SALON

Wednesday, Feb 10, 2010 1:20 AM UTC

Get busy, Democrats

This country loves its hustlers and slick operators, but it's hard work that gets you through the rough patches

By

Topics: Democratic Party,

Get busy, Democrats

It is a large moment for Democrats, learning to stick with a good man through a rough period when the people who crave disillusionment have become disillusioned. It’s like a winter vacation in the Caribbean when it rains buckets and you eat some bad shellfish and a shrieky teenager says you’ve ruined her life forever. You smile, take a shower and organize a volleyball game. You have to work at it. It’s work.

We the people are fond of hustlers and slick operators and the reverend with the diamond-studded Rolex and Sarah Palin slipping into Nashville and collecting a hundred grand for a 40-minute speech of no distinction whatsoever (“I’m so proud to be an American. Happy birthday, Ronald Reagan”) to a roomful of happy tea partiers. You didn’t have to pore over it line by line to know that no work went into it: It was butterscotch pudding made from a box, add hot water and stir.

History does not record that Samuel Adams charged a fee for addressing the rally at the Old South Meeting House on Nov. 29, 1773, at which he rallied the Sons of Liberty to resist the British, leading to the Boston Tea Party. But that was then and this is now.

Miss Sarah knows where the cameras are, and she has pizzazz, and the tea partiers whooped and yelled for her standard Republican stump speech, which is like paying $750 for a hotel room and finding no clean towels and a lot of dead cockroaches and then circling Excellent Excellent Excellent on the customer questionnaire.

Well, this is the country we live in. Hard work is not held in such high esteem as it once was. Look at Warren Beatty. A recent biography claims that he slept with 12,755 women, which cannot possibly be true, but even if it were half that number, what a labor of love: the delicate work of seduction, the pats on the arm, the flattery, the exquisite timing of the kisses, then the zippers, the bra clasps, the stockings, and then the performance itself — which, if you are Warren Beatty, will be judged by a higher standard than if you are Ralph Nader or Archbishop Tutu — and then the obligatory post-coital glow in which you help the woman believe that this time, THIS time, was of all your many couplings the one that really zinged your strings and rang your chimes, and then coaxing the babe from your bed and into her clothes and into a cab, so you can freshen up in time for your 11:30 assignation.

Mr. Beatty, through his lawyer, says the number is not accurate. But the number 12,755 is out there, emblazoned in our memories. And so Mr. Beatty gets credit for work he did not do. A lazy Casanova who lets another man write his story and inflate the workload, and then, by denying the story through a lawyer, publicizes it further.

I know something about fiction, and I believe Mr. Beatty slept with 15 women, maybe 18, 25 tops, and considered himself lucky. But I admire him for creating this enormous legend.

And so did J.D. Salinger, may he rest in peace. No American author ever held onto such fame for so long for having done so little work. The junior members of the firm, John Updike and Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, were busy, busy, busy, year after year after year, while Mr. Salinger lounged in Cornish, famous for not wanting to be famous, and sales of his slender “Catcher in the Rye” kept chunking along, his slender “Nine Stories” and “Franny and Zooey” still adored by the faithful. What a perfect dodge for a guy who is tired of working so hard! You leave town in a huff and become a celebrity recluse and you get to spend 50 years enjoying leisurely breakfasts and maintaining your bird feeders while collecting buckets of royalties. And when you die, it’s huge.

I still believe in hard work. It’s more fun and it’s a better way of life. I don’t have much patience for Democrats who grab hold of defeat and find vindication there. They long to be a heroic voice in the wilderness, crying out against selfishness and cruelty and going nobly down to defeat, and for their obituaries to say they were visionaries and ahead of their time. I’d rather they were in their time and did the hard work.

(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)

© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Garrison Keillor is the author of the Lake Wobegon novel "Liberty" (Viking) and the creator and host of the nationally syndicated radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," broadcast on more than 500 public radio stations nationwide. For more columns by Keillor, visit his column archive. More Garrison Keillor.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 31 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations