If you wake up in the morning with the blues because people treat you mean, you could sing a song about it, or you could shop around for an enormous conspiracy that has denied you your constitutional right to liberty and happiness — and how about Central Standard Time? What gives the feds the right to set your clock for you? It’s tyranny.
So you join the Free Time movement. You go to meetings. You tune in “The Bob Glenn Show” every day on Fox for your marching orders and set your clock as you darn well please and feel liberated from lockstep uniformity.
Before, you were worried about your novelty taxidermy business and the declining sales of mummified mice on tiny surfboards, but now that it’s gone under, thanks to Obama’s bank bailout, and you lost your mansion on Wyandotte Lane and Joan took the kids to Toledo and you moved into a studio rental, you have time to write scorching letters to authorities and attend Free Time rallies and go to the shooting range preparing for the Revolution.
You used to be a Republican, a Kiwanian, a Presbyterian, a go-along get-along kind of guy, but now, at age 62, you’ve awakened from decades of indifference — which, you now know, was caused by chemicals the Department of Agriculture puts into snack foods to induce torpor, and so you only eat dried organic veggies ordered from a Patriot company in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — and you are filled with enormous energy. You join the good fight on all fronts. You are anti-union, opposed to the eight-hour workday, the 24-hour clock, the Gregorian calendar and the New York Times.
You don’t necessarily agree with all the other Free Timers, e.g., the religious wing that says Only God Can Know The Time and is opposed to the use of the future tense, or the wing that believes Barack Obama is using metal detectors at airport security checkpoints to program the minds of all who pass through, but these minor differences disappear in the joyful enthusiasm of the rallies and marches, which focus on Washington’s attempts to rule our daily lives and its indifference to you and to others in the novelty taxidermy business.
Meanwhile, your health insurance runs out and your gut hurts and it takes you 20 minutes to empty your bladder. You go to the E.R., but they want to check your prostate and you happen to know, thanks to Bob, that the digital prostate exam is how the CIA inserts GPS chips into Patriots to monitor their movements, and so you go home and suffer.
And then the New York Times publishes a big story about the Free Time movement. All your fellow Patriots are thrilled. Sarah Palin is quoted as saying that the movement has raised important questions and that we must look to God for answers and put our clocks in His hands. David Broder says Free Time is an authentic voice of grass-roots anger. The chairman of the Republican National Committee meets with Free Time leaders and is “deeply impressed.” Democrats, meanwhile, are silent, confused, disheartened by the fact that Free Time has a 23 percent approval rating in some polls.
But in your own heart, you know that the crest has passed. Once the Times has recognized you, you’re on the way down. It’s the kiss of irrelevance. Meanwhile, your old friends avoid you, your own mother doesn’t call. You’ve burned through your savings and Joan is talking divorce.
And then a job offer. Teaching science to middle-schoolers, $900 a week through June 10. Your brother the school board liberal twisted an arm and you have two hours in which to decide. Congress doesn’t care what you do, neither does the president. Will you continue donating your life to Bob, or will you be a dad to your kids? They miss you. You may be a wingnut, but your kids don’t care about that. They love you deep down in their hearts, Daddy, and they always will.
And that’s what you’re going to do, pal. I’ve been there. I know.
I was with Che Guevara in Bolivia, selling T-shirts and fomenting revolution, and I got the offer to write a weekly column and had to decide: Do I want to die in the jungle and become an icon, or would I rather live in Minnesota and enjoy macaroni and cheese and quarter-pounders with cheese and deep-fried cheese curds. Call me a coward but I chose cheese.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc
It is a large moment for Democrats, learning to stick with a good man through a rough period when the people who crave disillusionment have become disillusioned. It’s like a winter vacation in the Caribbean when it rains buckets and you eat some bad shellfish and a shrieky teenager says you’ve ruined her life forever. You smile, take a shower and organize a volleyball game. You have to work at it. It’s work.
We the people are fond of hustlers and slick operators and the reverend with the diamond-studded Rolex and Sarah Palin slipping into Nashville and collecting a hundred grand for a 40-minute speech of no distinction whatsoever (“I’m so proud to be an American. Happy birthday, Ronald Reagan”) to a roomful of happy tea partiers. You didn’t have to pore over it line by line to know that no work went into it: It was butterscotch pudding made from a box, add hot water and stir.
