thinking the same thing I am?" He is. Men always are. "I said to myself during the Stravinsky," she says, "that I would offer myself to the first man who touches me." This is OK by him.
She leads him into the women's john and into a stall, and she says, "I never did this before," and he says he never did either, and the two of them have wild sex and it is magical, it is stupendous, until 50 women waiting for a stall start shrieking, "Hey, there was a line!" and pound on the door and security comes running and pulls them apart and they're arrested, and there's shame, of course, being led by police through a crowd of the sensitive and genteel ("They did what? You're kidding!"), but also pride -- they crossed a line and it feels brave and good and also it's their ticket to something better. He was National Guard but now he's thinking about acting school. She's thinking she'll write a memoir called "Lavatory of Love."
All very believable, but there's one detail I can't quite get my head around. Midwesterners I know would not, even if three sheets to the wind and overwhelmed by hormones, use a handicapped stall to have sex in, just as we would never have sex in a car parked in a handicapped spot. It's a basic taboo. The adultery we cannot approve of, the drunkenness is immature, sex with a stranger is definitely sketchy, but the handicapped stall is beyond the pale. As your mother would say, "How could you do it? What were you thinking?"
Source: Salon.com
Midwesterners usually go south to misbehave, not to the handicapped stall in a Minneapolis men's room at halftime.
Dec. 3, 2008 | I've been trying not to think about the man and woman from Iowa who had sex in the men's room at the Iowa-Minnesota football game in Minneapolis a week ago and to think about the environment instead, or the future of American fiction, but it is hard to put something like lavatory sex out of your mind. And the environmental impact is slight. Some paper towels, that's about it.
The Iowans apparently did not know each other until they got really, really drunk and ran into each other on the concourse. Probably their shared Iowaness in enemy territory was an initial bond -- Minnesotans tell the same jokes about Iowans that used to be told about Polish people -- and they were a little happy about the fact that the Hawkeyes were walloping the Gophers (55-0 was the final score), and somehow the 38-year-old woman and the 26-year-old guy wound up in a handicapped stall in a men's room and had intercourse, which drew a crowd who cheered them on.
They were interrupted by a security man who spotted two pairs of feet under the partition and saw underwear on the floor and called police, who arrested them for indecent conduct, a misdemeanor, and released the male perp to the custody of his girlfriend and the woman to her husband. That is mostly all we know, except that the woman has told reporters, "It's ruined my life," which is pretty much what a nice Midwestern lady should say after she's gotten drunk and had sex in public with a complete stranger. It shows good manners. You can't have drunken public sex with a stranger and say, "I don't know what got into me!" You are supposed to sit in the ashes and rock back and forth for a while.
Midwesterners have always needed to go elsewhere to misbehave and so when people head south to Florida or Arizona in January, purportedly for the warm weather, we know better. "Warm weather for what?" we ask. Public sex, most likely.
This is one area of life that American literature needs to explore. You read about the Iowans and you think, "I would never do such a thing as that. No no no no no no no." And it's the job of the novelist to create empathy and to write this story so as to put the reader into the toilet stall with a heart full of passion and his or her drawers on the floor.
I'm going to put them at a Minnesota Orchestra concert instead of a football game. He's there with a girlfriend he's trying to break up with. He's had two glasses of Merlot at dinner. Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" is the opener, and at intermission he brushes against a lady in the lobby and quickly apologizes, and she says, "Are you thinking the same thing I am?" He is. Men always are. "I said to myself during the Stravinsky," she says, "that I would offer myself to the first man who touches me." This is OK by him.
She leads him into the women's john and into a stall, and she says, "I never did this before," and he says he never did either, and the two of them have wild sex and it is magical, it is stupendous, until 50 women waiting for a stall start shrieking, "Hey, there was a line!" and pound on the door and security comes running and pulls them apart and they're arrested, and there's shame, of course, being led by police through a crowd of the sensitive and genteel ("They did what? You're kidding!"), but also pride -- they crossed a line and it feels brave and good and also it's their ticket to something better. He was National Guard but now he's thinking about acting school. She's thinking she'll write a memoir called "Lavatory of Love."
All very believable, but there's one detail I can't quite get my head around. Midwesterners I know would not, even if three sheets to the wind and overwhelmed by hormones, use a handicapped stall to have sex in, just as we would never have sex in a car parked in a handicapped spot. It's a basic taboo. The adultery we cannot approve of, the drunkenness is immature, sex with a stranger is definitely sketchy, but the handicapped stall is beyond the pale. As your mother would say, "How could you do it? What were you thinking?"
Source: Salon.com
Nov 11, 2008
Garrison Keillor: Finally, no need to pose as Canadians
So, we have a new president and the world has hopes for us again. And so does Garrison Keillor with this uplifting essay.
By Garrison Keillor
Last update: November 11, 2008 - 5:07 PM
Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating, it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!
We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor -- he said, "I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.
The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference -- the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis -- you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.
It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he’s going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.
And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early Nineties, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of The Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could’ve written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.
The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote "The Naval War of 1812," and in my humble opinion, Obama’s is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.
Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons. His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.
So enjoy the afterglow of the election awhile longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails -- imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes The First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels. Have a good day.
Source: Salon.com
By Garrison Keillor
Last update: November 11, 2008 - 5:07 PM
Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating, it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!
We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor -- he said, "I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher." The French junior minister for human rights said, "On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes." When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.
The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference -- the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis -- you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.
It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he’s going to see "United States of America" and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.
And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early Nineties, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of The Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could’ve written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.
The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote "The Naval War of 1812," and in my humble opinion, Obama’s is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.
Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons. His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.
So enjoy the afterglow of the election awhile longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails -- imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes The First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now. The mind reels. Have a good day.
Source: Salon.com
Nov 4, 2008
Garrison Keillor: Bravo. Now be yourself
Garrison Keillor is optimistic that Barrack Obama is our elected president. As the old saying goes, Garrison, "From your mouth, to God's ears."
By Garrison Keillor
Last update: November 4, 2008 - 6:06 PM
A golden November day under a blue sky and an air of sweet amiability at the polls and at the end of the day, we elected the right guy, no doubt about it. Yes, we can and we did. A nation spread its wings and achieved altitude.
Bravo, Barack, Mr. Steady, who cheerfully did the rope lines, made the phone calls, answered the same questions 15,000 times, bounded up the stairs, delivered his lines with warmth and wit, ran a tight disciplined army, and that, plus $700 million and an 80 mile-per-hour wind at your back, is all you need to win the prize.
One is electrified by the historic moment, of course, but I will let Great Minds chew on that, and simply wish him and his marvelous lady all the best as they bear up under the tsunami of adoration from Democrats whom he has led out of Egypt. His picture goes up in the kitchen shrine alongside FDR and JFK — BHO elevated to sainthood and now expected to walk on water and turn it into wine. Meanwhile, everything he said about the national mess is utterly true and a lot more. And now it is Barack’s mess. Yikes.
A good shingle for the new administration to hang out, rather than The New Covenant or A Fair Exchange or English Spoken Here, would be Keep Seat Belt Buckled. Happy days are not here and the sky above is not clear.
One bright light in the marquee is Michelle Obama, that witty, jumpy woman with the quicksilver smile who said, "How does Barack prepare for a debate? He just talks to me and he’s ready." The good mother who said, "People ask me how I am, and I say, I’m only as good as my most sad child." Come January, we will have a president whose wife calls him Baby. Good for you, Mama. And now she becomes America’s No. 2 celebrity, the object of giddy curiosity.
Enjoy the people’s house, Michelle, and cruise along gently and do not read anything written about you, and don’t watch the news. Enjoy the pageantry (you look good, Baby), bring up the family, and don’t take the show too seriously. Don’t do too many interviews. Think Laura Bush, a cool First Lady. People like Laura Bush a lot, a Texas Democrat who married a Republican and stuck with him through thin and thinner. She’s smart and we know that because she never tried to show how smart she is. Do not let the mister put you in charge of health-care legislation. Your great challenge is to make a genuine life in the midst of the heavy surf of publicity. God willing, be happy and live your life. When life gets too unreal, sit down with a good book.
As for President-elect Obama, he can now stop dancing, which he’s been doing for 20 months — in a democracy we want candidates to really, really, really want to be president — and get down to the business of patient, focused, rational deliberation and calculation, starting with the formulation of a Cabinet and a White House staff. Have them write up a presidential order for Jan. 20 saying that America will not employ torture, and maybe issue a blanket presidential pardon for your predecessor and his vice, and then set about the business of disappointing your followers and astonishing your enemies and doing what is right for our country.
Be good to yourself. Hire smart, stable people who can tell you things you need to know and not copy Bob Woodward. Keep some Republicans around. You’re the man. You make us proud. You let us get to know you. You have the gift of speaking clearly and forcefully, whole sentences and paragraphs, while thinking at the same time, a good gift. You don’t need a staff of writers to create a persona for you. You need engineers. Problem solvers. You’re inheriting a raft of them.
Get on that treadmill every morning. Keep a daily journal. Let us see those darling girls once in a while. Please don’t play golf. Don’t get a dog. Enjoy Camp David. Be happy. Don’t hire people to tell you how to dress or who to be; you’re a grown-up. Don’t do crap that someday you’d have to go on TV and make cheesy apologies for. This job is one you were cut out to do and a big part of the job is to keep up the national morale and you are already doing that big-time. And thank you, sir. All those cheap motels, all those flights, all of that chip dip. We are deeply grateful.
Source: Star Tribune
By Garrison Keillor
Last update: November 4, 2008 - 6:06 PM
A golden November day under a blue sky and an air of sweet amiability at the polls and at the end of the day, we elected the right guy, no doubt about it. Yes, we can and we did. A nation spread its wings and achieved altitude.
Bravo, Barack, Mr. Steady, who cheerfully did the rope lines, made the phone calls, answered the same questions 15,000 times, bounded up the stairs, delivered his lines with warmth and wit, ran a tight disciplined army, and that, plus $700 million and an 80 mile-per-hour wind at your back, is all you need to win the prize.
One is electrified by the historic moment, of course, but I will let Great Minds chew on that, and simply wish him and his marvelous lady all the best as they bear up under the tsunami of adoration from Democrats whom he has led out of Egypt. His picture goes up in the kitchen shrine alongside FDR and JFK — BHO elevated to sainthood and now expected to walk on water and turn it into wine. Meanwhile, everything he said about the national mess is utterly true and a lot more. And now it is Barack’s mess. Yikes.
A good shingle for the new administration to hang out, rather than The New Covenant or A Fair Exchange or English Spoken Here, would be Keep Seat Belt Buckled. Happy days are not here and the sky above is not clear.
One bright light in the marquee is Michelle Obama, that witty, jumpy woman with the quicksilver smile who said, "How does Barack prepare for a debate? He just talks to me and he’s ready." The good mother who said, "People ask me how I am, and I say, I’m only as good as my most sad child." Come January, we will have a president whose wife calls him Baby. Good for you, Mama. And now she becomes America’s No. 2 celebrity, the object of giddy curiosity.
Enjoy the people’s house, Michelle, and cruise along gently and do not read anything written about you, and don’t watch the news. Enjoy the pageantry (you look good, Baby), bring up the family, and don’t take the show too seriously. Don’t do too many interviews. Think Laura Bush, a cool First Lady. People like Laura Bush a lot, a Texas Democrat who married a Republican and stuck with him through thin and thinner. She’s smart and we know that because she never tried to show how smart she is. Do not let the mister put you in charge of health-care legislation. Your great challenge is to make a genuine life in the midst of the heavy surf of publicity. God willing, be happy and live your life. When life gets too unreal, sit down with a good book.
As for President-elect Obama, he can now stop dancing, which he’s been doing for 20 months — in a democracy we want candidates to really, really, really want to be president — and get down to the business of patient, focused, rational deliberation and calculation, starting with the formulation of a Cabinet and a White House staff. Have them write up a presidential order for Jan. 20 saying that America will not employ torture, and maybe issue a blanket presidential pardon for your predecessor and his vice, and then set about the business of disappointing your followers and astonishing your enemies and doing what is right for our country.
Be good to yourself. Hire smart, stable people who can tell you things you need to know and not copy Bob Woodward. Keep some Republicans around. You’re the man. You make us proud. You let us get to know you. You have the gift of speaking clearly and forcefully, whole sentences and paragraphs, while thinking at the same time, a good gift. You don’t need a staff of writers to create a persona for you. You need engineers. Problem solvers. You’re inheriting a raft of them.
Get on that treadmill every morning. Keep a daily journal. Let us see those darling girls once in a while. Please don’t play golf. Don’t get a dog. Enjoy Camp David. Be happy. Don’t hire people to tell you how to dress or who to be; you’re a grown-up. Don’t do crap that someday you’d have to go on TV and make cheesy apologies for. This job is one you were cut out to do and a big part of the job is to keep up the national morale and you are already doing that big-time. And thank you, sir. All those cheap motels, all those flights, all of that chip dip. We are deeply grateful.
Source: Star Tribune
Garrison Keilloor: Will Mr. Burly Vote for Obama?
The thought of replacing the Current Occupant with the Angry Old Man of the Desert and Whoopee the Ice Queen is miserable in the extreme.
By Garrison Keillor
Oct. 29, 2008 |
I was messing around in Tulsa, Okla., last week and got talking with a big burly man with a McCain-Palin pin on his blue blazer who told me he was descended from yellow-dog Democrats who thought the sun rose and set over FDR and Republicans were people who wore spats and top hats and sailed off Newport. So I told him that my Republican ancestors believed that only lazy people were unemployed in the '30s. He said, "So each of us is heading back to where the other one is coming from." He found that rather amusing. I said, "If that's so, I hope you're ready to be good and poor and endure some hard Minnesota winters."
"Poor, yes. Good, I'm not so sure about. Winter, no. No way."
He's proud of Tulsa, which survived the exodus of Big Oil and got into telecommunications and aeronautics, proud of its Art Deco buildings from the '20s, its art museums and ballet. "Outsiders hear Tulsa and they think Dust Bowl and Oral Roberts," he says, "but that's not who we are. This town is all about change."
