I was in Chicago with time on my hands and the sweet woman murmured to me -- you know how this goes -- "Would you like to see the Art Institute?" and I was thinking No No No God No, and I said, "Sure. Fine." "You wouldn't rather do something else?" she said. "No," I replied. That's the correct answer when a woman asks you about art. Yes, absolutely, ma cherie.
What I'd rather do is watch a couple of welterweights whale on each other for 10 rounds or a lanky blonde dance as she peels off her long white gloves and unsnaps her garter, but it's 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, so into the citadel of art we go.
I've been here before. The sweet woman loves galleries and French impressionists and the sunny gardens of Pierre Bonnard. While looking at them, she is likely to say something about color and texture. But I am an American man and color and texture are not my strong suits. And so I staked out my aesthetic at the start. I said, "I see no reason to paint flowers. You can buy fresh flowers. Still lifes are only an exercise. And abstract expressionism is for the lobbies of big insurance companies. The true calling of an artist is to paint women and the greatest challenge is the naked female form. That's what separates the true artists from the wallpaper-hangers."
I said this in the room that houses some rather erotic Georgia O'Keeffe flowers and "American Gothic" with its squinty lady, and I spoke on behalf of American men everywhere. At the age of 67, I have stopped apologizing for looking at naked women. I don't stand directly in front of a nude and stare at her, lest I be taken for a pervert. I stand in front of the painting next to the nude and sneak sidelong glances, but nonetheless I am moved by her. Deeply.
A man gets to say what he likes. In Chicago, the city of the big shoulders, he does. In New York, where men have exquisite thin shoulders and glossy skin tone, they are more into texture. I glanced at a plaque on the gallery wall, something about "his work references as a multifaceted narrative structure that re-contextualizes the ambiguity of alienation and aims at disrupting the viewer's habits of perception." Well, pardon me for living, but I am fond of my habits of perception. I stroll past the spatter art and angst-ridden photography and junk sculpture, and when I see a naked woman, my heart leaps up.
Is a man's heart not supposed to leap? Should it squat instead?
Rubens did big naked porky women who could lie on a man and smother him, and many artists have done pale, cold goddesses, but I want a sweet woman bathing or reclining on a couch, someone I'd like to know. She makes my heart sing.
She reminds me of beautiful naked moments from real life -- skinny-dipping in the Mississippi, intertwining underwater on Oahu, sitting in hot water in the big round iron tub on the deck in Utah, the sweet woman lowering herself gingerly into the water, slowly, slowly, as her delicate anatomical parts feel the heat rising -- and coming from fundamentalist people in a cold-weather state, nakedness means more to me than to, say, a Southern Unitarian.
We hiked around the Art Institute and didn't discuss texture. I saw a couple of nude women and other women who looked as if they were thinking about undressing, and then we went back to the hotel and, for some reason that now I forget, we went and sat in a steam room together and admired each other's multifaceted bodies and got recontextualized and so on and so forth and that's what happened to me in Chicago.
What does this have to do with healthcare reform and our enormous indebtedness to what used to be known as Red China before Republicans became reds? Everything.
Politics and policy mean more to those who love life itself. We want government to stave off lawlessness and war and chaos and economic misery so that we can wholeheartedly enjoy the pure goodness of life, which, when you come right down to it -- and I come right down to it as often as possible -- is a naked woman lowering herself into hot water that you yourself are sitting in, waiting.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
There are some things we will never understand. Death, for one. I overheard a woman in the drugstore say, "He went into the hospital yesterday and he was eating his supper and then he fell asleep and then he died. I don't get it." She didn't seem grief-stricken, just uncomprehending. (Why did it have to happen now?) The paranoia that has seized the Republican Party is beyond my understanding. So is the physics of cord entanglement: how two power cords set separately in a briefcase become so complexly intertwined in only a few hours. And why do you find the rudest people in first class? Passengers in steerage accept their misery with stoical grace, while the privileged sit in luxury in a cold rage.
