Oh, Garrison,
We Hardly Knew Ye!

by D. J. Herda

I like Salon Magazine.  I don't like it enough to subscribe, but I like it just about enough to receive it free in my e-mail in-box everyday.  No, that's not true.  I like it exactly enough to receive it free in my e-mail in-box everyday.

What I like most about the magazine is its hell-bent-for-leather stand against Republicans, conservatives, and the present White House administration.  I really do.  It's not often that you get a free radical magazine delivered to your e-mail in-box everyday.  I mean, I can get all the nice-administration news I want directly from the nation's capital, so getting Salon in my in-box let's me see how the other half lives, thinks, and--most importantly of all--writes.

Some other things I like about receiving Salon magazine free in my e-mail in-box everyday are the periodic columns written by Garrison Keillor.  Keillor, as some people know, created and still oversees NPR's A Prairie Home Companion, a witty, tongue-in-cheek welcomed relief from everyday broadcast radio.  Keillor plays the bumbling boob next door, and he does it well, stumbling in and out of small-town home-fried situations that would tire lesser men. 

And that's the beauty of Garrison Keillor.  He is for real--a tall, bumbling, stumbling, out-of-the-mouths-of-babes kind of guy you just can't help but like.

Or, at least, I thought that was Garrison Keillor.  Now, as I find out, I may have been wrong.

I don't know Keillor well.  Or, at least, I didn't until recently.  I had met him only once in person while I lived and skied in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.  I was nursing a snow-related injury one morning over a cup of hot coffee and a sweet roll at Lyon's Drugs on Main Street when he walked in.  He's a tall son-of-a-gun; and, dressed in an overcoat and a hat the way he was, he was not easy to miss.  Harder still to miss was the voice: the trembling, hesitant, resonance-filled voice that works its magic on NPR and works it even better in person.

It is the voice, I reasoned, that has made him what he is today.  Although I had always convinced myself that the voice, that magical lyrical voice, held some brains behind it, as well.

"Hi," he said to me, as he walked out of the store clutching a bag he had just received from the pharmacist.  "Hi," I replied, nodding in his general direction and trying not to stare.

That is exactly the way I had hoped to get to know Garrison Keillor of A Prairie Home Companion infamy one day.  To revel in his on-air creativity and to say “Hi” to him whenever I ran into him in a drug store in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.  It was just about the perfect relationship.

And then I read a recent column he wrote for Salon.  (See, and you thought I wasn't going anywhere with this.)  It was all about how Memorial Day, that last bastion of true patriotism, has been desecrated by the current administration:

"Dishonesty makes for poor rhetoric and that's what has gutted this beautiful holiday.  The ideas it celebrates -- that our young men and women did their duty and died in defense of their country -- are simply not true.  Vietnam was lost and it didn't matter to the security of the United States.  Saigon fell and life in the States went on without a blink.  And since the end of selective service, these honored dead are somebody else's sons and daughters, not ours -- one good reason why there is so little protest of this war: If the Army was conscripting our children to go to Baghdad, the Occupant's approval rating would be in the low teens."

Now, I don't mind people calling the president and his administration dishonest.  These are, after all, the same jugheads who came to the defense of Bill Clinton, a Democrat, when he lied before the American people and later, under oath, to Congress, when he insisted that "I did not have sex with that woman [a.k.a. Monica Lewinsky]."  Anyone who would deny Clinton's long history of lies--or, for that matter, those of Richard M. Nixon, a Republican--is obviously too politically partisan to see the forest through the disease, for partisanship, like cancer, robs its host of life not suddenly and dramatically but one tiny wheezing breath at a time.

What I do mind is Keillor's denigrating those who have recently died defending our country:

"The ideas it celebrates -- that our young men and women did their duty and died in defense of their country -- are simply not true." 

Actually, they simply are true.  And anyone who has ever read Al Qaeda's allied statements avowing 9-11 as only the first step in a long and bitter jihad against the West knows that they are true.  Apparently, Keillor--whom I know can read--chose to avoid doing so in favor of partisanship.