I did not bother to tell him that change is exactly what the country is bursting to achieve in less than a week. Of course he knows all about it. Oklahoma seems safely red, but these days who knows? Obama looks more and more steadfast as the moment nears. The country longs for a president who can talk and think at the same time. We've been locked up with the Current Occupant for way too long and the thought of replacing him with the Angry Old Man of the Desert and Whoopee the Ice Queen is miserable in the extreme.
Most of my Republican friends are people who are not ashamed of having worked hard and done well in school, and their party's frantic appeal to anti-intellectualism is nothing they care to sign up for. Time to nip that sucker in the bud. The party needs to reform itself around some coherent philosophy of governance and vision of the future and for that, it must take a trip to the wilderness. They are quietly supporting the skinny guy this time around. They might tell a pollster otherwise but that's what they will do. Call it the Palin Effect.
Even Mr. Burly of Tulsa expressed sorrow over McCain's campaign, the jerkiness and desperation of it, and admiration for Barack's steadiness, his cool, his straightforward articulation and the old-fashioned story of his rise in the world. I thought about that the next day, flying to Philly and walking over to Independence Hall and riding the train to Lancaster through the little towns of old brick row houses, the red and golden trees, the trim farmyards and the fields of tan stubble, a state McCain has scrapped hard for even as he sank in the polls. I suppose he looks at that classic Rockwell landscape and those hardy German Lutheran faces and thinks those are his people and how can they possibly go for a Harvard Law graduate from the South Side of Chicago whose last name is Obama, for crying out loud?
They can and they will. Colin Powell was right when he called the guy a transformational candidate. We walk through the door and we close it behind us and the simplicity of it is dazzling. That's how it happens. You walk aboard a plane and glance into the cockpit and there's a woman in the left-hand seat, and who these days would even think this worthy of comment? You see Latino men and women moving up whose grandparents picked row crops for a living. In Tulsa, in 1921, there was a big race riot following the arrest of a young black man who was alleged to have touched a white woman on the arm. Fighting in the streets, neighborhoods torched, the National Guard called in -- and this story seems medieval to us, a dark age almost beyond our ken. That culture is gone, gone, gone, and on Tuesday we bury it by the simple democratic process of voting for the best man even though his father was African.
In America, a man is not held responsible for choosing his parents, only for his own life and conduct. This man promises to take us into a new era where we aren't defined by our differences, Short vs. Tall, Pale vs. Freckled, and can take a deep breath and do what's best for the country.
SOURCE: Salon.com
By Garrison Keillor
Oct. 29, 2008 |
I was messing around in Tulsa, Okla., last week and got talking with a big burly man with a McCain-Palin pin on his blue blazer who told me he was descended from yellow-dog Democrats who thought the sun rose and set over FDR and Republicans were people who wore spats and top hats and sailed off Newport. So I told him that my Republican ancestors believed that only lazy people were unemployed in the '30s. He said, "So each of us is heading back to where the other one is coming from." He found that rather amusing. I said, "If that's so, I hope you're ready to be good and poor and endure some hard Minnesota winters."
"Poor, yes. Good, I'm not so sure about. Winter, no. No way."
He's proud of Tulsa, which survived the exodus of Big Oil and got into telecommunications and aeronautics, proud of its Art Deco buildings from the '20s, its art museums and ballet. "Outsiders hear Tulsa and they think Dust Bowl and Oral Roberts," he says, "but that's not who we are. This town is all about change."
I did not bother to tell him that change is exactly what the country is bursting to achieve in less than a week. Of course he knows all about it. Oklahoma seems safely red, but these days who knows? Obama looks more and more steadfast as the moment nears. The country longs for a president who can talk and think at the same time. We've been locked up with the Current Occupant for way too long and the thought of replacing him with the Angry Old Man of the Desert and Whoopee the Ice Queen is miserable in the extreme.
Most of my Republican friends are people who are not ashamed of having worked hard and done well in school, and their party's frantic appeal to anti-intellectualism is nothing they care to sign up for. Time to nip that sucker in the bud. The party needs to reform itself around some coherent philosophy of governance and vision of the future and for that, it must take a trip to the wilderness. They are quietly supporting the skinny guy this time around. They might tell a pollster otherwise but that's what they will do. Call it the Palin Effect.
Even Mr. Burly of Tulsa expressed sorrow over McCain's campaign, the jerkiness and desperation of it, and admiration for Barack's steadiness, his cool, his straightforward articulation and the old-fashioned story of his rise in the world. I thought about that the next day, flying to Philly and walking over to Independence Hall and riding the train to Lancaster through the little towns of old brick row houses, the red and golden trees, the trim farmyards and the fields of tan stubble, a state McCain has scrapped hard for even as he sank in the polls. I suppose he looks at that classic Rockwell landscape and those hardy German Lutheran faces and thinks those are his people and how can they possibly go for a Harvard Law graduate from the South Side of Chicago whose last name is Obama, for crying out loud?
They can and they will. Colin Powell was right when he called the guy a transformational candidate. We walk through the door and we close it behind us and the simplicity of it is dazzling. That's how it happens. You walk aboard a plane and glance into the cockpit and there's a woman in the left-hand seat, and who these days would even think this worthy of comment? You see Latino men and women moving up whose grandparents picked row crops for a living. In Tulsa, in 1921, there was a big race riot following the arrest of a young black man who was alleged to have touched a white woman on the arm. Fighting in the streets, neighborhoods torched, the National Guard called in -- and this story seems medieval to us, a dark age almost beyond our ken. That culture is gone, gone, gone, and on Tuesday we bury it by the simple democratic process of voting for the best man even though his father was African.
In America, a man is not held responsible for choosing his parents, only for his own life and conduct. This man promises to take us into a new era where we aren't defined by our differences, Short vs. Tall, Pale vs. Freckled, and can take a deep breath and do what's best for the country.
SOURCE: Salon.com
Oct 21, 2008
GK: Among the Hardy Republicans
Garrison Keillor is direct in this essay. "Why did you vote to reelect that dope?" Those were his thoughts when he spent a weekend among hardy Republicans. He was polite and didn't express it, he just thought it. Of course, people do stupid things. He, as I, admit having done stupid things.
His new essay is about getting along and realizing that, despite our political differences, we are all the same: hard-working Americans. And, I admit that, like Keillor, I am primarily a Democrat simply because I believe that those who are less fortunate than I am deserve happiness as well. After all, the Democratic party is, as Keillor says, "... the party that has a better record of looking after the interests of people who earn less than a hundred grand a year."
By Garrison Keillor
Oct. 22, 2008
Spent a weekend in Abilene, Texas, a town that voted 75 percent for the Current Occupant in 2004, and nothing bad happened to me at all, they were as friendly as could be. Any time I sat down, they put food in front of me, and all in all they were witty and well-spoken and good to be around. So it would've been rude to ask them, "Why did you vote to reelect that dope?" But I thought it.
Not that I haven't done dumb things myself. I have. And intend to keep on doing some of them. But the Current Occupant has slept through his own presidency. He has no idea what went wrong. He knows less about governance than a cat knows about a can opener. He cut taxes during a costly war and made serious debtors of our grandchildren and he has ignored the future as if it doesn't exist. He is now about as popular as wet socks and deservedly so. And here were the people who spawned him and we got along pretty well.
Of course it helped that I only stayed two days.
These Republicans are hardy people not given to endless self-examination of the sort that we liberal elitists practice (Why did I agree to come to Abilene? Why did I allow that woman to force that prime rib on me and the au gratin potatoes and the pecan pie? Should I have talked to her about torture?), and they stick with a position once taken and don't admire people who waver and hedge their bets and cover their butts. Abilene, Texas, would appear rather bleak to most people, a big khaki-colored desert with some oil wells and windmills and shopping malls and not much happening after dark, but people here are fiercely loyal to the place, and their loyalty is a great civic asset.
In a cohesive community like Abilene, so much business can be done on trust. A truck pulls up to the gate and the rancher herds 20 steers off to be slaughtered. He doesn't count them or weigh them. Pure trust. A handshake and a wave. A week or two later, he gets a check from the buyer, whoever that may be. No IDs are checked, no bonds posted, no 10-page contract signed and notarized. You simply are part of a culture that trusts a person unless he proves untrustworthy. This can be quite astonishing if you're from the city, but it's fundamental to a place like Abilene.
Probably Abileneans wouldn't really need a national government or a Constitution or a judicial system, they could do OK on their own as semi-nomadic Bedouins, defending themselves, keeping order, managing their herds, enduring primitive healthcare, educating their kids, making the best of their earthly sojourn, and looking to the next life as the real deal. They are a hardier strain and for them the urban America that most of us live in is laden with non-necessities. Public transportation, for example. In Abilene, people would be happy to give you a ride if you needed one. Why wait for a bus?
My fellow liberal elitists are more dependent on other people. I am, that's for sure. I need other people to fix my car, raise my vegetables, build bookshelves, launder my shirts and clean my house, and since I need those people, I should take some passing interest in the schools their children attend and the sort of medical care available. I don't believe in indentured servitude, and so I want to live in a society in which the women who launder and fold my shirts get a fair deal. I don't want my breakfast sausage to come from a packing plant like the one in Iowa that employed undocumented Mexicans and treated them like medieval serfs. So I'm a Democrat. It's the party that has a better record of looking after the interests of people who earn less than a hundred grand a year.
But it's good to be among the opposition and know them as fine upstanding people. At the dinner where I was forced to eat the prime rib, we all sat around afterward and sang "I'll Fly Away" and "God Bless America" and "How Great Thou Art" and "Home on the Range" and a dozen other songs we all knew, and it was a lovely evening a couple weeks before a big election. We still do know some of the same songs, we Americans. Deep down, we are loyal to each other. And the truth is marching on.
SOURCE: Salon.com
His new essay is about getting along and realizing that, despite our political differences, we are all the same: hard-working Americans. And, I admit that, like Keillor, I am primarily a Democrat simply because I believe that those who are less fortunate than I am deserve happiness as well. After all, the Democratic party is, as Keillor says, "... the party that has a better record of looking after the interests of people who earn less than a hundred grand a year."
By Garrison Keillor
Oct. 22, 2008
Spent a weekend in Abilene, Texas, a town that voted 75 percent for the Current Occupant in 2004, and nothing bad happened to me at all, they were as friendly as could be. Any time I sat down, they put food in front of me, and all in all they were witty and well-spoken and good to be around. So it would've been rude to ask them, "Why did you vote to reelect that dope?" But I thought it.
Not that I haven't done dumb things myself. I have. And intend to keep on doing some of them. But the Current Occupant has slept through his own presidency. He has no idea what went wrong. He knows less about governance than a cat knows about a can opener. He cut taxes during a costly war and made serious debtors of our grandchildren and he has ignored the future as if it doesn't exist. He is now about as popular as wet socks and deservedly so. And here were the people who spawned him and we got along pretty well.
Of course it helped that I only stayed two days.
These Republicans are hardy people not given to endless self-examination of the sort that we liberal elitists practice (Why did I agree to come to Abilene? Why did I allow that woman to force that prime rib on me and the au gratin potatoes and the pecan pie? Should I have talked to her about torture?), and they stick with a position once taken and don't admire people who waver and hedge their bets and cover their butts. Abilene, Texas, would appear rather bleak to most people, a big khaki-colored desert with some oil wells and windmills and shopping malls and not much happening after dark, but people here are fiercely loyal to the place, and their loyalty is a great civic asset.
In a cohesive community like Abilene, so much business can be done on trust. A truck pulls up to the gate and the rancher herds 20 steers off to be slaughtered. He doesn't count them or weigh them. Pure trust. A handshake and a wave. A week or two later, he gets a check from the buyer, whoever that may be. No IDs are checked, no bonds posted, no 10-page contract signed and notarized. You simply are part of a culture that trusts a person unless he proves untrustworthy. This can be quite astonishing if you're from the city, but it's fundamental to a place like Abilene.
Probably Abileneans wouldn't really need a national government or a Constitution or a judicial system, they could do OK on their own as semi-nomadic Bedouins, defending themselves, keeping order, managing their herds, enduring primitive healthcare, educating their kids, making the best of their earthly sojourn, and looking to the next life as the real deal. They are a hardier strain and for them the urban America that most of us live in is laden with non-necessities. Public transportation, for example. In Abilene, people would be happy to give you a ride if you needed one. Why wait for a bus?
My fellow liberal elitists are more dependent on other people. I am, that's for sure. I need other people to fix my car, raise my vegetables, build bookshelves, launder my shirts and clean my house, and since I need those people, I should take some passing interest in the schools their children attend and the sort of medical care available. I don't believe in indentured servitude, and so I want to live in a society in which the women who launder and fold my shirts get a fair deal. I don't want my breakfast sausage to come from a packing plant like the one in Iowa that employed undocumented Mexicans and treated them like medieval serfs. So I'm a Democrat. It's the party that has a better record of looking after the interests of people who earn less than a hundred grand a year.
But it's good to be among the opposition and know them as fine upstanding people. At the dinner where I was forced to eat the prime rib, we all sat around afterward and sang "I'll Fly Away" and "God Bless America" and "How Great Thou Art" and "Home on the Range" and a dozen other songs we all knew, and it was a lovely evening a couple weeks before a big election. We still do know some of the same songs, we Americans. Deep down, we are loyal to each other. And the truth is marching on.
SOURCE: Salon.com
Oct 14, 2008
Garrison Keillor: Let the leader lead
He found an interesting way to once again endorse Obama.
The American people are poised to do something that could not be imagined 10 years ago -- elect the best man president, regardless of his skin color.
By Garrison Keillor
Oct. 15, 2008 | The Scripture reading in church Sunday gave me a jolt -- Exodus 32, which refers to the Chosen People wearing earrings, men as well as women, and I twitched when the lector read it. Yikes! Moses got his ears pierced? What else didn't we know?