And then there is Washington. I maintain that Congress would do better work if it moved to Buffalo, N.Y., and the Honorables had to experience blizzards and snow shoveling and cold weather, which stimulate intelligence -- SAT scores rise as you approach the Canadian border. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution says that Congress could not convene in Buffalo.
The Founding Fathers intended the Senate to be a fount of wisdom flowing, but when you consider Saxby Chambliss and Jim Bunning, John Ensign, Jim DeMint, James Inhofe, who look as if they've been banged on the head too many times, and the moon-faced Mitch McConnell, your faith in democracy is challenged severely. Any legislative body in which 41 senators from rural states that together represent 10 percent of the population can filibuster you to death is going to be flat-footed, on the verge of paralysis, no matter what. Any time 10 percent of the people can stop 90 percent, it's like driving a bus with a brake pedal for each passenger. That's why Congress has a public approval rating of 25 percent.
Healthcare is much too complicated for Congress. The whole issue should've been handed over to a blue-ribbon commission of living, breathing economists -- let them draw up a plan and defend it and stand up to the ranters and rug-chewers -- and let Congress do what it does best, which is to uphold virtue and decency and to denounce narrow self-interest and partisanship, and then go to lunch.
The Republican bulls remind me of an old coot who used to sit in my row in the Lutheran church, a guy who favored plaid dress shirts and a string tie with a turquoise clasp and who had an elaborate comb-over, a real piece of hair architecture. He muttered to himself through the sermon and never put more than $1 in the collection plate. I guessed that he attended for the sake of his wife, a plump lady who sat between him and me. What he truly dreaded every Sunday morning was the exchange of peace. To shake hands with people nearby and say "The peace of the Lord" did not come naturally to him.
I didn't like it either. I was young and idealistic and thought those Lutherans had more than enough peace, what they needed was some slapping around, not hand shaking. But I was amused by how wary the guy got when the peace was exchanged and ladies went gallivanting around the sanctuary, hugging, having meaningful moments. He stood facing straight forward and wished everyone would keep their peace to themselves. I always leaned over to shake hands with his missus, and he turned away, avoiding eye contact.
One morning, during the exchange, the lady in front of me, turning to embrace me, lost her corsage. It fell at my feet and I looked down for it and accidentally kicked it and then went to retrieve it and stepped past the plump lady, and the old coot turned, horror-stricken, to see me coming. He tried to retreat but was blocked by other worshippers. My hair was a little long at the time and maybe he expected me to plant a major peace on him -- and then he saw me bend down and pick up the flower. He looked disgusted. It was what they call a transforming moment. I had always looked down on the guy and here he was, upset, because he thought I was going to love him up. He stuck out his hand to fend me off and I shook it.
The way to pass healthcare is for the president to praise Republicans for their courage and foresight and compassion until he scares them to death and they let the thing pass. The way to fight these guys is to make them think you might like them.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
It costs $722 to fly from St. Paul/Minneapolis to Bismarck, N.D., and you can fly from St. Paul/Minneapolis to Paris for $754. Life is unfair; we all know this. Big prizes go to mediocrities while you struggle on, unappreciated. The righteous suffer while the wicked prosper. Bernie Madoff danced around the Securities & Exchange Commission to the tune of billions and the Immigration & Naturalization people deport a good Vietnamese woman for a minor error.
I grew up with the Kellogg's Variety Pack in a family of eight and so I know about unfairness. Some mornings your beloved Raisin Bran with its crunchy chewiness is snatched away by swifter hands and you sit staring into a bowl of soggy Rice Krispies or the wretched Sugar Pops and feel resentful, cheated, abused. Some days Mother embraces socialism and cooks a pot of Cream of Wheat, take it or leave it, but you look forward to the day when you take your place in the great emporium of adult life and can enjoy Raisin Bran whenever you like.
But by then, you have transcended Raisin Bran. You long for nobler things such as a moment of brilliance deconstructing Nabokov in your American lit seminar and winning the admiration of the delightful Jessica, who sits behind you, her mango hair conditioner sweetening the air, her beautiful knees just inches from your gluteus maximus. She is the smartest and sexiest girl you've ever met. In the Variety Pack of Love there is only Jessica, Jessica, Jessica, and all the other girls are tepid gruel in comparison. She allows you to put your arm around her magnificent shoulders. And one day she says to you over coffee, "I like you but you are not the one for me." You asked her to the homecoming dance, but no, she is going to come home with someone else.
