"Love Will Outlast Bush." (Thank you, Garrison Keillor.)

[shereads]

Love will outlast Bush

It's tiresome to think about weasels all the time. Let us remember that somewhere a woman is waiting outside a hotel for a man...

By Garrison Keillor

Columnists should not write about politics. Take it from me, it's a bad idea. You pick up your bright sword to harass the heathen Republican and your prose style goes limp, your verbs droop, and words such as "comprehensive" and "funding" creep in and you become thin-lipped and hissy, like Miss Whipple in study hall telling the boys in the back of the room to shape up or be sorry. Well, they aren't going to shape up. What will shape them up is the day of reckoning and it's not here yet.

It's spring in Minnesota, the snow is gone except behind the garage, so it's time to turn over a new leaf and let other people rag on the president. He is who he is, and anybody who hasn't formed an opinion of him is not paying attention. I am going to sit and read poetry and wait for the enormous old crabapple tree beside our driveway to bud and then blossom, a mass of brilliant purplish flowers like a Mardi Gras float parked beside the house -- you can almost hear the brass band playing "Just a Little While to Stay Here." Or maybe it's a funeral and the purple flowers are from the deceased's old pals who are shuffling along beside the coffin, hankies in hand, on their way to the graveyard and then to O'Gara's for a commemorative bump of whiskey. You can get all this just by looking at a crabapple tree. Visions of the vast grandeur of the sensuous world, intimations of mortality.

~ Salon.com

Thanks. I needed that. Thinking about the weasel is exhausting; trying not to think of him isn't easy either, but it burns calories and builds muscle.

 

[OhMissScarlett]

Thanks. I needed that. Thinking about the weasel is exhausting; trying not to think of him isn't easy either, but it burns calories and builds muscle.

Thanks, Sher. That's a beautiful article and more importantly, it reminds us that no matter what, we go on. The whole situation is so paralyzing sometimes that we forget the reason why we care in the first place. We love it here or we wouldn't even give a fuck.

 

[shereads]

Thanks, Sher. That's a beautiful article and more importantly, it reminds us that no matter what, we go on. The whole situation is so paralyzing sometimes that we forget the reason why we care in the first place. We love it here or we wouldn't even give a fuck.

You're so right.

Perhaps this is not be the best time to bring up the topic of Bush's proposed constitutional amendment to ban the planting of crabapple trees by same-sex couples...

 

[OhMissScarlett]

You're so right.

Perhaps this is not be the best time to bring up the topic of Bush's proposed constitutional amendment to ban the planting of crabapple trees by same-sex couples...

*snort*
Okay, that was enough reflecting on nature, back to being overcome with homicidal rage.

 

[cantdog]

Some people's love has not been equal to the task of outlasting Bush. Have you heard Neil Young's Living With War (or any part of it) yet? Extremely strident stuff, very Manichean.

 

[cantdog]

Keillor, like Walt Kelly, stands foursquare on the side of gentleness. He writes about folly, and his love of the people who commit the follies raises them and the reader above it. Some people don't get that; some didn't get Walt Kelly, either, rest his soul.

 

[shereads]

Some people's love has not been equal to the task of outlasting Bush. Have you heard Neil Young's Living With War (or any part of it) yet? Extremely strident stuff, very Manichean.

I haven't, I'm ashamed to say. I love Neil Young, but even in the best circumstances he breaks my heart.*

For Neil and others who took up the burden of dissent in the era of Kent State and the October Surprise, the Bush/Cheney years must feel like 'deja vu all over again.'

Stridency, without tanks and missiles, takes courage.





*I can work up a good cry just humming the sweet little song by Neil Young that punctutates the final moments of the movie, 'Philadelphia.'

City of brotherly love
Place I call home
Don't turn your back on me,
I don't want to be alone...

Now you've done it, Cdog. <sniff> Pass the Kleenex.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Keillor, like Walt Kelly, stands foursquare on the side of gentleness. He writes about folly, and his love of the people who commit the follies raises them and the reader above it. Some people don't get that; some didn't get Walt Kelly, either, rest his soul.

I agree, B-man.

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-12/909970/Pogo001.jpg

But I truly wish I hadn't been so right about Dubya.

Rumple Foreskin

 

[shereads]

Keillor, like Walt Kelly, stands foursquare on the side of gentleness. He writes about folly, and his love of the people who commit the follies raises them and the reader above it. Some people don't get that; some didn't get Walt Kelly, either, rest his soul.

I had the pleasure of watching a broadcast of "Praire Home Companion" at a park in downtown Miami two years ago. Watching radio being made was entertaining; seeing Keillor pace the stage like a caged tiger when he wasn't 'on,' and then settle into that gentleness like Mister Rogers pulling on a sweater, was a revelation.