And then a bigger jolt. God is so furious at the C.P. for worshiping the golden calf (forged from their earrings) that He talks about consuming them with fire, but Moses talks Him out of it, which sort of dents one's faith in divine omniscience, does it not, the Lord taking a sharp turn like that? ("Oh, I hadn't thought about that -- OK, cancel the thunderbolt!") But I didn't jump up in my pew and point this out -- we like to keep things moving along in church, recite the Creed, confess our sins, pass the plate, sing the doxology, not stop for questions along the way -- so I just brood over it, as I do about more and more these days. Walk at night down misty streets through yellow leaves and question everything and keep it to myself.
I let other people carry the conversational ball when it comes to religion, or politics, these days. I've known enough old bores to want not to be one of them. Old honkers with ratchety voices who hold everyone hostage and make their point 16 times and lay waste to the dinner hour. Not me, dear hearts. As I write this, the sun is coming up over the Mississippi Valley, and in the orange swashes at the horizon is a long string of clouds that one could imagine are mountains. It rises on people facing challenges far beyond anything I've known in my rackety life. A beautiful cheerful woman of 26 has been handed a jagged diagnosis of cancer like a big wet albatross on a necklace. A friend struggles with severe depression, slogging through the day, wishing the meds would kick in. And then there is Patrick, whom I met on Saturday, a very bright boy who lies speechless on a gurney, a trach tube in his windpipe, a pump humming softly on a shelf below. His parents explain that he was stricken by a rare neuromuscular disease and that's all they say about that. They're both animated, buoyant, jokey, and Patrick smiles and raises his eyebrows -- and suddenly one's own tiny troubles aren't worth mentioning.
The existence of human suffering seems to me to affirm the Christian faith. It's the sacred duty of the faithful to uphold the Patricks of the world and their heroic parents against the prevailing Darwinist forces, but a Patrick shouldn't be asked to sit by the roadside waiting for a kindly Christian motorist to stop -- he is entitled to mercy as a basic human right, and it is merciful of Christians to expect government to carry out this duty.
The safety net has become seriously frayed, as the parents of the Patricks of America know very well, and now the sun has risen on an October day of pure blue sky and yellow and red boughs raised against it, and the day must be acknowledged. What a gorgeous life we lead, here in this gaudy forest, the smell of smoke and apples in the air, and three weeks to go before the election.
The American people are poised to do something that could not be imagined 10 years ago, or even five, which is to vote for the best man regardless of his skin color and elect him president. The campaign against him is not one that anybody will point to with pride in years to come. It is a long trail of honking and flapping and traces of green slime, as if a flock of geese had taken up residence in the front yard. But Barack's cool poise in the face of blather is some sort of testament to American heart and humor. The man has walked tall and his wife has turned out to be the brightest figure in the whole political parade, an ebullient woman of quick wit and beautiful spirit. Bravo, Michelle.
Onward, America. We've all seen plenty of the worst -- the sly cruelty, the arrogant ignorance, the fascination with trivia, the cheats, the weaselish and piggish and the buzzardly -- but we can rise above it if we will only recognize a leader when one comes along and have the sense to let him lead.
SOURCE: Salon.com
The American people are poised to do something that could not be imagined 10 years ago -- elect the best man president, regardless of his skin color.
By Garrison Keillor
Oct. 15, 2008 | The Scripture reading in church Sunday gave me a jolt -- Exodus 32, which refers to the Chosen People wearing earrings, men as well as women, and I twitched when the lector read it. Yikes! Moses got his ears pierced? What else didn't we know?
And then a bigger jolt. God is so furious at the C.P. for worshiping the golden calf (forged from their earrings) that He talks about consuming them with fire, but Moses talks Him out of it, which sort of dents one's faith in divine omniscience, does it not, the Lord taking a sharp turn like that? ("Oh, I hadn't thought about that -- OK, cancel the thunderbolt!") But I didn't jump up in my pew and point this out -- we like to keep things moving along in church, recite the Creed, confess our sins, pass the plate, sing the doxology, not stop for questions along the way -- so I just brood over it, as I do about more and more these days. Walk at night down misty streets through yellow leaves and question everything and keep it to myself.
I let other people carry the conversational ball when it comes to religion, or politics, these days. I've known enough old bores to want not to be one of them. Old honkers with ratchety voices who hold everyone hostage and make their point 16 times and lay waste to the dinner hour. Not me, dear hearts. As I write this, the sun is coming up over the Mississippi Valley, and in the orange swashes at the horizon is a long string of clouds that one could imagine are mountains. It rises on people facing challenges far beyond anything I've known in my rackety life. A beautiful cheerful woman of 26 has been handed a jagged diagnosis of cancer like a big wet albatross on a necklace. A friend struggles with severe depression, slogging through the day, wishing the meds would kick in. And then there is Patrick, whom I met on Saturday, a very bright boy who lies speechless on a gurney, a trach tube in his windpipe, a pump humming softly on a shelf below. His parents explain that he was stricken by a rare neuromuscular disease and that's all they say about that. They're both animated, buoyant, jokey, and Patrick smiles and raises his eyebrows -- and suddenly one's own tiny troubles aren't worth mentioning.
The existence of human suffering seems to me to affirm the Christian faith. It's the sacred duty of the faithful to uphold the Patricks of the world and their heroic parents against the prevailing Darwinist forces, but a Patrick shouldn't be asked to sit by the roadside waiting for a kindly Christian motorist to stop -- he is entitled to mercy as a basic human right, and it is merciful of Christians to expect government to carry out this duty.
The safety net has become seriously frayed, as the parents of the Patricks of America know very well, and now the sun has risen on an October day of pure blue sky and yellow and red boughs raised against it, and the day must be acknowledged. What a gorgeous life we lead, here in this gaudy forest, the smell of smoke and apples in the air, and three weeks to go before the election.
The American people are poised to do something that could not be imagined 10 years ago, or even five, which is to vote for the best man regardless of his skin color and elect him president. The campaign against him is not one that anybody will point to with pride in years to come. It is a long trail of honking and flapping and traces of green slime, as if a flock of geese had taken up residence in the front yard. But Barack's cool poise in the face of blather is some sort of testament to American heart and humor. The man has walked tall and his wife has turned out to be the brightest figure in the whole political parade, an ebullient woman of quick wit and beautiful spirit. Bravo, Michelle.
Onward, America. We've all seen plenty of the worst -- the sly cruelty, the arrogant ignorance, the fascination with trivia, the cheats, the weaselish and piggish and the buzzardly -- but we can rise above it if we will only recognize a leader when one comes along and have the sense to let him lead.
SOURCE: Salon.com
Oct 8, 2008
Palin's future, according to Garrison Keillor
I believe that Senator McCain, under poor advice, chose Governor Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential candidate to boost his possibilities of winning over the born-again conservative right of his party. In my and in Garrison Keillor's opinion, it was a poor choice.
Juicing up the ticket
Dishonest, cynical men put forward Sarah Palin for national office, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about.
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
GARRISON KEILLORWe are a stalwart and stouthearted people, and never more so than in hard times. People weep in the dark and arise in the morning and go to work. The waves crash on your nest egg and a chunk is swept away and you put your salami sandwich in the brown bag and get on the bus. In Philly, a woman earns $10.30/hour to care for a man brought down by cystic fibrosis. She bathes and dresses him in the morning, brings him meals, puts him to bed at night. It's hard work lifting him and she has suffered a painful hernia that, because she can't afford health insurance, she can't get fixed, but she still goes to work because he'd be helpless without her. There are a lot of people like her. I know because I'm related to some of them.
Low dishonesty and craven cynicism sometimes win the day but not inevitably. The attempt to link Barack Obama to an old radical in his neighborhood has desperation and deceit written all over it. Meanwhile, stunning acts of heroism stand out, such as the fidelity of military lawyers assigned to defend detainees at Guantanamo Bay -- uniformed officers faithful to their lawyerly duty to offer a vigorous defense even though it means exposing the injustice of military justice that is rigged for conviction and the mendacity of a commander in chief who commits war crimes. If your law school is looking for a name for its new library, instead of selling the honor to a fat cat alumnus, you should consider the names of Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Lt. Col. Mark Bridges, Col. Steven David, Lt. Col. Sharon Shaffer, Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel and Maj. Michael Mori.
It was dishonest, cynical men who put forward a clueless young woman for national office, hoping to juice up the ticket, hoping she could skate through two months of chaperoned campaigning, but the truth emerges: The lady is talking freely about matters she has never thought about. The American people have an ear for B.S. They can tell when someone's mouth is moving and the clutch is not engaged. When she said, "One thing that Americans do at this time, also, though, is let's commit ourselves just every day, American people, Joe Six-Pack, hockey moms across the nation, I think we need to band together and say never again. Never will we be exploited and taken advantage of again by those who are managing our money and loaning us these dollars," people smelled gas.
Some Republicans adore her because they are pranksters at heart and love the consternation of grown-ups. The ne'er-do-well son of the old Republican family as president, the idea that you increase government revenue by cutting taxes, the idea that you cut social services and thereby drive the needy into the middle class, the idea that you overthrow a dictator with a show of force and achieve democracy at no cost to yourself -- one stink bomb after another, and now Governor Palin.
She is a chatty sportscaster who lacks the guile to conceal her vacuity, and she was Mr. McCain's first major decision as nominee. This troubles independent voters, and now she is a major drag on his candidacy. She will get a nice book deal from Regnery and a new career making personal appearances for forty grand a pop, and she'll become a trivia question, "What politician claimed foreign-policy expertise based on being able to see Russia from her house?" And the rest of us will have to pull ourselves out of the swamp of Republican economics.
Your broker kept saying, "Stay with the portfolio, don't jump ship," and you felt a strong urge to dump the stocks and get into the money market where at least you're not going to lose your shirt, but you didn't do it and didn't do it, and now you're holding a big bag of brown bananas. Me, too. But at least I know enough not to believe desperate people who are talking trash. Anybody who got whacked last week and still thinks McCain-Palin is going to lead us out of the swamp and not into a war with Iran is beyond persuasion in the English language. They'll need to lose their homes and be out on the street in a cold hard rain before they connect the dots.
Sep 30, 2008
Garrison Keillor: A shame to leave this world early
This is an interesting article. It does not contain the thoughts of the politically angry Keillor. He does not write about the "current occupant." This is an essay about life and death. Keillor witnessed a dead body being attended by the CSI of LA, and it moved him. It moved him enough to pay attention to this woman who during her lifetime was someone he would never have noticed. Her death, however, made him aware of mortality and the fine line between life and death.
I like this essay. It makes me appreciate life and think about it. Keillor is good at describing the small nuances that we miss while living our lives. I urge you to read it. It's not morbid. It will make you think. If you never read anything by this man, go ahead and read this essay. He is a true poet.
By Garrison Keillor
Last update: September 30, 2008 - 5:21 PM
I was in Santa Monica for a day last week, sampling baked figs at the farmers’ market on the Third Street promenade, a sweet sunny day that makes an old Midwesterner like me a little nervous. We fear seduction. Some days in California are so tender and delicious that a person could abandon all commitments and wind up living in blissful stupor in some cult devoted to the worship of the sky.
I have work to do. I haul it around in a black case the size of an anvil and when an hour or two opens up, in an airport or hotel, I dig in. I don’t lie on beaches, looking up at the sky. It’s blue in Santa Monica. You don’t have to look at it for long to figure that out.
My hotel was on the beach, so I headed back that way, crossing the Pacific Coast Highway on a pedestrian bridge. And there, 50 yards south of me, police cars and flashing blue lights. The northbound lanes of the PCH had been closed. A car sat in the middle lane, its rear end smashed in brutally. And south of it, a yellow tarp spread on the pavement. A body lay beneath it.
Then eight cops and EMTs lined up on either side of it, like pallbearers, and then they spread out a long white sheet which they held as a screen while the yellow tarp was pulled away and a police photographer took pictures with an enormous camera. A man in a dark suit bent over the body, studying it closely. The eight men stood quietly, hardly moving, and they looked straight at each other. They did not look at the body. It was a still-life scene, except for the flashing lights and the southbound traffic passing: eight men standing at attention, guarding a body, and two men moving with great delicacy around it, gathering evidence.
A blue sky over Santa Monica and on the beach, people lay on towels, sunning themselves. A few swimmers in the surf. Roller bladers out on the sidewalk and joggers, grunting about the presidential campaign. A day in which you’ve witnessed death takes on an aura of fragile loveliness. You breathe the salt air and you savor this on behalf of the dead and note the pencil-line delicacy of the long cane poles of the Japanese fishermen on the pier, the two triangles of white sail taut with wind on the distant boat, the skinny boy in blue trunks swinging high on the flying rings on the beach and soaring to the next set of rings. You see the portly man wade into the water and shudder as the water touches his testes and you feel it, the shudder of mortality. And visions of the fallen one stay with you.
A few hours later, online, news that the victim was a woman, 44, whose car had been rear-ended, that she had gotten out of her car and stood waiting for help to arrive and was struck and killed by a third vehicle. Her name was Alma and she was from Los Angeles.
The day goes on and though you don’t keep in mind the sight of the pallbearers around the body, the death attends you wherever you go. You imagine the woman’s plan for her day, maybe lunch in Malibu and a meeting at her kids’ school and supper and a movie afterward, a simple day in sunny L.A., and you abandon your own plan to work and instead you walk around looking at the shining world on behalf of Alma who died on the highway.
You buy a mango/papaya smoothie and a cafe mocha and in the face of death they are spectacular. You sit at a table in the brilliant sunshine, the light splashing off the stone facades and aluminum moldings. She was standing by her car waiting for help to arrive when she was struck by another vehicle and killed, and 30 minutes later men were standing at attention around her. It would be intolerable not to know the name of the woman. Attention must be paid. She trails alongside you as you walk into a bookstore full of art books and you pick up one with pictures of California beach houses, all whites and yellows and pale blues, sun-drenched rooms, bowls of flowers, cotton curtains, and the sea beyond. A beautiful world, Alma, and every day is a gift. I’m sorry you had to leave early.
SOURCE: Star Tribune
I like this essay. It makes me appreciate life and think about it. Keillor is good at describing the small nuances that we miss while living our lives. I urge you to read it. It's not morbid. It will make you think. If you never read anything by this man, go ahead and read this essay. He is a true poet.