Your heart is truly broken. Suddenly those songs on the jukebox are about you -- "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" and "I Will Always Love You" and "Too Far Gone" -- big salty tears well up in your pale green eyes and trickle down your tan cheeks.
Maybe Jessica's dismissal sends you spinning into a cult that believes that mankind is haunted and harried by the spirits of billions of people brought to Earth 75 million years ago by the intergalactic tyrant Xenu and you need to be hooked up to an e-meter to get free of them, or maybe you become a right-wing blogger and global-warming denier. Or you have your head pierced and a tiny red blinking light installed.
Or perhaps the loss of Jessica turns you into a true conservative. This is someone who believes that the treasures you inherited are probably more important than what you chose for yourself, that your family, your community, your culture, about which you had no choice, are the true gifts and all that you were ambitious to acquire on your own -- fame, wealth, an elegant prose style, mastery of the tango, Jessica -- are less true. This is the great divide in society: Some people accept who they are and settle into it and thrive on the predictable, and others are restless searchers and keep rewriting their lives, ever in the market for some new scheme, a new prophet, the newest True Light.
There are as many restless searchers among Republicans as among Democrats, and as many true conservatives, and a healthy society needs both. You do not want your child's school bus driver to be a restless searcher, you want him to stop at railroad crossings and look both ways. The older brother known for his constancy, his abiding faith, his discipline, proves to be an irritant to the younger brother and inspires him to feats of recklessness and to achieve a sort of breathless happiness unavailable to constancy and discipline.
The great unrequited love tears open your heart to the beauty of the world, its small rivers and upland meadows. It also makes you kinder to the next hundred thousand persons who cross your path. You kneel down beside small children and ask them how was their Halloween and what is their favorite breakfast cereal. You met grim defeat and so what? After a few months in Paris, you would've realized that Bismarck was a better fit for you. There is no Louvre, no Notre Dame, and the wind blows all the time, and winter lasts until April, but you're going to feel right at home there.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
The former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who resigned his Foreign Service post in Afghanistan because he feels the war is pointless and not worth dying for, deserves all the attention he's gotten and more. The Obama administration faces hard decisions there, and the man made a good case against deeper American involvement. He says that our presence among the Pashtun people, the rural, religious people, is only aggravating a civil war between them and the urban, secular (and, it seems, fraudulent) government of Kabul, and the role of the Taliban and al-Qaida is not central -- the real issues are tribal and cultural.
American families, he said, "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."
It is rare that a high-level official -- he was the senior State Department guy in Zabul province -- resigns in protest, and in all the to-do about his four-page resignation letter, nobody had a single bad thing to say about Matthew Hoh.
The American people tend not to admire quitters, which is maybe why protest resignations are so rare. You can get up on your high horse and talk about your principles, but we suspect that you're just another slacker looking for an easy way out. Your old football coach told you that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and by "get going" he didn't mean "write a four-page letter about your disillusionment with his coaching and the split-T offense in general" -- he meant, Toughen Up, Assume the Three-Point Stance, Hit 'Em Hard, Eat Some Turf, Get Up and Hit 'Em Again.
On the other hand, you don't want to be the last man to believe in the mission after everyone else has seen the light and gone home. Sunday in San Francisco, they set out to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock by gathering 3,000 guitarists in Golden Gate Park to play Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and 50 showed up and some of them were playing ukuleles. The '60s are over. Time to move on.
This is the great divide, between the true believers and the skeptics, and we cross over it every day, back and forth. On the one hand, we admire persistence and the good workers who go at the job and get it done, but then we listen to management huff and puff and realize that the ship is becalmed and liable to be boarded by pirates. Time to look for other work.
The box-elder bugs that flock into my house seeking shelter from the cold seem untroubled by skepticism. They march in and are squished and more bugs walk across the smeared innards of box-elder brethren and nobody is the wiser, the message is never passed on toward the rear.