History does not record that Samuel Adams charged a fee for addressing the rally at the Old South Meeting House on Nov. 29, 1773, at which he rallied the Sons of Liberty to resist the British, leading to the Boston Tea Party. But that was then and this is now.
Miss Sarah knows where the cameras are, and she has pizzazz, and the tea partiers whooped and yelled for her standard Republican stump speech, which is like paying $750 for a hotel room and finding no clean towels and a lot of dead cockroaches and then circling Excellent Excellent Excellent on the customer questionnaire.
Well, this is the country we live in. Hard work is not held in such high esteem as it once was. Look at Warren Beatty. A recent biography claims that he slept with 12,755 women, which cannot possibly be true, but even if it were half that number, what a labor of love: the delicate work of seduction, the pats on the arm, the flattery, the exquisite timing of the kisses, then the zippers, the bra clasps, the stockings, and then the performance itself — which, if you are Warren Beatty, will be judged by a higher standard than if you are Ralph Nader or Archbishop Tutu — and then the obligatory post-coital glow in which you help the woman believe that this time, THIS time, was of all your many couplings the one that really zinged your strings and rang your chimes, and then coaxing the babe from your bed and into her clothes and into a cab, so you can freshen up in time for your 11:30 assignation.
Mr. Beatty, through his lawyer, says the number is not accurate. But the number 12,755 is out there, emblazoned in our memories. And so Mr. Beatty gets credit for work he did not do. A lazy Casanova who lets another man write his story and inflate the workload, and then, by denying the story through a lawyer, publicizes it further.
I know something about fiction, and I believe Mr. Beatty slept with 15 women, maybe 18, 25 tops, and considered himself lucky. But I admire him for creating this enormous legend.
And so did J.D. Salinger, may he rest in peace. No American author ever held onto such fame for so long for having done so little work. The junior members of the firm, John Updike and Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates, were busy, busy, busy, year after year after year, while Mr. Salinger lounged in Cornish, famous for not wanting to be famous, and sales of his slender “Catcher in the Rye” kept chunking along, his slender “Nine Stories” and “Franny and Zooey” still adored by the faithful. What a perfect dodge for a guy who is tired of working so hard! You leave town in a huff and become a celebrity recluse and you get to spend 50 years enjoying leisurely breakfasts and maintaining your bird feeders while collecting buckets of royalties. And when you die, it’s huge.
I still believe in hard work. It’s more fun and it’s a better way of life. I don’t have much patience for Democrats who grab hold of defeat and find vindication there. They long to be a heroic voice in the wilderness, crying out against selfishness and cruelty and going nobly down to defeat, and for their obituaries to say they were visionaries and ahead of their time. I’d rather they were in their time and did the hard work.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
There they all were on the Sunday-morning chatfests, droning on about the anger of the American people as shown by the election in Massachusetts of a pickup truck to the U.S. Senate — ever ready, as pundits are, to take one good story and extrude it into a national trend portentous with meaning. One could draw other conclusions from that election — the importance of actually campaigning, for one, and not vacationing in the Caribbean — but OK, maybe anger was a factor. Nobody looks on the marathon healthcare debate as a noble chapter in political science. No legislator is going to have a hospital named for him in honor of his heroic work. (Maybe a parking ramp.)
Meanwhile, one-sixth of our population is without health insurance, and Republicans have decided that defeating Mr. Obama is more important than the welfare of 50 million Americans: Let them die and decrease the surplus population and be quick about it. That’s the long and the short of it. And now they have won a Senate seat in a Democratic stronghold and feel revived and are smelling the bacon and looking forward to November.
This is good. The midterms will require Republicans to decide who they are. Are they interested in unemployment, healthcare, banking regulation and the long-term health of the planet? Or are they just angry that a non-citizen and practicing Muslim got elected president so he could send death panels around to enslave us in the chains of Marxism?
Running on anger is not such a great idea. For one thing, it’s hard to sustain if, God forbid, the economy springs back. And as Republicans well know, government does not change when you yell at it. The world doesn’t run on slogans, it runs on paperwork. Federal agencies are full of old Reaganauts and Bushites in civil service positions who went to Washington with high ideals of making government smaller, but government can’t get smaller, there being so many of them, and these conservative ideologues gradually turn into weary old bureaucrats with dandruff on their shoulders, same as the liberal ones.