By Garrison Keillor
Last update: September 30, 2008 - 5:21 PM
I was in Santa Monica for a day last week, sampling baked figs at the farmers’ market on the Third Street promenade, a sweet sunny day that makes an old Midwesterner like me a little nervous. We fear seduction. Some days in California are so tender and delicious that a person could abandon all commitments and wind up living in blissful stupor in some cult devoted to the worship of the sky.
I have work to do. I haul it around in a black case the size of an anvil and when an hour or two opens up, in an airport or hotel, I dig in. I don’t lie on beaches, looking up at the sky. It’s blue in Santa Monica. You don’t have to look at it for long to figure that out.
My hotel was on the beach, so I headed back that way, crossing the Pacific Coast Highway on a pedestrian bridge. And there, 50 yards south of me, police cars and flashing blue lights. The northbound lanes of the PCH had been closed. A car sat in the middle lane, its rear end smashed in brutally. And south of it, a yellow tarp spread on the pavement. A body lay beneath it.
Then eight cops and EMTs lined up on either side of it, like pallbearers, and then they spread out a long white sheet which they held as a screen while the yellow tarp was pulled away and a police photographer took pictures with an enormous camera. A man in a dark suit bent over the body, studying it closely. The eight men stood quietly, hardly moving, and they looked straight at each other. They did not look at the body. It was a still-life scene, except for the flashing lights and the southbound traffic passing: eight men standing at attention, guarding a body, and two men moving with great delicacy around it, gathering evidence.
A blue sky over Santa Monica and on the beach, people lay on towels, sunning themselves. A few swimmers in the surf. Roller bladers out on the sidewalk and joggers, grunting about the presidential campaign. A day in which you’ve witnessed death takes on an aura of fragile loveliness. You breathe the salt air and you savor this on behalf of the dead and note the pencil-line delicacy of the long cane poles of the Japanese fishermen on the pier, the two triangles of white sail taut with wind on the distant boat, the skinny boy in blue trunks swinging high on the flying rings on the beach and soaring to the next set of rings. You see the portly man wade into the water and shudder as the water touches his testes and you feel it, the shudder of mortality. And visions of the fallen one stay with you.
A few hours later, online, news that the victim was a woman, 44, whose car had been rear-ended, that she had gotten out of her car and stood waiting for help to arrive and was struck and killed by a third vehicle. Her name was Alma and she was from Los Angeles.
The day goes on and though you don’t keep in mind the sight of the pallbearers around the body, the death attends you wherever you go. You imagine the woman’s plan for her day, maybe lunch in Malibu and a meeting at her kids’ school and supper and a movie afterward, a simple day in sunny L.A., and you abandon your own plan to work and instead you walk around looking at the shining world on behalf of Alma who died on the highway.
You buy a mango/papaya smoothie and a cafe mocha and in the face of death they are spectacular. You sit at a table in the brilliant sunshine, the light splashing off the stone facades and aluminum moldings. She was standing by her car waiting for help to arrive when she was struck by another vehicle and killed, and 30 minutes later men were standing at attention around her. It would be intolerable not to know the name of the woman. Attention must be paid. She trails alongside you as you walk into a bookstore full of art books and you pick up one with pictures of California beach houses, all whites and yellows and pale blues, sun-drenched rooms, bowls of flowers, cotton curtains, and the sea beyond. A beautiful world, Alma, and every day is a gift. I’m sorry you had to leave early.
SOURCE: Star Tribune
Sep 23, 2008
Garrison Keillor: Where are the cops?
Keillor, in my opinion, once again hits the nail on the head. Our economy is in the bad shape it is in because we have not paid attention to regulation. We deregulated, we let the financial institutions go wild. They played with the public's money and now want to be forgiven and be given their more than "average" bonus. Where's justice here? Open up your eyes, the people who are hurting because they are now foreclosing should be forgiven as well.
By Garrison Keillor
Last update: September 23, 2008 - 3:12 PM
It’s just human nature that some calamities register in the brain and others don’t. The train engineer texting at the throttle ("HOW R U? C U L8R") and missing the red light and 25 people die in the crash — oh God, that is way too real — everyone has had a moment of supreme stupidity that came close to killing somebody. Even atheists say a little prayer now and then: Dear God, I am an idiot, thank you for protecting my children.
On the other hand, the federal bailout of the financial market (YAWN) is a calamity that people accept as if it were just one more hurricane. An air of crisis, the secretary of the Treasury striding down a hall at the Capitol with minions in his wake, solemn-faced congressmen at the microphones. Something must be done, harrumph harrumph. The Current Occupant pops out of the cuckoo clock and reads a few lines off a piece of paper, pronouncing all the words correctly. And the newscaster looks into the camera and says, "Etaoin shrdlu qwertyuiop." Where is the outrage?
Poor Larry Craig got a truckload of moral condemnation for tapping his wingtips in the men’s john, but his party proposes to spend 5 percent of the GDP to buy up bad loans made by men who walk away with their fortunes intact while retirees see their 401(k) go pffffffff like a defunct air mattress, and it’s business as usual. Mr. McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please — remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators on behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush, the brother of the C.O., who, as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends and who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things? Mr. McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.
Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn’t their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that’s why you need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, "This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon."
The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand we trust them because they’re packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.
Some say the tab might come to a trillion dollars. Nobody knows. And Mr. McCain has not one moment of doubt or regret. He switches from First Deregulation Church to Our Lady of Strict Vigilance like you might go from decaf to latte. Where is the straight talk? Does the man have no conscience?
It wasn’t their money they were playing with. It was yours. Where were the cops?
What we are seeing is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero. It is painful. First, there was his exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth that it isn’t funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how Mr. McCain has made a fool of her. Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.
Mr. McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in Macy’s window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer. Obviously you can fool a lot of people for a while and maybe he can stretch it out until mid-November. But the truth is marching on. A few true conservatives are leading a charge against the bailout. Good for them. But how about admitting that their cowboy economic philosophy was at fault here?
SOURCE: Star Tribune
By Garrison Keillor
Last update: September 23, 2008 - 3:12 PM
It’s just human nature that some calamities register in the brain and others don’t. The train engineer texting at the throttle ("HOW R U? C U L8R") and missing the red light and 25 people die in the crash — oh God, that is way too real — everyone has had a moment of supreme stupidity that came close to killing somebody. Even atheists say a little prayer now and then: Dear God, I am an idiot, thank you for protecting my children.
On the other hand, the federal bailout of the financial market (YAWN) is a calamity that people accept as if it were just one more hurricane. An air of crisis, the secretary of the Treasury striding down a hall at the Capitol with minions in his wake, solemn-faced congressmen at the microphones. Something must be done, harrumph harrumph. The Current Occupant pops out of the cuckoo clock and reads a few lines off a piece of paper, pronouncing all the words correctly. And the newscaster looks into the camera and says, "Etaoin shrdlu qwertyuiop." Where is the outrage?
Poor Larry Craig got a truckload of moral condemnation for tapping his wingtips in the men’s john, but his party proposes to spend 5 percent of the GDP to buy up bad loans made by men who walk away with their fortunes intact while retirees see their 401(k) go pffffffff like a defunct air mattress, and it’s business as usual. Mr. McCain is a lifelong deregulator and believer in letting brokers and bankers do as they please — remember Lincoln Savings and Loan and his intervention with federal regulators on behalf of his friend Charles Keating, who then went to prison? Remember Neil Bush, the brother of the C.O., who, as a director of Silverado S&L, bestowed enormous loans on his friends without telling fellow directors that the friends were friends and who, when the loans failed, paid a small fine and went skipping off to other things? Mr. McCain now decries greed on Wall Street and suggests a commission be formed to look into the problem. This is like Casanova coming out for chastity.
Confident men took leave of common sense and bet on the idea of perpetual profit in the real estate market and crashed. But it wasn’t their money. It was your money they were messing with. And that’s why you need government regulators. Gimlet-eyed men with steel-rim glasses and crepe-soled shoes who check the numbers and have the power to say, "This is a scam and a hustle and either you cease and desist or you spend a few years in a minimum-security federal facility playing backgammon."
The Republican Party used to specialize in gimlet-eyed, steel-rim, crepe-soled common sense and then it was taken over by crooked preachers who demand we trust them because they’re packing a Bible and God sent them on a mission to enact lower taxes, less government. Except when things crash, and then government has to pick up the pieces.
Some say the tab might come to a trillion dollars. Nobody knows. And Mr. McCain has not one moment of doubt or regret. He switches from First Deregulation Church to Our Lady of Strict Vigilance like you might go from decaf to latte. Where is the straight talk? Does the man have no conscience?
It wasn’t their money they were playing with. It was yours. Where were the cops?
What we are seeing is the stuff of a novel, the public corruption of an American war hero. It is painful. First, there was his exploitation of a symbolic woman, an eager zealot who is so far out of her depth that it isn’t funny anymore. Anyone with a heart has to hurt for how Mr. McCain has made a fool of her. Never mind the persistent cheesiness of his attack ads. And now this chasm of debt and loss and the gentleman pretends to be shocked. He was there. He turned out the lights. He sent the regulators home.
Mr. McCain seems willing to say anything, do anything, to get to the White House so he can go to war with Iran. If he needs to recline naked in Macy’s window, he would do that, or eat live chickens, or claim to be a reformer. Obviously you can fool a lot of people for a while and maybe he can stretch it out until mid-November. But the truth is marching on. A few true conservatives are leading a charge against the bailout. Good for them. But how about admitting that their cowboy economic philosophy was at fault here?
SOURCE: Star Tribune
Sep 9, 2008
GK: George Bush with big hair
This essay just made me have faith in Garrison Keillor again. His biting, in your face humor that is also there for you to see the light is back again. This type of essay was exactly what drew me to his writing. We need him and others to be angry. We will not tolerate what we are being dished out by the Republican candidates. It is not right that they go for the Democratic candidate's jugular and the Democrats are too nice not to do that themselves. Thank you, Garrison. Thank you for finally expressing yourself without walking on egg shells.
(Silly fan that I am, I was so pleased with this essay that I went ahead and substituted that horrible caricature that Salon uses for his face. Of course, he has a face made for radio, and I may not have improved the entry much by it. LOL. However, I felt that the true Keillor needs to be seen here, not his caricature.)
By Garrison Keillor
Sept. 10, 2008 |
So the Republicans have decided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, "Throw the bums out!" They've been running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of inviting lobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves. And Mayor
Giuliani is an advocate for small-town America. Bravo.They are coming out for Small Efficient Government the very week that the feds are taking over Fannie and Freddie, those old cash cows, and in the course of a weekend 20 or 50 (or pick a number) billion go floating out the Treasury door. Hello? Do you see us out here? We are not fruit flies, we are voters, we can read and write, we didn't just fall off the coal truck.
Mr. McCain has decided to run as a former POW and a maverick, a maverick's maverick, rather than Mr. Bush's best friend, and that's understandable, but how can he not address the $3 trillion that got burned up in Iraq so far? It's real money, it could've paid for a lot of windmills, a high-speed rail line in Ohio, some serious R&D. The Chinese, who have avoided foreign wars for 50 years, are taking enormous leaps forward, investing in their economy, and we are falling behind. We're wasting our chances. The Republican culture of corruption in Washington hasn't helped.
And a former mayor of a town of 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26 million in federal earmarks is now running against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money to build the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low in Wasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader of the free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I had thought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final exam in higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, "I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godly hardworking people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle ax you."
In school, you couldn't get away with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don't uphold scholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk the losers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.
I must say, it was fun having the Republicans in St. Paul and to see it all up close and firsthand. Security was, as one might expect, thin-lipped and gimlet-eyed, but once you got through it, you found the folks you went to high school with -- farm kids, jocks, the townies who ran the student council, the cheerleaders, some of the bullies -- and they are as cohesive now as they were back then, dedicated to school spirit, intolerant of outsiders, able to jump up and down and holler for something they don't actually believe. But oh Lord, what they brought forth this year. When you check the actuarial tables on a 72-year-old guy who's had three bouts with cancer, you guess you may be looking at the first woman president, a hustling Evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder who, not counting Canada, has set foot outside the country once -- a trip to Germany, Iraq and Kuwait in 2007 to visit Alaskans in the armed service. And who listed a refueling stop in Ireland as a fourth country visited. She's like the Current Occupant but with big hair. If you want inexperience, there were better choices.
SOURCE: Salon.com
Sep 2, 2008
GK: Who wants to see Sarah Palin as the next president?
Well, I certainly don't want to see her as the next president. Don't ge me wrong. I would love to see a woman in the White House. However, from 2009—2018, I want to see Barack Obama in the White House.
The title in this essay is a bit distracting. Keillor doesn't talk about her much. He just lets us know that the choice was bad, that's all. Then he goes on talking about the Minnesota Senatorial race. The title certainly doesn't fit. I wish he had an editor who read his essays. (I'll volunteer.)
The Republicans are meeting down the hill from my house. What are they trying to say?
By Garrison Keillor
Sept. 3, 2008 |
The Republicans are meeting down the hill from my house, helicopters are pounding the air, and there are more suits on the streets and big black SUVs and a brownish cloud venting from the hockey arena where the convention is assembled. A large moment for little old St. Paul, which is more accustomed to visitations by conventions of morticians and foundation garment salesmen and the Sons of the Desert, and so we are thrilled. It makes no difference that the city is Democratic. What matters is that, for a few days, TV will show a few pictures of the big bend in the Mississippi, the limestone bluffs, the capitol and cathedral, and a tree-shaded avenue or two, and some of the world will know that we exist.
Too bad that the Current Occupant and Mr. Cheney canceled their St. Paul appearances so they could focus on hurricane-threatened New Orleans and lend their expertise to rescue operations. As it turned out, they weren't needed, which has been generally true for a long time. Their reporting for duty now only served to remind everyone of what happened three years ago. And Mr. McCain, as of this writing, seemed torn between coming to St. Paul to address the convention and comforting hurricane victims in Mississippi, if any could be found.
Meanwhile, he posed a stark question for voters to ponder: How much would you like to see Sarah Palin of Wasilla, Alaska, as the next president of the United States? And what does the question say about Mr. McCain's love of the country that she might suddenly need to lead? No need to discuss these things at length, really. The gentleman played his card, a two of hearts. Make of it what you will.