Our time is brief. No matter how smart you are or pretty, the demand for you is limited. This is the hard lesson of adult life. Vancouver wants you to come and perform your work and you say yes and hundreds of e-mails fly back and forth -- What beverage would Mr. Keillor wish us to place in the back seat of the limo? Fermented persimmon juice? Not a problem. Should the flower petals that young maidens strew in his path be rose or narcissus? -- and then, two days before the big day, you are struck by a sore throat and propulsive sneezing. So you call Vancouver and tell them you can't come. They take the news calmly. They don't shriek, "No! No! Not this! Our lives will be shattered if you cancel, esteemed one." Your non-appearance is No Problemo.
And this is how you find out the hard truth. The world can get along without you pretty well.
You don't want to be the last person to write a novel in Esperanto or compose a 12-tone symphony, the last Socialist Labor candidate trying to hand out literature to the working class as they go into Wal-Mart, or the last Christian Science person to believe in the efficacy of prayer after all your friends have slipped away to have surgery, or the consumer of the last contaminated tuna left on the grocery shelf -- you don't want that.
Time to move on. Tell the others. It's a brand-new day. Let us start making our way on out of Afghanistan, Mr. President.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
A gorgeous fall here on the upper Mississippi, but among the old grumblers I drink cheap coffee with, the mood these days is dark, due to low interest rates and the advance of the glaciers, which is why I, sunny optimist that I am, seek out the company of the young and ebullient and drink $4 coffee, but sometimes you get stuck next to some old guy in a plaid shirt who gives you an earful about Wall Street bonuses and how the game is rigged in favor of the custom-tailored suits, and you must be polite and listen.
"Look at this. A person saves his money like he was brought up to do and he salts it away in a safe CD or Treasury note or municipal bond and it pays him a measly 2 percent interest. Why? Because the Fed has decreed we gotta have low interest to save the high-fliers and speculators who almost brought the roof crashing down a year ago, and they pour money into Goldman Sachs and these killer sharks walk away with a hundred billion in bonuses, and meanwhile guys are losing their shirts in the dairy business. What's the deal there?"
"There is a lot of human nature involved in economics, so if you are an idealist, you should take up astronomy," I tell him.
"I'm serious," he says. "You drive out west of here and you see headlights in the fields at midnight, guys putting in 16-hour days combining beans, and back east you've got people in offices with a phone in each hand, moving money around, not creating a damn thing, just playing a game, and the government can't do enough for them. Where's the fairness in that?"
"I saw your beautiful wife the other day and she looks 10 years younger," I say. "She said that you two can't keep your hands off each other. Good for you. And how about those Vikings and Brett Favre? Six and oh. Life is good. And how about those maple trees? Have you ever seen such colors?"
"This country is skidding toward disaster and the guy you elected president has his foot on the gas."
"You need to get out and walk more, Earl," I tell him, "and not sit and brood about interest rates. Life is too short to be unhappy. So look at the long term."
What I mean by "long term" is the basic tenet that the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and what goes around comes around. In St. Luke's gospel, the CEO wound up in hell, begging for a sip of cold water, and the homeless man sat at God's right hand. This happens over and over again in Scripture, and in America we believe that the guy who gets the $100 million bonus today is on a chute that leads to a bad cocaine habit, a car crash, serious head injury and 16 months of speech therapy before he can write his Crash & Redemption memoir and go on Larry King to promote it. Just wait and see.
Among the young and ebullient, there's no worry about interest rates because they have no savings -- they spend their weekly earnings and a little bit more on hair gel, iTunes, phone bills, $4 coffee and $100 jeans beautifully pre-ripped. They don't see the headlights in the soybean fields at midnight, only the lights in the bars where they go to be beautiful and cool and maintain text-message contact with friends from coast to coast and then have sex.
Sex, as we all know, is not accomplished by money alone, and that is why Wall Street traders get about 37 percent less than the average American. Anxiety has extinguished their pilot light. What works in seduction is not successfulness but comedy.