Populism is a stiff liquor (Power to the People, Down With the Meritocracy, Into the Tumbrils with the Elitist Media), but in the end it fails to give you useful directions. In North Dakota, in the ’30s, the populist Non-Partisan League took power and put their folks into state jobs, including running the insane asylum in Jamestown, and the poor inmates suffered at the hands of the People. So did universities suffer at the hands of students who took over campuses back in the day. It was fulfilling to sit in the president’s big armchair and smoke his cigars, but then what? They had no idea what.
Be as anti-elitist as you like, but when the surgeon comes in to open up your skull to see what that big dark spot on the CT scan was, you don’t want him to be wearing a humorous T-shirt (“Hey It IS Brain Surgery”) and eating Jujubes. You board the DC-10 to London and you’d like to see a lean guy with a military-style crew cut, an overachiever, not a guy with hair in his eyes who is really, really into his own music. Your life may depend on an arrogant elitist who happens to know what he’s doing.
I’m in Peoria as I write this, having just left Sheboygan, two factory towns (Caterpillar and Kohler) hit hard by the recession and by the southward migration of manufacturing, with plenty of “For Lease” signs on industrial buildings. And yet I haven’t met anyone here who imagines that Obama is the cause of it all. There was a previous administration, during which regulation of banks and the securities trade was negligible, that had a hand in it, too.
Meanwhile, the lights are still on, beer is still coming out of the taps, and the genial gentlemen at the bar are talking about a big bump in corporate profits in 2010, maybe 25 percent. My heart was gladdened by an official-looking sign in the Milwaukee airport, just beyond the TSA checkpoint, hanging over where you put your shoes and coat back on and stuff your laptop back in the case: The sign said, “Recombobulation Area.” The English language gains a new word. Recombobulate, America. Pull yourself together, tie your shoelaces, and if your pilot is wearing a button that says “To hell with the FAA,” wait for the next flight.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
The tea partiers are enjoying their day in the sun, but coffee is the beverage preferred by most Americans, and we don’t have time to gang up and holler and wave our arms — we prefer to sit quietly with coffee in hand and read a reliable newspaper and try to figure out what’s going on in the world. Great heaps of dead bodies are moved by front-loaders and dumped, uncounted, unidentified, into open pits in a stricken country while people feast and walk treadmills on enormous cruise ships sailing a hundred miles off the coast en route to the Bahamas and Jamaica. That’s the real world, not the paranoid hallucinations of the right.
The problem for Democrats right now is that nobody can explain healthcare reform in plain English, 50 words or less. It’s all too murky. The price of constructing this intricate web of compromises for the benefit of Republican senators (who then decided to quit the game and sit on their thumbs) is a bill with strange hair and ill-fitting clothes that you hesitate to bring home to Mother. Like all murky stuff, it is liable to strike people as dangerous or unreliable. And demagogues thrive in dim light.
The basic question is simple: Should healthcare be a basic right or is it a privilege for those who can afford it? Rush says it’s a privilege — pay or die — and for his colonoscopy, they use a golden probe with a diamond tip, but most Americans agree that healthcare is basic, like education or decent roads or clean water. Holy Scripture would seem to point us in that direction. And yet the churches, so far as I can see, have chosen to stay aloof from this issue. Churches that feed the hungry and house the homeless dare not offend the conservatives in their midst by suggesting that we also tend the sick. And the opposition has beaten on garbage cans and whooped and yelled and alarmed the populace, which they’re quite good at. These people look at a clear blue sky and see a conspiracy.
Arousing alarm is easy, teaching is tough. It takes patience and discipline to teach; any bozo can drop a book on the floor and make people jump. This is true even in Massachusetts. And in Nevada, where Sen. Harry Reid is facing a tough challenge in the fall.
Reid is the gentlest and most patient soul in the U.S. Senate and his presence there in a colony of bull walruses is a tribute to Nevada. He’s a soft-spoken man from hardscrabble roots in the mining town of Searchlight who possesses Western honesty and openness and a degree of modesty startling for a senator, and if he goes down to defeat to some big bass drum, the Republic will be the poorer for it.