The challenge for Republicans is how to change the subject from the dismal story of Republican triumph the past eight years and get voters to focus on, say, the old man's war record or Mrs. Palin's perkiness or the oddity of the skinny guy's last name. If they can succeed there, hey can win this thing.
The Senate race in Minnesota is a good example. The Republican, Norm Coleman, has scored points by whooping up a couple tiny scandalettes -- some old jokes that, like a lot of old jokes, aren't so funny, and a tax snafu by some bookkeeper with dandruff on his shoulders -- against Democrat Al Franken, which may yet succeed in distracting voters from Coleman's important role as whistle-plugger in the $23 billion Iraq scandal.
From 2003 to 2006, Coleman was chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is responsible for investigating, among other things, "fraud, waste, and abuse in government contracting," and on his watch, the subcommittee held no hearings on the disappearance of billions of tax dollars into "reconstruction projects" in Iraq that didn't seem to reconstruct anything whatsoever. Bundles of newly minted $100 bills on pallets in Baghdad that simply vanished. No-bid contracts lavished on people with connections. What may be the biggest case of war profiteering in the history of buzzardry.
The PSI is a big hammer. It's the subcommittee Joe McCarthy used to go after the U.S. Army and Sen. John McClellan used to go after labor racketeers with the young Bobby Kennedy as chief counsel, but as the Coleman subcommittee it went after federal employees who were traveling business class instead of economy, meanwhile money was pouring out of the Treasury for any Republican who could write "Iraq" with fewer than two spelling errors, and an old Bush retainer was appointed special inspector general to oversee the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund, but without authority to oversee money spent on reconstruction by the Pentagon, which was where most of the money went. All of this Sen. Coleman watched with a cool eye, and he now calculates that Minnesota voters won't have the attention span to read a story with a lot of dollar amounts and acronyms like PSI and IRRF and SIG. Maybe, maybe not.
The simple truth is that, while more than 4,000 Americans gave their lives in the war in Iraq, the war was an enormous financial opportunity for neocons and their friends, and Sen. Coleman was a passive observer of one of the biggest heists in history. The cynicism is staggering to the normal person. He was the cop who busted the hot dog vendor for obstructing the sidewalk while the McGurks were cleaning out the bank. This is no joke. A crook is walking around looking for votes. And the truth is marching on.
SOURCE: Salon.com
The title in this essay is a bit distracting. Keillor doesn't talk about her much. He just lets us know that the choice was bad, that's all. Then he goes on talking about the Minnesota Senatorial race. The title certainly doesn't fit. I wish he had an editor who read his essays. (I'll volunteer.)
The Republicans are meeting down the hill from my house. What are they trying to say?
By Garrison Keillor
Sept. 3, 2008 |
The Republicans are meeting down the hill from my house, helicopters are pounding the air, and there are more suits on the streets and big black SUVs and a brownish cloud venting from the hockey arena where the convention is assembled. A large moment for little old St. Paul, which is more accustomed to visitations by conventions of morticians and foundation garment salesmen and the Sons of the Desert, and so we are thrilled. It makes no difference that the city is Democratic. What matters is that, for a few days, TV will show a few pictures of the big bend in the Mississippi, the limestone bluffs, the capitol and cathedral, and a tree-shaded avenue or two, and some of the world will know that we exist.
Too bad that the Current Occupant and Mr. Cheney canceled their St. Paul appearances so they could focus on hurricane-threatened New Orleans and lend their expertise to rescue operations. As it turned out, they weren't needed, which has been generally true for a long time. Their reporting for duty now only served to remind everyone of what happened three years ago. And Mr. McCain, as of this writing, seemed torn between coming to St. Paul to address the convention and comforting hurricane victims in Mississippi, if any could be found.
Meanwhile, he posed a stark question for voters to ponder: How much would you like to see Sarah Palin of Wasilla, Alaska, as the next president of the United States? And what does the question say about Mr. McCain's love of the country that she might suddenly need to lead? No need to discuss these things at length, really. The gentleman played his card, a two of hearts. Make of it what you will.
The challenge for Republicans is how to change the subject from the dismal story of Republican triumph the past eight years and get voters to focus on, say, the old man's war record or Mrs. Palin's perkiness or the oddity of the skinny guy's last name. If they can succeed there, hey can win this thing.
The Senate race in Minnesota is a good example. The Republican, Norm Coleman, has scored points by whooping up a couple tiny scandalettes -- some old jokes that, like a lot of old jokes, aren't so funny, and a tax snafu by some bookkeeper with dandruff on his shoulders -- against Democrat Al Franken, which may yet succeed in distracting voters from Coleman's important role as whistle-plugger in the $23 billion Iraq scandal.
From 2003 to 2006, Coleman was chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is responsible for investigating, among other things, "fraud, waste, and abuse in government contracting," and on his watch, the subcommittee held no hearings on the disappearance of billions of tax dollars into "reconstruction projects" in Iraq that didn't seem to reconstruct anything whatsoever. Bundles of newly minted $100 bills on pallets in Baghdad that simply vanished. No-bid contracts lavished on people with connections. What may be the biggest case of war profiteering in the history of buzzardry.
The PSI is a big hammer. It's the subcommittee Joe McCarthy used to go after the U.S. Army and Sen. John McClellan used to go after labor racketeers with the young Bobby Kennedy as chief counsel, but as the Coleman subcommittee it went after federal employees who were traveling business class instead of economy, meanwhile money was pouring out of the Treasury for any Republican who could write "Iraq" with fewer than two spelling errors, and an old Bush retainer was appointed special inspector general to oversee the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund, but without authority to oversee money spent on reconstruction by the Pentagon, which was where most of the money went. All of this Sen. Coleman watched with a cool eye, and he now calculates that Minnesota voters won't have the attention span to read a story with a lot of dollar amounts and acronyms like PSI and IRRF and SIG. Maybe, maybe not.
The simple truth is that, while more than 4,000 Americans gave their lives in the war in Iraq, the war was an enormous financial opportunity for neocons and their friends, and Sen. Coleman was a passive observer of one of the biggest heists in history. The cynicism is staggering to the normal person. He was the cop who busted the hot dog vendor for obstructing the sidewalk while the McGurks were cleaning out the bank. This is no joke. A crook is walking around looking for votes. And the truth is marching on.
SOURCE: Salon.com
Aug 29, 2008
Garrison Keillor wants ‘just enough success to keep working’
"Hello, Chad. This is Garrison Keillor calling from Salem, Oregon.''
And I’m hypnotized – that articulate baritone, that comforting timbre, that beguiling, measured way of observing, discussing and describing that’s endeared Keillor to a fan base that, in the author, satirist and radio personality’s low-key, self-deprecating way, he’d probably still try to downplay.
Keillor’s "A Prairie Home Companion: The Rhubarb Tour'' – a live variety show adapted from his broadcast program – pulls into the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis on Sunday and South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset on Monday.
PL: You know the area, having played both venues before.
GK: They are unique venues – venues with revolving platforms. You get to walk around and get a sense of motion. And much of the audience can see the drummer’s back. He bounces. He does.
PL: What do you particularly enjoy about the South Shore?
GK: I don’t know much about the South Shore, but I remember riding through it on the bus. You saw house after house that was large but not a showpiece house – houses built for comfort but that had a sort of pleasant, rundown quality about them, which reminds me of the houses in St. Paul. In St. Paul, if you don’t mow your lawn into a work of art, people don’t hold it against you. Some of these (houses) were like that – a weathered quality about them, which makes sense being close to the ocean and the salt water – and they didn’t look like houses you’d typically see in suburbs. So much of America looks so much alike. The suburbs of Phoenix look like the suburbs of Minnesota, which look like the suburbs of Atlanta: the same architecture, shopping centers and stores. When you’re in New England, you are in a particular part of America. It doesn’t look like other places. I like that about it.
PL: You’ve described this show as "the show I could do if I could do only one more show.'' Why is that?
GK: It’s really the variety. It packs, into a few hours, some ribald humor, love songs, stories and sound effects. It incorporates some sonnets I’ve written in the last six months, but also low comedy. It has so many different things. It’s not just one performer trotting out his wares.
PL: It seems like more people should know about (country singer and Rhubarb tour stalwart) Suzy Bogguss, even though she was pretty big in the ’80s and ’90s. How would you describe her?
GK: She’s a sterling singer. People are stunned by the clarity and tone of her voice when she begins to sing. I’m sort of a constructed singer – she’s a natural. She comes out and breaks up the show. There are duets and they’re wonderful. A duet is an extremely simple and good thing: two voices in harmony.
PL: It seems fitting we’re talking during the week of the Democratic National Convention, seeing as you endorsed Sen. Obama earlier this year. What do you make of – what do you like about – how he’s run his campaign?
GK: I’ve been impressed by his discipline and focus. He’s not a casual candidate. He doesn’t come with the sloppiness that has beset so many Democrats who think they can get by on the basis of good feelings.
(Obama) is a tireless and focused person. I also admire that he wrote his own books; Teddy Roosevelt wrote his but I can’t think of many since then who have. It’s stunning, the fact that he can express himself without calling in a cadre of writers to do it for him. That’s a mark of intelligence that ought to be required, I think. If you can’t put thoughts on paper in a cogent and organized way, who are you?
And then of course, race is the great unmentionable. If Obama were a 47-year-old white man from Chicago with his same skills, I think he’d be 15 points ahead.
PL: Earlier this year you wrote a column called "The Roar of Hollow Patriotism'' (which criticized the biker subculture that gathers for the "Rolling Thunder'' parade in Washington D.C. to honor veterans). I know it was a bit controversial at the time. Has there been any feedback?
GK: There was a big reaction to it – people felt like they were being attacked – but it has mostly all passed. I’m not aware of any hard feelings. I wrote a piece that described what I saw: 300,000 motorcycles in the Capitol is quite a phenomenon.
PL: Your most recent book was "Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon,'' from 2007. I know you’re writing all the time, from poetry to columns, but do you have your next book project in the works?
GK: I’ve started a new novel called "Pilgrims.'' It will be another Lake Wobegon novel and will be out a year from now. It’s about a group of Lake Wobegonians who are visiting Italy and to see the grave of a Lake Wobegon boy buried outside Rome. I thought of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for the idea of these travelers who make their way from Rome to the cemetery, starting to tell stories. The death of this boy, which happened a long time ago, opens up memories of old times and people long forgotten in Lake Wobegon. It’s a very simple idea and came from my own experiences with my own siblings. You sit there and enjoy Italy, but the trip also reminds you of back home. You remember things.
PL: It’s been nearly two years since Robert Altman’s passing, and you were obviously close to his last completed project, the film version of "A Prairie Home Companion'' (2006). Do you have a favorite memory of working with Altman?
GK: I remember how frail and fragile he seemed when I first met him in New York, and then how much younger and happier he seemed when he started shooting the movie. He loved to sit in that high canvas chair, directing his cameraman, directing his lighting man, directing his set designer – he was just so happy to talk about what he was doing to anyone who wanted to listen. He had no wish to go into retirement whatsoever. I remember he started talking to me about World War II and that was my clearest insight into Altman. He had enlisted when he was 17 and lied about his age, and by the time he was 19 he was piloting a B-17 bomber in the Pacific. Here was this enormous, cold, loud, rattling piece of machinery in the sky, and he was in it doing bombing runs. When you’ve done that at 19 or 20, you have nothing left to fear. You’re fearless for the rest of your life. And he absolutely was fearless – he just wanted to go forward.
I can’t imagine being that way, and I admired getting to know him. He got that movie done under the stress of personal illness and the mentality that would have had most people going to the hospital every minute. He was a hero and an admirable person.
PL: Do you give any thought to retirement? It doesn’t seem like you’re ready to stop moving forward, either. Is that accurate?
GK: That’s accurate. I’m moving along, bouncing from one thing to another, and I love what I do for an odd combination of reasons. One thing is a kind of memory loss – I’ve had failure but I tend to forget it, and I have many regrets that don’t seem to inhibit me, and I have qualms but you learn to stifle them and go on ahead and do what you do. I still haven’t done the radio show the way I really want to do it, and I want to write another movie, and my great hope is to write a play. A person wants to do what he can’t and that’s what keeps you going. Failure is a great stimulus.
What you realize, in maturity, is that stunning success when you’re young would have killed you forever. Maybe you make a movie that’s hailed as a new classic or you have an album that goes titanium. How do you survive that? It’s hard for young people to understand, and they shouldn’t understand it, but it is the truth. You want just enough success to keep working. So don’t win any awards, OK?
SOURCE: EnterpriseNews.com
And I’m hypnotized – that articulate baritone, that comforting timbre, that beguiling, measured way of observing, discussing and describing that’s endeared Keillor to a fan base that, in the author, satirist and radio personality’s low-key, self-deprecating way, he’d probably still try to downplay.
Keillor’s "A Prairie Home Companion: The Rhubarb Tour'' – a live variety show adapted from his broadcast program – pulls into the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis on Sunday and South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset on Monday.
 Garrison Keillor visits the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis on Sunday and South Shore Music Circus in Cohasset on Monday. |
GK: They are unique venues – venues with revolving platforms. You get to walk around and get a sense of motion. And much of the audience can see the drummer’s back. He bounces. He does.
PL: What do you particularly enjoy about the South Shore?
GK: I don’t know much about the South Shore, but I remember riding through it on the bus. You saw house after house that was large but not a showpiece house – houses built for comfort but that had a sort of pleasant, rundown quality about them, which reminds me of the houses in St. Paul. In St. Paul, if you don’t mow your lawn into a work of art, people don’t hold it against you. Some of these (houses) were like that – a weathered quality about them, which makes sense being close to the ocean and the salt water – and they didn’t look like houses you’d typically see in suburbs. So much of America looks so much alike. The suburbs of Phoenix look like the suburbs of Minnesota, which look like the suburbs of Atlanta: the same architecture, shopping centers and stores. When you’re in New England, you are in a particular part of America. It doesn’t look like other places. I like that about it.
