In “A Prarie Home Conundrum,” Sam Anderson can’t understand the hostility Garrison Keillor often evokes. He asks:
How has someone so relentlessly inoffensive managed to become so divisive?
That’s easy. By writing, frequently, such things as the following, from In These Times:
How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?
And from Salon:
We’re stuck with a terrible war and a worse president, and all the GOP can do is scream, “Pelosi and her Nancy boys are coming”? This is pathetic.
Actually, one of the best explanations I’ve seen of why Keillor often evokes hostility was written 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.
If you look at Keillor’s political writing, asking how it could be that he evokes such hostility makes about as much sense as asking why not everyone thinks Al Franken is funny.
But having now looked at some Keillorania, I wonder why such a folksy, all-American guy wanted to change the normal, everyday-sort-of-guy name he was born with, Gary Edward Keillor, to that uptown, country-club-sounding “Garrison”?
LOL I had the exact same question about his name. It’s pretentious.
The Guardian profile (found by Google) says,
“Gary Edward Keillor – he didn’t adopt the ostensibly more literary Garrison until submitting poems to magazines while in high school – was born in Anoka, a small town outside Minneapolis, in 1942.”
However odious you think he is, it’s not fair to ding some guy for a pen name he picked 45 years ago as a high school poet.
Linda – Neither Sharon nor I said G. Keillor is odious, but I’m not sure that a “ding” for sticking with residual youthful pretentiousness is too strong. On the other hand you have good sense in these matters; maybe a “tweak” would have been more appropriate.
As a Minnesotan (“all of our mosquitos are above average”), I have a special and personal dislike for the man.
He routinely vilifies any and all conservative about whom he writes, and he does so frequently. While Coleman fought Mondale for Wellstone’s seat, GK wrote scandalous and hateful articles about rumors of Coleman’s relationship (or non-relationship) with his wife, and with others.
My epiphany as to his vileness came in reading, just a few days after transferring some of my money into his pocket, the full paragrpah from which you quoted:
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.
Nice to hear what he thinks of me. A group of us were going to go to PHC wearing T-shirts labeled “Hairy-Back Swamp Developers”, but decided that we couldn’t spend money on him. He is smug, acid-tongued, and convinced of his complete moral superiority.
I think a lot of the hostility is borne of betrayal. We all listened to him avidly and happily, supported him in the early days of PHC, and thought he was the best face Minnesota could ever put forward to the nation. The, he told half of us what he really thought of us . . .
PHC was, at one time, a highly entertaining program. I stopped listening when his stories of home started the migration to self-pitying whine-and-snivel sessions. He no longer speaks, but now seems to groan and pewl his way through his Lake Wobegon sketches.
It’s sad, because there are times the program has been very entertaining, and side-splittingly funny.