****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Keillor, Garrison, Homegrown Democrat. New York: Viking, 2004. Once again, the Lake Wobegon humorist shows us that he is better on the radio than he is on the page. His memories of childhood would have sounded much more genuine and moving if we could hear them in that low-pitched monotone, semi-mocking, that he uses on his show, which has been on the air for 30 years. The book appears to have been written in short segments and then sewn together disregarding repetitiousness. Thus, we learn many times that Keillor is 61, considers himself old, has had heart repair surgery, had a child in crisis rescued in minutes by the St. Paul EMT--much faster than the Republican, Minneapolis teams would respond ("when it comes to actually needing help from them, you shouldn't get your hopes up"), and so on. It's when he compares Democrats to Republicans that his prose begins to spark. "[Republicans] are a party that is all about perceptions, the Christian party that conceals enormous glittering malice and is led by brilliant bandits who are dividing and conquering this sweet land I grew up in. I don't accept this." The party of Lincoln has transmogrified into the party of "hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, see-through fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, . . . the shrieking midgets of AM radio," and so on. He calls Bush an "Etch-a-Sketch president with a voice like a dial tone, . . . a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions in general . . ." We are in the Gilded Age reincarnated, rallying to the cause of William McKinley. "The Republicans have turned into the Screw You Party." "People with too much money and too little character, all sensibility and no sense, all nostalgia and no history." Keillor sums up his philosophy in a single sentence. "I am a liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness." He describes Democrats as people "who believe in decency and public spiritedness" and protection of the powerless, the party that upholds the generous spirit and respects the individual, the party that refuses "to hitch our wagon to yahooism and intolerance." Keillor has changed since his earlier days. Instead of denigrating the humorless harshness of his Minnesota upbringing in a tiny Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren, he reminds us that his parents' generation believed in helping their neighbors, in being of service and "accepting a rough road without complaining." They had no need of barbiturates because they worked hard and were sleepy enough. I enjoyed the look back into the 40s, when students sat at little arm desks with inkwells and their report cards came home with marks in "deportment" for penmanship, obedience, cooperation, work habits, and citizenship, when we were taught to say "Please" and "Excuse me" and "May I." I was glad to read that Keillor imitated Bob & Ray comedy routines and thought about space travel, that he practiced the art of invisibility and thought to himself, "Someday I won't have to do this" as he stood in gym shorts in a line of boys waiting to do a flying somersault. It was the library that saved both of us. He "entered into the stacks and there was pure heaven." There is humor in the book. He served as the announcer for the college radio station, good training, until someone got up the courage to tell him that for lack of funding the station had gone off the air six months earlier. He danced with a classmate and, "we two being different heights, came out in 9/7 time." He learned the art of the written essay, "a 440-yard dash through natural obstacles . . .meant to be esthetically elegant." His first hangover gave him "a taste of what mental illness might be like, a sort of vacancy with dark shadows." Keillor had a well-publicized hate-fest with Jesse Ventura, the wrestler turned governor of Minnesota, "whose first act in office was to sell the book rights." After four years of him "it was a relief to go back to politics as usual, where soft-spoken people with ordinary chest sizes sit down and negotiate and get the job done." Finally, he reminded me of my own visits to the South in the 1950s, with its segregated drinking fountains (a rusty pipe sticking out of a hole in the wall, draped with a sign reading "Colored"), and comments, "What exactly it is that the Republicans have done for the South other than wave the flag and the Bible, I don't quite fathom." The second hundred pages of the book needn't have been written. It was all said in the first half.