PL: You’ve described this show as "the show I could do if I could do only one more show.'' Why is that?
GK: It’s really the variety. It packs, into a few hours, some ribald humor, love songs, stories and sound effects. It incorporates some sonnets I’ve written in the last six months, but also low comedy. It has so many different things. It’s not just one performer trotting out his wares.
PL: It seems like more people should know about (country singer and Rhubarb tour stalwart) Suzy Bogguss, even though she was pretty big in the ’80s and ’90s. How would you describe her?
GK: She’s a sterling singer. People are stunned by the clarity and tone of her voice when she begins to sing. I’m sort of a constructed singer – she’s a natural. She comes out and breaks up the show. There are duets and they’re wonderful. A duet is an extremely simple and good thing: two voices in harmony.
PL: It seems fitting we’re talking during the week of the Democratic National Convention, seeing as you endorsed Sen. Obama earlier this year. What do you make of – what do you like about – how he’s run his campaign?
GK: I’ve been impressed by his discipline and focus. He’s not a casual candidate. He doesn’t come with the sloppiness that has beset so many Democrats who think they can get by on the basis of good feelings.
(Obama) is a tireless and focused person. I also admire that he wrote his own books; Teddy Roosevelt wrote his but I can’t think of many since then who have. It’s stunning, the fact that he can express himself without calling in a cadre of writers to do it for him. That’s a mark of intelligence that ought to be required, I think. If you can’t put thoughts on paper in a cogent and organized way, who are you?
And then of course, race is the great unmentionable. If Obama were a 47-year-old white man from Chicago with his same skills, I think he’d be 15 points ahead.
PL: Earlier this year you wrote a column called "The Roar of Hollow Patriotism'' (which criticized the biker subculture that gathers for the "Rolling Thunder'' parade in Washington D.C. to honor veterans). I know it was a bit controversial at the time. Has there been any feedback?
GK: There was a big reaction to it – people felt like they were being attacked – but it has mostly all passed. I’m not aware of any hard feelings. I wrote a piece that described what I saw: 300,000 motorcycles in the Capitol is quite a phenomenon.
PL: Your most recent book was "Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon,'' from 2007. I know you’re writing all the time, from poetry to columns, but do you have your next book project in the works?
GK: I’ve started a new novel called "Pilgrims.'' It will be another Lake Wobegon novel and will be out a year from now. It’s about a group of Lake Wobegonians who are visiting Italy and to see the grave of a Lake Wobegon boy buried outside Rome. I thought of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for the idea of these travelers who make their way from Rome to the cemetery, starting to tell stories. The death of this boy, which happened a long time ago, opens up memories of old times and people long forgotten in Lake Wobegon. It’s a very simple idea and came from my own experiences with my own siblings. You sit there and enjoy Italy, but the trip also reminds you of back home. You remember things.
PL: It’s been nearly two years since Robert Altman’s passing, and you were obviously close to his last completed project, the film version of "A Prairie Home Companion'' (2006). Do you have a favorite memory of working with Altman?
GK: I remember how frail and fragile he seemed when I first met him in New York, and then how much younger and happier he seemed when he started shooting the movie. He loved to sit in that high canvas chair, directing his cameraman, directing his lighting man, directing his set designer – he was just so happy to talk about what he was doing to anyone who wanted to listen. He had no wish to go into retirement whatsoever. I remember he started talking to me about World War II and that was my clearest insight into Altman. He had enlisted when he was 17 and lied about his age, and by the time he was 19 he was piloting a B-17 bomber in the Pacific. Here was this enormous, cold, loud, rattling piece of machinery in the sky, and he was in it doing bombing runs. When you’ve done that at 19 or 20, you have nothing left to fear. You’re fearless for the rest of your life. And he absolutely was fearless – he just wanted to go forward.
I can’t imagine being that way, and I admired getting to know him. He got that movie done under the stress of personal illness and the mentality that would have had most people going to the hospital every minute. He was a hero and an admirable person.
PL: Do you give any thought to retirement? It doesn’t seem like you’re ready to stop moving forward, either. Is that accurate?
GK: That’s accurate. I’m moving along, bouncing from one thing to another, and I love what I do for an odd combination of reasons. One thing is a kind of memory loss – I’ve had failure but I tend to forget it, and I have many regrets that don’t seem to inhibit me, and I have qualms but you learn to stifle them and go on ahead and do what you do. I still haven’t done the radio show the way I really want to do it, and I want to write another movie, and my great hope is to write a play. A person wants to do what he can’t and that’s what keeps you going. Failure is a great stimulus.
What you realize, in maturity, is that stunning success when you’re young would have killed you forever. Maybe you make a movie that’s hailed as a new classic or you have an album that goes titanium. How do you survive that? It’s hard for young people to understand, and they shouldn’t understand it, but it is the truth. You want just enough success to keep working. So don’t win any awards, OK?
SOURCE: EnterpriseNews.com
Aug 26, 2008
GK: Rolling with the punches
Keillor says that,
"America has paid a terrible price for one family's decision to take a boy out of the public schools of Midland, Texas, and send him off to Chutney or Amway or whatever his prep school was called, and then to Yale, where he picked up a permanent grudge against people who were smarter than he."
I think the problem is that many of our countrymen instead of looking up to those who are smarter and accept them as our leader, our countrymen look down on the smart ones and want to be lead by those who are either of equal intellect or even lower. I don't know about you, but I don't want someone who is dumber than I am leading me. The trouble is the current occupant, as Keillor calls him, does not have the smarts to be a leader and, frankly, Mr. McCain does not either. Let's face it, McCain was on the bottom of his class. Would you want to have the surgeon who was on the bottom of his class working on your heart bypass?
Californians remind me of Londoners. They're less jittery than the rest of us, and disaster doesn't terrify them.
Aug. 27, 2008 |
Garrison Keillor
California is another country. You wake up in the morning and New York is already on its first coffee, and the first scandal has broken in Washington, one more Republican crony caught with his hand in the honey pot. It all feels very far away.
You wake up, your laptop is full of e-mails but you're in California so you don't have to reply to them. Your e-mailers imagine that you are busy attending some sort of Mayan fertility ceremony on a beach, bare-chested men whanging on little drums, dinging bells, naked children strewing blossoms in the surf, a priestess in a white caftan playing a Peruvian flute. Stereotypes live forever: Minnesota is cold, California is ditzy. Whereas the California I know is a land of gorgeously normal people, serious, reverent, clean, agile men and women, athletic nerds who love to surf and hike and shoot hoops and also read Frederick Buechner, listen to Bach. I grew up thinking you had to choose between smart and sexy; in California they think you can have it all.
They are less jittery than us flatlanders: Disaster does not terrify them. They roll with earthquakes, the landscape ripples, the china clinks, and so what, it's only an earthquake. Giant mudslides and brush fires -- you ride them out and you move on.
They remind me of Londoners, who are famous for rolling with the punches. The night of the horrible bombing in the Underground, the streets of London were full of people who came out to show each other and themselves that they would not be intimidated by a bunch of suicidal maniacs. And even though the danger of terrorism is very real in London, much more so than in Omaha, Neb., or Kenosha, Wis., or Tuscaloosa, Ala., the English have been stubborn in defending their freedom. You cannot be required to carry a photo ID in the U.K. The police still don't walk around with pistols on their belts.
In this country, the attacks by terrorists opened the doors to the darkness of Dick Cheney and furtive vicious men just like him who unleashed an assault on constitutional law, hoping to turn a traumatic occasion -- the twin towers burning, smoke billowing over Manhattan -- into a permanent Republican majority. As so often happens, vicious men were in the saddle for a time while decent men blithered and dithered. But the ignominious fall of Mr. Giuliani was evidence that Americans have gotten over it. You can't wave the bloody shirt anymore and expect people to fall into line.
And that's a problem for John McCain. A great candidate for hustling neocons and owners of five or more homes, he is dead wrong about Iraq, dead wrong about the economy, and he was born 20 years too soon. But Republicans feel sorry for how he was savaged eight years ago and so they will prop the old man up, retrain him as best they can, keep him on message, stuff a rag in him when he starts kidding around.
People have lots of questions about Barack Obama and that's as it should be. The man inspires curiosity. The problem for McCain is that Barack explains himself so well. Those people jamming basketball arenas aren't going there to look at his shoes. If you listen to the man speak, you're likely to vote for him. If you listen to McCain, you're reminded of your great-uncle Elmer hashing over the injustice of MacArthur getting canned by Harry Truman. Who cares?
And then there is the Current Occupant. He's kept quiet for a while, cutting brush, playing speed golf, treadmilling, but he's bound to emerge in the fall, make a speech, issue a statement, do something, and this will not be good for McCain.
America has paid a terrible price for one family's decision to take a boy out of the public schools of Midland, Texas, and send him off to Chutney or Amway or whatever his prep school was called, and then to Yale, where he picked up a permanent grudge against people who were smarter than he. A Yalie who learned to pass for redneck, a Methodist who learned to pass for evangelical, he was cut out for politics, but what a lousy administrator and what a dull, uninspiring leader. Fewer people want more bushiness than want to see the return of infantile paralysis. And the truth is marching on.
SOURCE: Salon.com
"America has paid a terrible price for one family's decision to take a boy out of the public schools of Midland, Texas, and send him off to Chutney or Amway or whatever his prep school was called, and then to Yale, where he picked up a permanent grudge against people who were smarter than he."
I think the problem is that many of our countrymen instead of looking up to those who are smarter and accept them as our leader, our countrymen look down on the smart ones and want to be lead by those who are either of equal intellect or even lower. I don't know about you, but I don't want someone who is dumber than I am leading me. The trouble is the current occupant, as Keillor calls him, does not have the smarts to be a leader and, frankly, Mr. McCain does not either. Let's face it, McCain was on the bottom of his class. Would you want to have the surgeon who was on the bottom of his class working on your heart bypass?
Californians remind me of Londoners. They're less jittery than the rest of us, and disaster doesn't terrify them.
Aug. 27, 2008 |
Garrison Keillor
California is another country. You wake up in the morning and New York is already on its first coffee, and the first scandal has broken in Washington, one more Republican crony caught with his hand in the honey pot. It all feels very far away.
You wake up, your laptop is full of e-mails but you're in California so you don't have to reply to them. Your e-mailers imagine that you are busy attending some sort of Mayan fertility ceremony on a beach, bare-chested men whanging on little drums, dinging bells, naked children strewing blossoms in the surf, a priestess in a white caftan playing a Peruvian flute. Stereotypes live forever: Minnesota is cold, California is ditzy. Whereas the California I know is a land of gorgeously normal people, serious, reverent, clean, agile men and women, athletic nerds who love to surf and hike and shoot hoops and also read Frederick Buechner, listen to Bach. I grew up thinking you had to choose between smart and sexy; in California they think you can have it all.
They are less jittery than us flatlanders: Disaster does not terrify them. They roll with earthquakes, the landscape ripples, the china clinks, and so what, it's only an earthquake. Giant mudslides and brush fires -- you ride them out and you move on.
They remind me of Londoners, who are famous for rolling with the punches. The night of the horrible bombing in the Underground, the streets of London were full of people who came out to show each other and themselves that they would not be intimidated by a bunch of suicidal maniacs. And even though the danger of terrorism is very real in London, much more so than in Omaha, Neb., or Kenosha, Wis., or Tuscaloosa, Ala., the English have been stubborn in defending their freedom. You cannot be required to carry a photo ID in the U.K. The police still don't walk around with pistols on their belts.
In this country, the attacks by terrorists opened the doors to the darkness of Dick Cheney and furtive vicious men just like him who unleashed an assault on constitutional law, hoping to turn a traumatic occasion -- the twin towers burning, smoke billowing over Manhattan -- into a permanent Republican majority. As so often happens, vicious men were in the saddle for a time while decent men blithered and dithered. But the ignominious fall of Mr. Giuliani was evidence that Americans have gotten over it. You can't wave the bloody shirt anymore and expect people to fall into line.
And that's a problem for John McCain. A great candidate for hustling neocons and owners of five or more homes, he is dead wrong about Iraq, dead wrong about the economy, and he was born 20 years too soon. But Republicans feel sorry for how he was savaged eight years ago and so they will prop the old man up, retrain him as best they can, keep him on message, stuff a rag in him when he starts kidding around.
People have lots of questions about Barack Obama and that's as it should be. The man inspires curiosity. The problem for McCain is that Barack explains himself so well. Those people jamming basketball arenas aren't going there to look at his shoes. If you listen to the man speak, you're likely to vote for him. If you listen to McCain, you're reminded of your great-uncle Elmer hashing over the injustice of MacArthur getting canned by Harry Truman. Who cares?
And then there is the Current Occupant. He's kept quiet for a while, cutting brush, playing speed golf, treadmilling, but he's bound to emerge in the fall, make a speech, issue a statement, do something, and this will not be good for McCain.
America has paid a terrible price for one family's decision to take a boy out of the public schools of Midland, Texas, and send him off to Chutney or Amway or whatever his prep school was called, and then to Yale, where he picked up a permanent grudge against people who were smarter than he. A Yalie who learned to pass for redneck, a Methodist who learned to pass for evangelical, he was cut out for politics, but what a lousy administrator and what a dull, uninspiring leader. Fewer people want more bushiness than want to see the return of infantile paralysis. And the truth is marching on.
SOURCE: Salon.com
Aug 19, 2008
GK: Meet me at the state fair
Well, this is his first article in a long time where he doesn't touch politics and he pissed me off. First off, I don't eat pork. They are smart animals. They stay off my diet. TApparently, it is on his diet. But then again, some of my children and my hubby eat pork as well. C'est la vie.
Then, he talks about llamas being gentle animals. Has he ever come close to them? They hiss and spit at you. Of course, you have to know how to raise them, and I am sure that the llamas he saw at the fair were very well behaved indeed.
Now, he also talks about the necessity of whacking a pig. Again, if you raise them properly, there's no need for violence. But anyway, this is just a nice essay about spending time at the fair. Enjoy it.
Then, he talks about llamas being gentle animals. Has he ever come close to them? They hiss and spit at you. Of course, you have to know how to raise them, and I am sure that the llamas he saw at the fair were very well behaved indeed.