A man doesn't become a great lover by spending big bucks on clothes and hairstyling. Those clothes are going to wind up on the floor, and your hair is going to get all messed up. Your lovemaking skill is only important to one person and if, while you are in the act, you can keep her distracted long enough, she won't even notice. Jokes help.
One hundred men interviewed about their sex lives said they had sex once a week or once or twice a month. One man said, "I have sex once every two years." The psychologist said, "You poor guy," and the man said, "Yes, but tonight's the night!"
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Evidently some people were disappointed that Dick Cheney didn't receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and believe me, I sympathize -- I thought Philip Roth should've gotten the literature prize instead of that grumpy Romanian lady with the severe hair -- but it was Mr. Obama whom the Norwegians wanted to come visit Oslo in December and stand on the balcony of the Grand Hotel and wave to the crowd along Karl Johans Gate, and, face it, Mr. Obama is going to draw a bigger crowd than Mr. Cheney would have. When a man has shot somebody in the face with a shotgun, people are going to be reluctant to line up en masse in his presence lest he get excited again. As for Mr. Cheney's boss, he was an unlikely pick for the Peace Prize after it was revealed by a White House speechwriter in a recent memoir that Mr. Bush once said, "I whupped Gary Bauer's ass." Boasting about ass-whupping is not the mark of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. The correct word is "whipping."
Going to Oslo in December and sitting through a black-tie banquet with a bunch of wooden-faced Norwegians and eating herring and delivering a speech larded with bromides about international cooperation and no jokes is not what I'd consider a whee of a good time, frankly. Oslo is rather dark and murky in December. The sun rises during the first coffee break and sets right after lunch and this does not make for a festive mood. Bell-bottoms were not invented in Norway, nor was the mambo, or the convertible. This isn't Carnival in Rio.
Some conservative pundit suggested that the president should've declined the prize, but it is not gracious to reject a compliment, one should accept it with becoming modesty, as Mr. Obama did, that's what your mother brought you up to do. The prize isn't about you, it's about Peace, or Literature, or Homecoming, or Champion Hog, or Male Vocalist of the Year, so walk up there and smile for the cameras, say thank you and sit down.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth that you hear among Republicans is 68 percent envy and 32 percent sour grapes. Here is an idealistic, articulate young president who is enormously popular everywhere in the world except in the states of the Confederacy, and here sit the 28 percent of the American people who still thought Mr. Bush was doing a heckuva job at the end, gnashing their teeth, hoping and praying for something horrible to happen such as an infestation of locusts or the disappearance of the sun, something to make the president look bad, which is not a good place for a political party to be, hoping for the country to slide into chaos. When you bet against America, you are choosing long odds.
A person can run down the list of all that's wrong with this country, including the lobbyists who cross back and forth from public service to influence-peddling like alligators on the golf course, or the bankers who lost their minds in the great mortgage mania, but the country has a history of rising to challenges and turning away from demagogues and doing what needs to be done. Because we are a passionately patriotic people, infused with a love of our history and our land, and so we have limited patience for fools, such as the ones who now dominate the right.
Conservatism is a powerful strain in American life that ordinarily passes as common sense. Save for a rainy day. Don't foul the nest. Don't burn your bridges. Don't sacrifice the future for short-term profit. But when it contradicts itself and becomes weighted down with bigotry and cynicism, then it doesn't hold water anymore.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." And conservatives tried to keep functioning through the Bush administration but the contradictions wore them down, and last fall, when the federal government wrote a blank check to stave off collapse of the financial sector, conservative principles came crashing to the ground, and now all they have in common is that they don't like President Obama. OK, but resentment of an American president being honored by the Norwegians is not a good point from which to build a Republican revival. Petulant fury isn't a winning hand in politics. Get over it.
(Garrison Keillor is the author of "77 Love Sonnets," published by Common Good Books.)
© 2009 by Garrison Keillor. All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.
unpacking my life
Their Father is a Transsexual Woman
The plight of the single, middle-aged newcomer in Smalltown
The blank page and me. (more writer's block horror)
October 25, 2002