I also mind Keillor's comparing the War in Iraq to the War in Vietnam: 

"Vietnam was lost and it didn't matter to the security of the United States." 

Actually, he's right; it didn't matter.  Neither did the falling of the Bastille or the beheading of Anne Boleyn.  Anyone who argues that a war fought over an uninterrupted supply of rubber and based upon a flawed socio-political concept called The Domino Theory is equivalent to the Iraqi War is not hitting on all six cylinders.  The war we fight today is with jihadist butcherers who have vowed to wipe from the face of the earth the Zionist and Imperialist states of the world (i.e., for those who don't read as well as Keillor, Israel and nearly everybody else).  Not recognizing the difference between Vietnam and Iraq is absolute lunacy.  Since Keillor is no loon, we can only assume he's bowing once again to partisanship.

I am confused about Keillor's "Saigon fell and life in the States went on without a blink."  Somebody needs to point out to him that Saigon IS part of Vietnam.  Hmm, perhaps this man who plays a small-town bumpkin on the air is not really that much of an actor after all...

But, be that as it may, what really bothers me about Keillor’s column is his eloquently stated and nearly accurately punctuated

"And since the end of selective service, these honored dead are somebody else's sons and daughters, not ours -- one good reason why there is so little protest of this war: If the Army was conscripting our children to go to Baghdad, the Occupant's approval rating would be in the low teens."

Surely Keillor recognizes that, while the Vietnam-era Selective Service Administration drafted unwilling opponents to the war regardless of their state of mind, physical and mental health, and economic status (and I was a draft counselor working with American Friends for three tumultuous years, so I saw the results of the draft firsthand), the Iraqi War's casualties had enlisted in the military for a cause.  They enlisted to help protect the shores of America from another 9-11.  Surely, Keillor remembers America.  Land of opportunity, from sea to shining sea, the Midwest, Minnesota, Lake Woebegone?  The very setting for the NPR syndicated show that remains the basis for every ounce of wealth and fame he has garnered since its inception?

Surely Keillor recognizes, too, that these same "honored dead" who are "somebody else's sons and daughters, not ours" are, indeed, ours.  I don't know about Keillor, but I weep for every single man, woman, and child of the universe who, at the hands of terrorist butchers, is killed, maimed, raped, decapitated, subjugated, tortured, and in all other ways desecrated in the name of Holy Jihad and Islamic Extremism. 

I weep for them just as surely as I weep for every man, woman, and child--every innocent human being, every civilian, every one of God's creations--who lost his or her life in a barbaric attack on New York's World Trade Center on that fateful September day so long ago.  I weep for them, and I salute our troops around the world who have been working ever since to prevent the next avowed attack on innocence and on life. 

Maybe--just maybe--if Garrison Keillor began looking at the human race as though we were all brothers and sisters, the good, the bad, and the sinister, instead of looking at it as "theirs" and "ours," he would see that the true meaning of patriotism is not what he spews out on the heels of the pulpit that a free America has granted him but rather what those brave men and women who have enlisted in the Armed Forces around the world have vowed to fight against...and what they have vowed to protect from annihilation.

Nevertheless, I am indebted to you, Garrison Keillor, for one thing.  I thought I knew you; but, thanks to your recent column in Salon, I realize now that I was wrong.

Does it hurt?  Am I disappointed?  Do I feel disillusioned, disheartened, betrayed?  Well, I guess so.  A little.  But, you know what?  I don’t want you to worry about it, because I’ll get over it. 

Besides, we’ll always have Steamboat.

And I…am D. J. Herda.

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D. J. Herda is President of the American Society of Authors and Writers (http://amsaw.org), an organization made up of authors, writers, editors, publishers, agents, directors, producers, and other media professionals who rely upon the printed word in the creation of quality literature and entertainment.  He is a member of the Author's Guild, a former member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a former member of the National Press Club.  He has published more than 80 books and several hundred thousand articles, short stories, columns, interviews, plays, and scripts.
 

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