Now, he also talks about the necessity of whacking a pig. Again, if you raise them properly, there's no need for violence. But anyway, this is just a nice essay about spending time at the fair. Enjoy it.
Llama judging, deep-fried pineapple on a stick, hot tubs, acres of machinery -- it's all here for the taking at the annual carnival of ideas.
By Garrison Keillor
Aug. 20, 2008 |
I got to go to the Iowa State Fair on Sunday and eat a very excellent pork chop on a stick as I stood by the U.S. Marines booth, where various civilians lined up to do chin-ups on a high bar, counted off by a Marine whose T-shirt said "Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body." I've seen many things at state fairs but never chin-ups. The look of chagrin on men's faces who had believed they could do chin-ups and then the truth dawned on them. One man looked as if he might blow out his aorta. A small, sharp memory of high school phys ed. I had to turn away.
I passed up the novelty foods, the deep-fried pineapple on a stick, etc. A fair isn't about food, it is a carnival of ideas where the Lutheran booth sits between the "reverse osmosis" water purifier booth and the hot-tub booth. Here is an 8-foot-by-8-foot tub that seats four and reclines one, with water jets and a pedestal table for your champagne, which would feel awfully good after a day of combining. Redemption by Faith Alone versus Creaturely Comfort. Nearby you can learn about ethanol and hear the horn of a Model T, which sounds like a terrified goose, or you can talk to a lawyer at the bar association booth. (He told me that most questions are about leases or divorces.)
Most fairgoers walk past like stunned sheep, but men are waiting in booths who'd be glad to explain about corn yield and herbicide or Republican principles or the advantages of vinyl siding. A kindly salesman told me all about an infrared "health cabin," which is sort of a sauna but without steam, just heat, up to 140 degrees, which "aids in the relief of chronic fatigue" and will detoxify you and "balance" your blood pressure. I didn't buy one, but I enjoyed the pitch. Salesmanship is basically a civil and amiable profession. Fifty feet away are the Methodists (Find Your Path, Share the Journey) and a display of bottled water (zero calories). And the antiabortion people, and the natural latex mattress booth (80 percent less tossing and turning), and a booth selling a GPS gizmo that provides weather info and also local movie times.
The beauty of a fair is conversation. You walk up to the Methodists and say, "What does that mean, 'find your path'? Is there more than one?" and you're good for 15 minutes. Talk, talk, talk, everywhere. Witness the rare art of barking, which is the art of rising inflection, and here is a crowd of overheated people in shorts and sneakers watching a green pepper being sliced and minced by a barker who made it seem thrilling. And next door, the hysteria of the auction ring, the old man in the big white hat and his bidibidibeebidy ululation, the shouts of his spotters, the old man hollering "Here we go!" and "It's only money! It'll only hurt for a little while!" and then "Sold for fifteen hundred dollars!"
I saw acres of machinery where a man who took a wrong turn into the liberal arts can contemplate a life he'll never live and stuff he'll never own. A beautiful 29-foot flatbed trailer with pine flooring on which you could carry hay bales or a tractor. A 4-by-4 double-cab pickup you could pull your trailer with. And beyond it an acre of FFA-restored tractors that put an older Midwesterner in a very thoughtful mood. The green John Deeres and Olivers, the red Farmall and Allis-Chalmers, the yellow Minneapolis Moline. The steel bucket seats on a coiled spring, the exhaust stacks, the brake and clutch pedals. You could climb up in that seat and be 14 again. I was happy back then pulling a manure spreader across the corn stubble on a September day, big clots of matter flying through the air. I miss those days.
And then I wound up at an open-air brick pavilion for the llama judging. Llamas are gentle, dignified beasts, and here were four of them being shown by teenagers. The animals' military bearing, heads high, their stately gait, their dark soulful eyes -- they looked as if they'd walked straight out of "Dr. Doolittle," and it was sweet to see them being handled lovingly by teenagers. Pigs are something else -- you can see how a person might need to whack a pig. But nobody would ever whack a llama. According to a poster, they are raised for "fiber, showing, carting, guardians, and companionship." One girl stood by her llama and blew gently on its nose, and he looked lovingly into her eyes. A sort of conversation. If every teenager had his or her own llama, this would be a very different country.
SOURCE: Salon.com
By Garrison Keillor
Aug. 20, 2008 |
I got to go to the Iowa State Fair on Sunday and eat a very excellent pork chop on a stick as I stood by the U.S. Marines booth, where various civilians lined up to do chin-ups on a high bar, counted off by a Marine whose T-shirt said "Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body." I've seen many things at state fairs but never chin-ups. The look of chagrin on men's faces who had believed they could do chin-ups and then the truth dawned on them. One man looked as if he might blow out his aorta. A small, sharp memory of high school phys ed. I had to turn away.
I passed up the novelty foods, the deep-fried pineapple on a stick, etc. A fair isn't about food, it is a carnival of ideas where the Lutheran booth sits between the "reverse osmosis" water purifier booth and the hot-tub booth. Here is an 8-foot-by-8-foot tub that seats four and reclines one, with water jets and a pedestal table for your champagne, which would feel awfully good after a day of combining. Redemption by Faith Alone versus Creaturely Comfort. Nearby you can learn about ethanol and hear the horn of a Model T, which sounds like a terrified goose, or you can talk to a lawyer at the bar association booth. (He told me that most questions are about leases or divorces.)
Most fairgoers walk past like stunned sheep, but men are waiting in booths who'd be glad to explain about corn yield and herbicide or Republican principles or the advantages of vinyl siding. A kindly salesman told me all about an infrared "health cabin," which is sort of a sauna but without steam, just heat, up to 140 degrees, which "aids in the relief of chronic fatigue" and will detoxify you and "balance" your blood pressure. I didn't buy one, but I enjoyed the pitch. Salesmanship is basically a civil and amiable profession. Fifty feet away are the Methodists (Find Your Path, Share the Journey) and a display of bottled water (zero calories). And the antiabortion people, and the natural latex mattress booth (80 percent less tossing and turning), and a booth selling a GPS gizmo that provides weather info and also local movie times.
The beauty of a fair is conversation. You walk up to the Methodists and say, "What does that mean, 'find your path'? Is there more than one?" and you're good for 15 minutes. Talk, talk, talk, everywhere. Witness the rare art of barking, which is the art of rising inflection, and here is a crowd of overheated people in shorts and sneakers watching a green pepper being sliced and minced by a barker who made it seem thrilling. And next door, the hysteria of the auction ring, the old man in the big white hat and his bidibidibeebidy ululation, the shouts of his spotters, the old man hollering "Here we go!" and "It's only money! It'll only hurt for a little while!" and then "Sold for fifteen hundred dollars!"
I saw acres of machinery where a man who took a wrong turn into the liberal arts can contemplate a life he'll never live and stuff he'll never own. A beautiful 29-foot flatbed trailer with pine flooring on which you could carry hay bales or a tractor. A 4-by-4 double-cab pickup you could pull your trailer with. And beyond it an acre of FFA-restored tractors that put an older Midwesterner in a very thoughtful mood. The green John Deeres and Olivers, the red Farmall and Allis-Chalmers, the yellow Minneapolis Moline. The steel bucket seats on a coiled spring, the exhaust stacks, the brake and clutch pedals. You could climb up in that seat and be 14 again. I was happy back then pulling a manure spreader across the corn stubble on a September day, big clots of matter flying through the air. I miss those days.
And then I wound up at an open-air brick pavilion for the llama judging. Llamas are gentle, dignified beasts, and here were four of them being shown by teenagers. The animals' military bearing, heads high, their stately gait, their dark soulful eyes -- they looked as if they'd walked straight out of "Dr. Doolittle," and it was sweet to see them being handled lovingly by teenagers. Pigs are something else -- you can see how a person might need to whack a pig. But nobody would ever whack a llama. According to a poster, they are raised for "fiber, showing, carting, guardians, and companionship." One girl stood by her llama and blew gently on its nose, and he looked lovingly into her eyes. A sort of conversation. If every teenager had his or her own llama, this would be a very different country.
SOURCE: Salon.com
Aug 12, 2008
GK: Bring back community baths
Actually, he is right. We need to realize that we are all the same. Clothing and artificiality separate us from each other. Here's to naked liberals.
And here's my comment to his post that I made in the Salon.com Web site:
Basically, when you get down to it, we are all equals. Take our clothes away, take our money away, take anything that differentiate us from one another, and we will find that we are all in the same. We all bleed when we are cut. We all feel pain when we are hurt. Japanese baths or any other baths won't cure our problems. We have to realize that what we want for our children and ourselves, our neighbors want them as well. Why deny them the opportunity for the simple reason to amass more for ourselves.
Liberals, and I am proud liberal, are always looking out for the other guy. This administration and the McCain administration (God forbid that should happen) is looking out for the corporation and the rich, and that's where their evilness is apparent.
Source: Salon.com
And here's my comment to his post that I made in the Salon.com Web site:
Basically, when you get down to it, we are all equals. Take our clothes away, take our money away, take anything that differentiate us from one another, and we will find that we are all in the same. We all bleed when we are cut. We all feel pain when we are hurt. Japanese baths or any other baths won't cure our problems. We have to realize that what we want for our children and ourselves, our neighbors want them as well. Why deny them the opportunity for the simple reason to amass more for ourselves.
Liberals, and I am proud liberal, are always looking out for the other guy. This administration and the McCain administration (God forbid that should happen) is looking out for the corporation and the rich, and that's where their evilness is apparent.
If we all got together naked in a steamy room and got sploshed with hot water and scrubbed down hard, we would be more civil people.
By Garrison Keillor
Aug. 13, 2008 |
People accuse us old liberals of smarmy self-righteousness and God knows they are right. Four of us had lunch the other day and we
agreed before we sat down: no politics. We know what we're going to say so why say it? Self-righteousness is a good old American vice, and we have it, and though preferable to cruelty and cynicism and deliberate dumbheadedness, nonetheless remind yourself: You are not so different from the others.
So when we got onto politics halfway through my tuna sandwich, I said a deliberate unself-righteous thing: "I don't think any of us believe what we say we believe. It's just our neurons responding to a phrase or something, a learned response that makes us feel warm for some reason that goes back to childhood. And in the end it doesn't matter. We're motes of dust on a tiny insignificant planet spinning around in a solar system so vast our minds can't comprehend it, and one day the planet will implode and all will be lost -- Beethoven, Plato, Monet, the Minnesota Twins -- and it won't make any difference to the cosmos whatsoever, so why should we care who wins the election in November?"
There was a moment of silence and then somebody said that Barack has a commanding lead in Wisconsin and that McCain is in deep mud in Ohio.
What I didn't get to talk about at lunch was my bath last week. Somehow the subject of cleanliness never came up. We covered Children, Gardens, Travel, the Olympics -- swimming was the closest we got to the subject -- but then somebody got on a soapbox about China and how dearly we will someday pay for the cheap goods.
My bath. (Thank you for asking.) I went to a Japanese spa and sat in a steam bath and after twenty minutes felt some of my liberal smugness trickle down my legs. Extreme heat breaks down moral arrogance -- look at equatorial peoples; do they lecture the rest of us about our duty to the environment? No, they don't -- and I sat feeling more and more chastened, and then a stout Japanese woman poked her head in and led me into a tiled room and laid me out face-down on a padded table and sloshed me with hot water from a basin and splorted some soap on my back and started scrubbing. She wore rough gloves for this. She rinsed me with pans of hot water and scrubbed some more.
My nakedness did not interest her. I suppose that repeated exposure to the male form will do that, just as plucking chickens might make you a vegan.
It was luxurious, being bathed, all the sploshing and skritching, but also humbling, a naked creature feeling scourged, the sheer ordinariness of it. Here you are, wet and naked, and you are not so different from any other wet naked person. And then came the tiny masseuse with the powerful thumbs, and the steam room again, and a shower, and out into the world I went, cleansed and twanged, somewhat chastened, my neurons trembling. "You look extremely clean," someone told me.
I think I still believe what I believe. Liberals hold that the test of a civilized society is how it deals with the weak, the sick, the powerless. As William Blake wrote:
A Dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus'd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Or as Jesus said, "Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these" and so forth. And so the test of the state is the state of the public schools and the treatment of the elderly, the ill, the demented, the incarcerated. And so the adoption of torture as American policy and loosing the darkness of the soul upon some poor manacled wretch at Guantánamo is no small matter. We are all wretches. But I will spare you the rest of the sermon.
Let's bring back community baths. I honestly think that if we all got together naked in a steamy room and got sploshed with hot water and scrubbed down hard, we would be more civil people. Cleaner, too. Before the first debate, put the geezer and the skinny guy in a steam room for 30 minutes and see if it doesn't bring out something fine in them, something profound and memorable. It's a great country, no matter what the rich and the privileged say, and the truth, dear hearts, is marching on.
By Garrison Keillor
Aug. 13, 2008 |
People accuse us old liberals of smarmy self-righteousness and God knows they are right. Four of us had lunch the other day and we
agreed before we sat down: no politics. We know what we're going to say so why say it? Self-righteousness is a good old American vice, and we have it, and though preferable to cruelty and cynicism and deliberate dumbheadedness, nonetheless remind yourself: You are not so different from the others.So when we got onto politics halfway through my tuna sandwich, I said a deliberate unself-righteous thing: "I don't think any of us believe what we say we believe. It's just our neurons responding to a phrase or something, a learned response that makes us feel warm for some reason that goes back to childhood. And in the end it doesn't matter. We're motes of dust on a tiny insignificant planet spinning around in a solar system so vast our minds can't comprehend it, and one day the planet will implode and all will be lost -- Beethoven, Plato, Monet, the Minnesota Twins -- and it won't make any difference to the cosmos whatsoever, so why should we care who wins the election in November?"
There was a moment of silence and then somebody said that Barack has a commanding lead in Wisconsin and that McCain is in deep mud in Ohio.
What I didn't get to talk about at lunch was my bath last week. Somehow the subject of cleanliness never came up. We covered Children, Gardens, Travel, the Olympics -- swimming was the closest we got to the subject -- but then somebody got on a soapbox about China and how dearly we will someday pay for the cheap goods.
