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| Lileks: the clipboard people & the derangement of Garrison Keillor |
| 2008-07-08 |
| Today's "Bleat" . . . I had another conversation with the clipboard people outside the grocery store. Honestly, I’m not being confrontational; I’m just curious about what they think. It’s instructive. The clipboard guy – twice my height, half my age – wanted me to sign a petition to ensure that 25% of the state’s power came from renewable sources by 2020. “That’s the law,” I said. (I drew my finger in a lateral motion to indicate the link.) He nodded. “So . . . what’s the petition about?” He said that Congress had failed to renew the renewable energy tax credits, and they needed to be reinstated. I agreed that this was short-sighted, but decided not to get into all the usual hideous politics around that bill. I asked if his group was in favor of expanding all available energy sources, so we could be have baseload capacity to back up intermittent sources, like wind and solar. “Baseload?” he said. He didn’t know the term. I gave a rough definition; eyes glazed. Then I asked if his group was in favor of drilling in the Bakken oil fields. He didn’t know about the Bakken oil fields. “It’s in North Dakota,” I said. “We’re opposed to drilling,” he said. “In North Dakota?” I said. “We’re opposed to drilling,” he repeated. A few months ago I noted, in hardy-har jest, that people would oppose drilling in North Dakota because they feared its impact on the Bison, or the now-depopulated newly-pristine plains. Turns out they don’t need a reason. Nobody drill anywhere anyhow ever. I said what I’d said before, and will probably say the next time I engage in this act of total futility: if you guys were for everything, I’d be with you. We need to try everything. But he had turned cold by then. The imperatives of the present are an inconvenient obstacle to heaven. The needs of the near future, even more so. . . . - - - - - - - - . . . it's time for What Makes Garrison Keillor Get Angry About George Bush: this week it's a little girl playing in a softball game in a small town. The piece begins: A couple of hours to kill on a humid afternoon in a small town in Masachusetts and rather than sit looking at hotel wallpaper I took a little walk. Here, free of charge: “I had.” Apply them to the beginning of the sentence. It’s a little trick we learned in writing class; helps folks out. They don’t have to read the sentence twice. The town reminds him of Norman Rockwell, and he likes Rockwell. So do I – good painted. But I never saw him this way: I liked a lot of Rockwell’s stuff because he was a liberal and he painted faces with great devotion. The faces shine through, as they should in a liberal’s art. Oh, agreed! Heh. Sorry about that. But I never quite realized the shiny-face aspect of liberal painting before; from now on, when I see a luminescent Caravaggio, I’ll assume he supported a single-payer health-care system. The amusing part of the assertion, of course, is that the liberal wing of painting, if you can call it that, has shied away from the difficult task of painting faces for almost a hundred years, preferring the progressive styles of abstraction. Representational art is regarded as conservative – not in the political sense, of course, but still. One also suspects that there might not be a straight unbroken line between Rockwell’s liberalism and the modern sort; he did a lot of stuff about Boy Scouts, and like many modern liberals might be dismayed by those in the vanguard who consider them political untouchables. But Keillor has a rather ossified notion of liberalism, untroubled by history or subtlety; he's almost a mirror-image of the paleoconservatives who believe to this day that True and Honest Conservatives dasn't listen to Elvis, lest their hips be corrupted. Anyway. He found a baseball game and got chatting with a father of a girl on the team. “A ballgame is a great place to get to know somebody,” Keillor writes, and that’s so. Of course, when you make stuff up, it’s more difficult to “get to know” the guy who’s sitting next to you: “ . . . we got to the grim business of What Do You Do For a Living. He said he was a cop. I said I was unemployed. (You tell people you’re a writer and they tend to clam up.)” Also, you tell people you’re a millionaire posing as an unemployed guy, they tend to clam up as well, but for different reasons. The piece goes on to note that Mr. Keillor feels he has done okay in the last eight years but has a hot collar and ground-up teeth thinking about what the Current Occupant has done to the country the little girl will inherit. He’s mad about spending – I’m with him there, although a bit perplexed to find Keillor coming down on the side of spending less – and he doesn’t approve of the war. It ruined his Rockwell moment. Being unable to watch a kid play baseball because you are mad at George Bush does not necessarily mean you are a better person or a person more attuned to truth and the future. It might mean, at best, you are a person who writes run-on sentences stringing together predictable assertions; at worst, it might mean you’re anhedonic, and looking for scapegoats. I look at my daughter and consider her future, and I see possibility and peril as well. But that’s up to us, and while I’m sure Mr. Keillor anticipates the day where he is legally required to pay the taxes he heretofore feels he is morally required to pay, we can do fine without him. We’ve done fine without his money so far, and I think we can keep that up. Unless he’s been paying in at the pre-tax-cut level, of course. In which case: hats off! A principled man is rare in any era. Final note: why is it "grim business" to talk about what you do for a living? Almost every interesting conversation I've had with strangers had to do with their jobs, because people in this country do all sorts of diverse and amazing things. It's "grim business" perhaps if you expect everyone else to be bent before a gritty grease-smeared gear a la Metropolis, but everyone you meet by happenstance usually does something for a living you don't do, and you can learn from it. I'd love to read a column about the life of a cop in a Norman Rockwell town, but that inessential pebble pinged off the author's glacial self-regard. Who cares what a little girl feels about having a dad for a cop? The real issue is how mad she makes the author feel about the President. I mean, I have lots of problems with Bush as well - lots, and then lots again - but when I see my daughter on the soccer field, running for the ball, heading for the goal, I'm hoping she scores. Even if it ruins a potential metphor for projected increases in college tuition in 2019. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #5 I think Potatohead should up his dosages. He'll feel better. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2008-07-08 09:25 |
| #4 There's a meme growing about how we're a nation in decline. I think I'd start pointing out, if anybody listened to me, that if we're a nation in decline it'd be precisely because we listened to the people like Keillor. I'd be real happy to see the nation go on a reindustrialization binge, myself. It'd be great fun watching the inhabitants of Lake Woebegone taking the gaspipe at all the drilling and the smokestacks and such. |
| Posted by: Fred 2008-07-08 09:10 |
| #3 I never managed to finish a Kiellor novel. That's funny; I never managed to start one! |
| Posted by: Raj 2008-07-08 08:44 |
| #2 I read a lot of fiction and I usually manage to finish even the most dismally awful crap. I never managed to finish a Kiellor novel. Which makes it crap in a class of its own. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2008-07-08 07:21 |
| #1 Unemployed Guy's House. |
| Posted by: Parabellum 2008-07-08 07:20 |