Sometimes you despair of common sense when you see an empty helmet like former Mayor Giuliani strutting up to the podium, or hear the Rev. Robertson opine on the earthquake in Haiti, or the lunatic congressman from Michigan who intimated that the president is somehow responsible for the Fort Hood massacre — you just roll your eyes and hope these guys have friends who will take away the car keys.
Paranoia sells better in January than in November, however. And Sarah Palin was not elected vice-president, and she is not in the West Wing advising President McCain on foreign policy. It didn’t happen. She is investing her windfall profits from the book about how the Eastern media beat up on her, but we the people decided she was not vice-presidential material. We don’t choose our family doctor based on his ability to yodel, and we don’t elect a woman vice-president because she’s perky.
And your high school civics teacher would not have given you a high mark for saying, as the Rev. Robertson did, that the earthquake in Haiti was God’s judgment on voodoo. God has tolerated voodoo in Washington for years and not seen fit to shake the city yet. Priests and mojo men dance around the Capitol every day, waving skulls on sticks, scattering their magic powders, trying to stop progress with a hex, and God is content to observe them. So do we coffee drinkers. Government is in the hands of realists and in the end we shall prevail.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
I went to church in San Francisco on Sunday, the big stone church on Nob Hill, whose name is an old slang term for a rich person, where a gaggle of railroad tycoons built their palaces high above the squalid tenements of the poor back in the Gilded Age, and there with considerable pomp we baptized a dozen infants into the fellowship of faith and we renounced the evil powers of this world, which all in all is a good day’s work.
The term “evil powers” is one you hear only in the church, or in Marvel comic books, or Republican speeches, and it isn’t something I renounce every day. I am a romantic democrat, raised on William Saroyan and Pete Seeger and Preston Sturges, and we have faith in the decency of the little guy, and we believe you can depend on the kindness of strangers. But it ain’t necessarily so.
Evil lurks in the heart of man, and anonymity tends to bring it out. Internet flamers would never say the jagged things they do if they had to sign their names. Road rage is anonymous; there is no equivalent pedestrian rage or bicyclist rage. (Have you ever yelled vile profanities at a fellow motorist — a spontaneous outburst — and then found that you’re holding a cellphone in your hand and a female colleague is on the other end? I have and it is excruciating.) War requires very well-brought-up people to do vicious things that they are able to do efficiently because the recipients of their viciousness are unknown to them. The bombardier never sees the quiet shady street of brick houses that he is about to incinerate.
I want to believe in the kindness of strangers. I believe that if voters actually knew gay couples, they would not vote to ban gay marriage. This particular cruelty is the result of social separation, which breeds contempt. I know something about that, having spent time in grad school. When I was 24 I was an insufferable snob, thanks to lofty isolation from the ordinary tumult of life, and what cured me eventually was entering the field of light frothy entertainment. When you strive to amuse a crowd of strangers, you have to drop your pants, and a man without pants gives up the right to look down on anybody.
We liberals can be as rigidly humorless as anybody else: You learn that, writing a newspaper column. Hardshell Baptists have nothing on us when it comes to self-righteousness. Mostly we look down on Republicans and the iconic small-town values that they have exploited so successfully, and yet, deep down, we share those values. We admire personal enterprise, we are wary of the power and blindness of big bureaucracies, and we do not admire self-pity. When I hear long tales of woe — Poor Me, my benighted life — my inner Republican thinks, “That was you who poured all that alcohol down your gullet. You. Nobody else. And why didn’t you work a little harder in school? Duh. Your mama tried to tell you and you sneered at her. You did it to yourself, pal. You got on the train to Nowheresville and guess what? You arrived.”
The center of civility in our society is not the small town but the big city, where you learn to thread your way through heavy traffic and subdue your aggressiveness and extend kindness to strangers. Small-town Republicans are leery of big cities and the anonymity they bestow, but there is no better place to learn the delicate ballet of social skill. Isolation is a difficult trick for a pedestrian, even with music pouring into your ears.