My bath. (Thank you for asking.) I went to a Japanese spa and sat in a steam bath and after twenty minutes felt some of my liberal smugness trickle down my legs. Extreme heat breaks down moral arrogance -- look at equatorial peoples; do they lecture the rest of us about our duty to the environment? No, they don't -- and I sat feeling more and more chastened, and then a stout Japanese woman poked her head in and led me into a tiled room and laid me out face-down on a padded table and sloshed me with hot water from a basin and splorted some soap on my back and started scrubbing. She wore rough gloves for this. She rinsed me with pans of hot water and scrubbed some more.
My nakedness did not interest her. I suppose that repeated exposure to the male form will do that, just as plucking chickens might make you a vegan.
It was luxurious, being bathed, all the sploshing and skritching, but also humbling, a naked creature feeling scourged, the sheer ordinariness of it. Here you are, wet and naked, and you are not so different from any other wet naked person. And then came the tiny masseuse with the powerful thumbs, and the steam room again, and a shower, and out into the world I went, cleansed and twanged, somewhat chastened, my neurons trembling. "You look extremely clean," someone told me.
I think I still believe what I believe. Liberals hold that the test of a civilized society is how it deals with the weak, the sick, the powerless. As William Blake wrote:
A Dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus'd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Or as Jesus said, "Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these" and so forth. And so the test of the state is the state of the public schools and the treatment of the elderly, the ill, the demented, the incarcerated. And so the adoption of torture as American policy and loosing the darkness of the soul upon some poor manacled wretch at Guantánamo is no small matter. We are all wretches. But I will spare you the rest of the sermon.
Let's bring back community baths. I honestly think that if we all got together naked in a steamy room and got sploshed with hot water and scrubbed down hard, we would be more civil people. Cleaner, too. Before the first debate, put the geezer and the skinny guy in a steam room for 30 minutes and see if it doesn't bring out something fine in them, something profound and memorable. It's a great country, no matter what the rich and the privileged say, and the truth, dear hearts, is marching on.
Source: Salon.com
Aug 5, 2008
GK: It's an amazing country
Garrison Keillor has been on a tirade against McCain. Now, I have no problems with that, as I myself am not voting for the older candidate. What bothered me about all his essays was that he made his tirades without really supporting why he disliked the man. I find this article a bit better focused.
Where else could an Arizona multimillionaire attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick?
By Garrison Keillor
Aug. 6, 2008 |
It's a simple, cheerful life but with occasional grim complications that one simply ignores, such as mortality or the '70s or the demise of the downtown department store. I love my downtown store, a block from the old stone courthouse where Alvin (Creepy) Karpis of the Ma Barker gang was tried for kidnapping in 1936, near a fine old popcorn shop, just down the street from a haberdashery where the other day I got fitted for a seersucker suit and was shown how to tie a bow tie. A great mystery, like the Trinity, suddenly made clear. You don't get this sort of instruction at a mall.
With a seersucker suit and a bow tie, I am equipped to run for public office on the States' Rights ticket and stand up for Our Way of Life and let's support our boys fighting for Unconditional Victory in Korea -- that's what I associate with seersucker, a man perspiring heavily and mopping his brow with Coca-Cola and crying out against the gummint and pointy-heads who interfere with Our Way of Life. A charlatan, in other words. My daily uniform is black T-shirt and jeans, which, if you saw me on the street and didn't know me, might lead you to believe I speak French and love jazz. Non non non, madame! Je suis un authentique Americain.
It's an amazing country where an anthrax researcher working for the Defense Department may have carried out a murderous campaign with anthrax and thereby succeeded in winning vast new appropriations for the anthrax program.
And it's an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.
Good luck with that, sir.
Meanwhile, the casual revelation last month that Mr. McCain has never figured out how to use a computer and has never sent e-mail or Googled is rather startling. It's like admitting that you've never clipped your own toenails or that you didn't know that toothpaste comes out of a tube because your valet always did that for you. It's like being amazed at the sight of a supermarket scanner. What world does Mr. McCain live in? Where does he keep his sense of curiosity? My 94-year-old mother has sent e-mail. Does somebody plan to show him how it's done and will they explain to him what "LOL" means?
Source: Salon.com
Where else could an Arizona multimillionaire attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick?
By Garrison Keillor
Aug. 6, 2008 |
It's a simple, cheerful life but with occasional grim complications that one simply ignores, such as mortality or the '70s or
the demise of the downtown department store. I love my downtown store, a block from the old stone courthouse where Alvin (Creepy) Karpis of the Ma Barker gang was tried for kidnapping in 1936, near a fine old popcorn shop, just down the street from a haberdashery where the other day I got fitted for a seersucker suit and was shown how to tie a bow tie. A great mystery, like the Trinity, suddenly made clear. You don't get this sort of instruction at a mall.With a seersucker suit and a bow tie, I am equipped to run for public office on the States' Rights ticket and stand up for Our Way of Life and let's support our boys fighting for Unconditional Victory in Korea -- that's what I associate with seersucker, a man perspiring heavily and mopping his brow with Coca-Cola and crying out against the gummint and pointy-heads who interfere with Our Way of Life. A charlatan, in other words. My daily uniform is black T-shirt and jeans, which, if you saw me on the street and didn't know me, might lead you to believe I speak French and love jazz. Non non non, madame! Je suis un authentique Americain.
An American guy is capable of many costumes -- Riverboat Gambler, Sensitive Aesthete, Wilderness Scout, Lounge Lizard, House Husband, Dangerous Radical and Scourge of Society, Aging Preppie -- and I've tried out most of them, but as you enter your golden years, your interest in masquerade naturally diminishes, and so it's interesting to see America's Oldest Presidential Candidate out on the hustings transforming himself into a yahoo and a cracker. Whatever consultant told him to do this is being paid way too much.
It's an amazing country where an anthrax researcher working for the Defense Department may have carried out a murderous campaign with anthrax and thereby succeeded in winning vast new appropriations for the anthrax program.
And it's an amazing country where an Arizona multimillionaire can attack a Chicago South Sider as an elitist and hope to make it stick. The Chicagoan was brought up by a single mom who had big ambitions for him, and he got scholarshipped into Harvard Law and was made president of the law review, all of it on his own hook, whereas the Arizonan is the son of an admiral and was ushered into Annapolis though an indifferent student, much like the Current Occupant, both of them men who are very lucky that their fathers were born before they were. The Chicagoan, who grew up without a father, wrote a book on his own, using a computer. The Arizonan hired people to write his for him. But because the Chicagoan can say what he thinks and make sense and the Arizonan cannot do that for more than 30 seconds at a time, the old guy is hoping to portray the skinny guy as arrogant.
Good luck with that, sir.
Meanwhile, the casual revelation last month that Mr. McCain has never figured out how to use a computer and has never sent e-mail or Googled is rather startling. It's like admitting that you've never clipped your own toenails or that you didn't know that toothpaste comes out of a tube because your valet always did that for you. It's like being amazed at the sight of a supermarket scanner. What world does Mr. McCain live in? Where does he keep his sense of curiosity? My 94-year-old mother has sent e-mail. Does somebody plan to show him how it's done and will they explain to him what "LOL" means?
Source: Salon.com
Jul 29, 2008
GK: GK: The trouble with John McCain
I am not so much worried out his age, as I am worried about the negative and deceitful campaign that he has approved to air on TV. If he is conducting his campaign this way, how will he handle his administration. We don't need another 4 or 8 years of deceiving the American public.
SOURCE: Salon.com
Nobody is anxious to see another oldster dithering in the Oval Office.
By Garrison Keillor
July 30, 2008 |
Another paradise day in our old river town and we linger over supper in the backyard and talk about the dry weather and bats (Do they eat 3,000 mosquitoes per night? No, says the family biologist.) and cousin Bruce's truck farm besieged by suburban yards and of course Barack's audacious trip to Iraq and Europe; meanwhile the sun goes down and little candles come out and a fresh pot of green tea and nobody feels the urge to get up and go. We are taciturn people, but give us a paradise night, balmy, a slight breeze stirring, candles burning, and we are on the verge of vast intimate revelations -- "I became a writer as a way of drawing attention to myself. I admit it. It had nothing to do with truth and beauty. It always was about Me! Always!" -- and I realize it's my duty as host to say "Well ..." and stand up and start clearing the table, otherwise we might stay too long and say too much.
I talked more than usual since my wife and daughter, who do most of the talking around here, are gone gallivanting around Prague and Paris and I am starved for company. Nobody is bursting into the room in her wet swimsuit and throwing her arms around me. There is very little bursting or throwing going on, just tap-tap-tapping and the turning of pages.
I have been left behind to do some work and to water the flowers and also because I'm not a good traveler. My need to see great castles, churches and museums is at an all-time low. What I really want to see is Wyoming and every morning I wake up with a strong urge to get in the car and go. Drive away from the rigmarole of business and find the high range and stand there amazed and gaze at the glittering stars, just like in the song.
I can't remember a summer I loved so much as this. This is a factor of age -- time is more precious when there's less of it remaining -- and partly it's anticipation that the dogs of war who slipped in the back door eight years ago will soon be gone. In a month, the Republicans will convene a few blocks from my house and I'd like to stand across the street with a sign, but I can't come up with the right wording. "Bleaughhhh," maybe, or "Arghhhh."
I stood watering the flowers this morning and then went upstairs and made my bed, two minimum-wage jobs that I am not well qualified for, apparently. But there is yet time to learn. As long as your mother is alive, you are still young, and mine is holding steady at 94, a tall tree shading us from mortality. Whenever I need to feel youthful again, I can trot out to Mother's and there is my high school graduation picture on the wall, the solemn self-important youth of the spring of 1960, who -- so long as I stay away from mirrors -- I maybe still am.
It's no surprise that Senator McCain likes to bring out his 96-year-old mother Roberta, I suppose. The problem is that she is a lot perkier than he. The gentleman has had a few bad weeks, thundering in a dithery way about America's enemies, looking vaguely purposeful campaigning up and down supermarket aisles as if he couldn't remember what kind of cheese he'd been sent to buy. He surely will hit his stride after the Republican convention, but at the moment he looks to be eight years too late. The brash Bull Moose independent of 2000 has made all sorts of accommodations since, abandoning common sense when necessary, and his unsteadiness the past couple weeks makes his age an unspoken issue: Anyone who remembers the Iran-Contra years and the president who couldn't remember is not anxious to see a genial oldster dithering in the Oval Office. There is more to the job than flashing a big grin. You do need to make sense now and then.
And now I realize that in writing about Mr. McCain I have left the hose in the flower bed and may have drowned some geraniums. There is a pool of standing water in the bed. I have soaked up some of it with a sponge, but I may need to call in a geraniumologist. Talk to you later. Keep the faith. The truth is marching on.
By Garrison Keillor
July 30, 2008 |
Another paradise day in our old river town and we linger over supper in the backyard and talk about the dry weather and bats (Do they eat
3,000 mosquitoes per night? No, says the family biologist.) and cousin Bruce's truck farm besieged by suburban yards and of course Barack's audacious trip to Iraq and Europe; meanwhile the sun goes down and little candles come out and a fresh pot of green tea and nobody feels the urge to get up and go. We are taciturn people, but give us a paradise night, balmy, a slight breeze stirring, candles burning, and we are on the verge of vast intimate revelations -- "I became a writer as a way of drawing attention to myself. I admit it. It had nothing to do with truth and beauty. It always was about Me! Always!" -- and I realize it's my duty as host to say "Well ..." and stand up and start clearing the table, otherwise we might stay too long and say too much.I talked more than usual since my wife and daughter, who do most of the talking around here, are gone gallivanting around Prague and Paris and I am starved for company. Nobody is bursting into the room in her wet swimsuit and throwing her arms around me. There is very little bursting or throwing going on, just tap-tap-tapping and the turning of pages.
I have been left behind to do some work and to water the flowers and also because I'm not a good traveler. My need to see great castles, churches and museums is at an all-time low. What I really want to see is Wyoming and every morning I wake up with a strong urge to get in the car and go. Drive away from the rigmarole of business and find the high range and stand there amazed and gaze at the glittering stars, just like in the song.
I can't remember a summer I loved so much as this. This is a factor of age -- time is more precious when there's less of it remaining -- and partly it's anticipation that the dogs of war who slipped in the back door eight years ago will soon be gone. In a month, the Republicans will convene a few blocks from my house and I'd like to stand across the street with a sign, but I can't come up with the right wording. "Bleaughhhh," maybe, or "Arghhhh."
I stood watering the flowers this morning and then went upstairs and made my bed, two minimum-wage jobs that I am not well qualified for, apparently. But there is yet time to learn. As long as your mother is alive, you are still young, and mine is holding steady at 94, a tall tree shading us from mortality. Whenever I need to feel youthful again, I can trot out to Mother's and there is my high school graduation picture on the wall, the solemn self-important youth of the spring of 1960, who -- so long as I stay away from mirrors -- I maybe still am.
It's no surprise that Senator McCain likes to bring out his 96-year-old mother Roberta, I suppose. The problem is that she is a lot perkier than he. The gentleman has had a few bad weeks, thundering in a dithery way about America's enemies, looking vaguely purposeful campaigning up and down supermarket aisles as if he couldn't remember what kind of cheese he'd been sent to buy. He surely will hit his stride after the Republican convention, but at the moment he looks to be eight years too late. The brash Bull Moose independent of 2000 has made all sorts of accommodations since, abandoning common sense when necessary, and his unsteadiness the past couple weeks makes his age an unspoken issue: Anyone who remembers the Iran-Contra years and the president who couldn't remember is not anxious to see a genial oldster dithering in the Oval Office. There is more to the job than flashing a big grin. You do need to make sense now and then.
And now I realize that in writing about Mr. McCain I have left the hose in the flower bed and may have drowned some geraniums. There is a pool of standing water in the bed. I have soaked up some of it with a sponge, but I may need to call in a geraniumologist. Talk to you later. Keep the faith. The truth is marching on.
SOURCE: Salon.com
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