Because You Never Asked

(6/08, Spain)

     (This is the companion piece to the essay “Comments On Commentary: Thomas Freidman”. It should be read after it.)

     My next “comment on commentary” comes from a piece written by Garrison Keillor. It appeared in the same edition of the International Herald Tribune as the piece just discussed by Thomas Friedman. In fact, both articles shared the same page of the editorial section, which, in itself, could be considered refreshing --- or totally nuts. Putting the work of Thomas Friedman and Garrison Keillor side by side is something like putting Laurence Olivier and Groucho Marx on the same stage.

     Keillor might be described as a Renaissance Man. He can write, he can act, he can do music, comedy, and who knows what else? Perhaps the most telling aspect of his special brand of creativity is that he has made his fame in an art form that does not even exist anymore. Garrison Keillor does radio. When I say “radio“, I do not mean today’s brand of Limbaughnian-classic rock-sports talk indigestion, grinding away anonymously while driving a car or doing the laundry. When I say radio, I mean the type of thing the family used to gather around and listen to. I mean a variety show with live music and comedy skits and sound effects and a clapping audience and a theme song and “see ya’ next week”, the kind of endeavor new technology has relegated to the scrap heap of obsolescence with such things as whalers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, milkmen, records, stereo sets, 8 tracks, floppy discs, land lines --- my God! what a chore it is to keep up these days.

     But Keillor’s National Public Radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion”, is alive and well, performing an art form that is dead. Alive and dead --- at the same time. Anyone who can pull that off has to be taken seriously.

     The name of Garrison Keillor’s radio show is an indication of just who he is --- sprung from “amber waves of grain”, a son of America’s great agricultural heartland. His humor is often a self deprecating but loving barb at the good and decent rural folk he comes from, people who are often “as corny as Kansas in August”. But underneath all this satirical humility is a form of popular wisdom whose foundation is as strong and practical as this bounteous agricultural wealth, America’s original wealth, the genuine, functional wealth that underpinned and led to the rest of a great nation’s strength and vitality. It has been handed down from such grass roots oracles as Will Rogers and Woodie Guthrie, people with calluses on their hands and the rich soil of a great continent’s bread basket on their shoes --- real people, honest people, working people, God-fearing people. It is a kind of wisdom I value more than Thomas Friedman’s tortured attempts to explain the hidden geo-political machinations of our time. Garrison Keillor’s wisdom is like a genetically inherited trait, like a Willie Mays kind of talent that can’t be taught in ivory towered “think tanks”.

     Garrison Keillor is from Minnesota. America’s northern plains have produced a populist kind of liberalism that seems not nearly as prevalent in other rural areas of the country. From Gene McCarthy to Hubert Humphrey to George McGovern to Fritz Mondale to Alan Wellstone to Russ Feingold on up to its latest torch bearer, comedian turned politician, Al Franken, this is the political legacy Keillor has inherited. One might be politically opposed to these people, but considering any of them as dishonest or insincere seems remote.

     Keillor’s knack of weaving his down to earth, farm belt populism with his savvy political formation can be quite effective. “A Prairie Home Companion” almost never dwells directly on political matters, but Keillor has a sneaky way of insinuating his politics like a crisp Ali jab nobody ever sees coming. He does it with such style and grace, that even the most recalcitrant conservative does not feel offended, if even alluded to.

     Garrison Keillor hates the war in Iraq in a way the Thomas Friedmans of the world could never understand. Thomas Friedman and his ilk have so confused themselves with the intricacies of the foreign policy subterfuges they live in, they’ve lost their concept of right and wrong. It is all so complicated for them.

     For Garrison Keillor it is easy: you don’t go marching half way around the world and start massively killing people who haven’t done a friggin’, bleeping thing to you.

     The Keillor article on the editorial page of the Trib was a scalding rant against the war in Iraq, inspired by the oncoming Memorial Day holiday. Its tone caught my attention, for it seemed so beyond anything permissible in mainstream media. When I write the things I do in this ever growing cauldron of chicken soup philosophy, there is nobody working for a Big Media mouthpiece telling me to turn it down. “No, no, Jerry, we can’t go there”. But some of the things Keillor says in this article seem plucked from the voice of Post Consumer Man. It is a telling sign that such a tone was allowed expression in one of America’s most respected journalistic outlets. It shows that a moribund cycle in American politics is about to end in infamy. It shows an abject yearning to be done with these people, to move on, to get them out of our sights and minds. The attitude of Keillor’s uncensored comments is confirmation of just how much the Bush Gang has earned our disrespect.

     It starts from the very first sentence. In referring to George W. Bush, Keillor begins: “The Current Occupant tossed Nazi into a speech last week, something he rarely does since it only reminds people of Dick Cheney”. Cool, very cool, but when’s the last time you heard a Vice President of the United States referred to as a Nazi in a respectable American newspaper? He goes on to explain how “ --- Communism was exploited for short term political advantage after WWII by Richard Nixon and other weasels of the right, much the way ’terrorist’ is today”. A President of the Republic, the Commander in Chief, described as a weasel? Such a description might be considered benign for the likes of PCM, but when is the last time a New York Times publication spoke in such terms?

     But those are just the hors d’oeuvres. The main course comes near the end of the article: “Meanwhile, it is almost Memorial Day and here is a vet on television ( --- ) who has been horribly burned and grafted back together. His head looks like a candle stub with a mouth and blinking eyes. Your heart goes out to the brave young man. And what choice does he have other than to be brave? It’s either that or the life of a potato”.

     Can we agree this is not Big Media’s normal, flag waving Memorial Day cook out? Keillor goes on: “On Memorial Day we will hear about men who gave their lives for their country, but many lives were not given, they were taken, and taken stupidly and uselessly.  And there has been great public piety about these men and their ’sacrifice’ on the part of politicians who blithely sacrificed them”.

     I suppose we’ve all heard worse (better?) somewhere or other, but one would have to say the personality of this piece is stretching the bounds of the usual fraternal dissent adhered to by sources such as the International Herald Tribune. But there is a Newtonian quality here, for the Bush government the world has suffered for almost 8 years now, has stretched the bounds of stupidity as well.

     One good stretch deserves another.

     But for Post Consumer Man, Keillor’s rant still falls a bit short. He, like almost every other American pundit opposed to this war, forgets to mention the people most aggrieved by this imperial action. Yes, it is good and just to recognize the utterly useless loss of American life. Yes, it is not just good, but necessary to mention that pitiful young man with the candle for a head. But if we leave out those who have most been wronged by this, we are doomed to make the same mistakes in the future.

     Some estimates bring the death toll in Iraq up to 1,000,000 people.

     Relevant Material: “Because affluent people are not getting killed in Iraq. Affluent people are sitting home thanking your dead son for his great sacrifice while watching football games rife with patriotic symbols and rhetoric. That includes your president, whom, in your data starved confusion, I’m reasonably certain you voted for“. From the essay “Letter To A Dead Soldier’s Mother”, from the collection of essays, “Because You Never Asked”, by a writer unknown to approximately 6 billion people.