And here, this morning, in a city famous for eccentricity, we strangers in a cathedral embrace other people’s children and promise to fight the good fight in their behalf, a ceremony that never fails to bring tears to my eyes. We renounce evil powers. I renounce isolation and separation and the splendid anonymity of the Internet and the doink-doink-doink of the clicker propelling me through six Web sites in five minutes. I vow to put my feet on the ground and walk through town and make small talk with clerks and call my mother on the phone and put money in the busker’s hat. We welcome the infants into our herd and though some of them sob bitter tears at the prospect, they are now in our hearts and in our prayers and we will not easily let them go.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of “77 Love Sonnets,” published by Common Good Books.)
© 2010 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
The cruise ships sail from Tampa and Fort Lauderdale and Miami, great oceangoing pueblos, 10 decks high, passengers lounging on their verandas, gazing at the sea, workhorse Americans trying to get out of cellphone range for a week and sweeten up to their families. It is a beautiful thing to behold.
You walk around the ship as Florida slips past in the gloaming and smell hamburgers frying and hear the rhythm of mojitos being shaken and the clik-clok of the ping-pong tables and pick out the accents of New Jersey, Canada, Atlanta, Little Havana, Iowa, people who have left their lives behind and formed a village of 1,200 souls joined by a solemn compact to try to have fun.
Vacation cruises are advertised as luxurious journeys to exotic places, but a chief pleasure is the reading of books and another is making small talk with strangers. On steamer chairs topside or poolside, in the lounges, everywhere you see men and women with their noses in books, devouring them for hours. The Book: Man’s Chief Weapon Against Tedium. Woman’s, too. I read a book of stories by a young Pakistani writer, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and found it riveting, the most wonderful thing I’d read in a long, long time, thanks to the freedom of being at sea, away from CNN and NPR and Google, out in a vast silence in which the details of Pakistani village life loom large, as if one were actually there, sipping sweet tea with Saleema and Husad and Mr. K.K. Harouni.
It’s the village aspect of ships that we love. The food is OK, the entertainment is third-rate Las Vegas. The ship docks in Mexico and you take a bus to look at Mayan ruins for 45 minutes and return to the SS Gringo. Fine. It’s the village life that’s wonderful, the pleasure of people-watching and eavesdropping, which the automobile has cheated us of, the camaraderie of card games. Remember that? Back in my leisurely 20s, I sat around for hours with my Republican in-laws and played gin rummy and Five and then I fell in among earnest Democrats who preferred to sit and argue. Cards belonged to the Elks lodge and the Ladies Circle and my generation didn’t go in for that. Decades passed and nobody shuffled. And suddenly, walking into a salon full of card players, I remember how much fun it was, the gentle teasing and the small talk. “Go ahead, amaze me,” an old lady says to her grandson as she slaps down trump. He folds his hand. Everyone laughs.
The ship sails south across the Gulf of Mexico and you lie on deck, the Aztec sun beating down on your northern Protestant skin, and you’re moved by the bravery of the semi-naked folks around you, beefy people with pork butts and shoulders, piano legs, unashamedly browning themselves. There are few perfect specimens past the age of 20. For women over 30, the bikini is not a friend. Most American men should not remove their shirts in public. There are old ladies who serve as living examples of the danger of solar radiation. But who cares? In this village, we are who we are, mortal beings, why pretend otherwise?
The ancient Mayans did not take vacations on ships. They were busy growing maize and hauling rocks to make their temples higher and you just have to wonder if a little downtime wouldn’t have been a good thing for them. An intelligent people, whizzes at math, who developed a calendar more accurate than the Gregorian, but they did monumentally stupid things like cutting holes in their teeth to insert chunks of jade — good God, the pain! — and they bound babies’ heads to make them pointy and then there was the practice of human sacrifice. They did it to win the favor of the gods and as an express ticket to heaven, but who did they sacrifice? Not the enemy. No. Their own warriors, children, virgin women –the very people a society needs for its survival. Duh.
I read about Pakistan and watch my daughter in the pool. Little boys tear around and hurl themselves into the water, but little girls congregate, bobbing, ducking, holding hands, chatting, reassuring each other by small gestures that You Are Not Weird, You Belong Here With Us. Boys cannonball a few feet away and the girls are unfazed. And that’s what I did on my winter vacation. Back to basics. Let’s all try to get along.
(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.