I thought I knew him pretty well from Lake Woebegone and Guy Noir, Private Eye and a few autobiographical stories of his childhood. Then someone in the AH - was it Seattle Zack? - posted a chapter from Keillor's book, "Homegrown Democrat,' that was startlingly, unapologetically angry - and remarkably dignified, for all its fury.

It would have been the keynote address at the Democratic convention of my dreams. I bought the audio version of the book and spent a six-hour car trip listening to Keillor's delivery of his own, wonderful rant: proudly liberal; passionate in defense of the poor and elderly and other voiceless Americans; outraged by the notion that dissent is un-American, especially in war and other times of crisis.

It was so inspiring, I reconsidered my decision to give up voting. Not having missed an election since I came of age, the despair of Nov. '04, combined with a suspicion that my paperless vote disappeared into a virtual shredder, has put me in doubt about something I've never questioned. I still don't know if I'll find the energy to vote against Bush's successor; I lack faith in democracy itself, having seen how easily people were duped by that good ol' boy persona masking something so destructive, we'll spend decades struggling to undo a fraction of the damage. If Nov. 2, 2000 taught us that a few hundred votes can decide an election, the weeks afterward demonstrated that election results can be shuffled and manipulated as easily as the books at Enron...The ugliness four years later showed that when all else fails, a man who sat out his generation's war and sent this generation into one he proved incapable of running, can win an election by pitting veterans against veterans.

In other words: vote this, pal. I got yer democracy right here.



But if anything can get me motivated again, it will be Garrison Keillor's "Homegrown Democrat." In particular, the chapter devoted to his late friend and long-time neighbor, Sen. Paul Wellstone. I owe him a fruitless, disheartening trip to the polls, at the very least.

If only Keillor would sacrifice his peaceful existence as Wellstone did, and pull a Schwartzenegger for our side. With his background, he'd rule the pancake breakfasts without even having to show up. With his celebrity, although it barely registers on The Terminator scale, he might even overcome the challenge of a name that isn't bumpersticker-friendly. Keillor even has a built-in campaign gimmick: bright red socks.

If only...

Dammit! Stop me before I feel hope again.

 

[cantdog]

Kelly was more difficult to decipher, politically. Kelly's objection to McCarthy (Senator Joe, from Wisconsin) wasn't a liberal objection. He and young Dick Nixon were mean; that seemed to have been his main resentment. He noted that McCarthy was absurd, too, but he noted that all of us were that.

I can't see Kelly ever writing a 'Homegrown democrat' piece.

Keillor has his head on straight, and sometimes he touches the universal. Somewhat more often, he bespeaks the peculiarly American. His heartland America is not my America, is some ways, though. Some of his references, like the ones to Lutherans and Presbyterians, I had to research to have even a hint about what he is speaking of.

Minnesota would make him a Senator in a heartbeat, though, if he wanted to take it on. You have that right. And I'd always stop surfing the channels to hear him speak to the press or the Senate. It'd be an improvement over a whole lot of the yahoos people have voted in.

 

[shereads]

Kelly was more difficult to decipher, politically. Kelly's objection to McCarthy (Senator Joe, from Wisconsin) wasn't a liberal objection. He and young Dick Nixon were mean; that seemed to have been his main resentment. He noted that McCarthy was absurd, too, but he noted that all of us were that.

I can't see Kelly ever writing a 'Homegrown democrat' piece.

Keillor has his head on straight, and sometimes he touches the universal. Somewhat more often, he bespeaks the peculiarly American. His heartland America is not my America, is some ways, though. Some of his references, like the ones to Lutherans and Presbyterians, I had to research to have even a hint about what he is speaking of.

Minnesota would make him a Senator in a heartbeat, though, if he wanted to take it on. You have that right. And I'd always stop surfing the channels to hear him speak to the press or the Senate. It'd be an improvement over a whole lot of the yahoos people have voted in.

Wellstone was pretty alien to heartland America, too, as Keillor points out - "a small Jew surrounded by large Norwegians" - but won people over with his unmistakeable sincerity.

Like you, I have limited knowledge of Lutherans but I do have an uncle from Minnesota who became Southern by marriage after WWII. He may be the only long-time citizen of small-town Florida who once fell through the ice while skating on a farm pond. He is an ornery old cuss, to the extent that his local Hardees' once called the police to end an argument about the breakfast special; but that could just as easily have been caused by having been partially frozen during his formative years, as by being Swedish.

 

[shereads]

Some of his references, like the ones to Lutherans and Presbyterians, I had to research to have even a hint about what he is speaking of.

He explains Minnesota religion fairly simply in a story about Lake Woebegone's competing car dealerships, one owned by a Protestant family (Chevrolet) and one Catholic (Ford). Locals are more likely to buy from the Chevrolet dealer even if they prefer the Ford, because they know the money the dealer tithes to his church will be used to support orphans and do good works. The Ford dealer's tithe will be used to "mortgage the souls of heathen babies and buy diamonds for the Pope's shoelaces."

Clear?