Like Jon Lauck, below, I have always enjoyed Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. Mr. Keillor's career has always rested on his one great invention, an imaginary Minnesota town. He has allowed us to live with and love these characters over the years, and I am grateful for it.
But Keillor himself doesn't really love them. There are too many Bush voters lurking among the quiet Christians living in his town. The first glimpse I got of this was in one of his routines, where a young man at the Lake Wobegon High School refuses to wear a yellow ribbon in honor of American troops fighting in Iraq (this was Bush 41's Iraq war). For this the young man was ostracized by the community, and realized that Lake Wobegon wasn't his home anymore.
I found that routine to be utterly unconvincing. It is just not the way Lake Wobegoners would have behaved. But it did shed some light on Keillor's true feelings about his fellow Americans. His piece on talk radio in the Nation sheds more.
The reason you find an army of right-wingers ratcheting on the radio and so few liberals is simple: Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time. I go to church on Sunday morning to be among the like-minded, and we all say the Nicene Creed together and assume nobody has his fingers crossed, but when it comes to radio, I prefer oddity and crankiness. I don't need someone to tell me that George W. Bush is a deceitful, corrupt, clever and destructive man--that's pretty clear on the face of it. What I want is to be surprised and delighted and moved. Here at the low end of the FM dial is a show in which three college boys are sitting in a studio, whooping and laughing, sneering at singer-songwriters they despise, playing Eminem and a bunch of bands I've never heard of, and they're having so much fun they achieve weightlessness--utter unself-consciousness--and then one of them tosses out the f-word and suddenly they get scared, wondering if anybody heard. Wonderful. Or you find three women in a studio yakking rapid-fire about the Pitt-Aniston divorce and the Michael Jackson trial and the botoxing of various stars and who wore what to the Oscars. It's not my world, and I like peering into it. The sports talk station gives you a succession of men whose absorption in a fantasy world is, to me, borderline insane. You're grateful not to be related to any of them, and yet ten minutes of their ranting and wheezing is a real tonic that somehow makes this world, the world of trees and children and books and travel, positively tremble with vitality. And then you succumb to weakness and tune in to the geezer station and there's Roy Orbison singing "Dream Baby" and you join Roy on the chorus, one of the Roylettes.
I don't worry about the right-wingers on AM radio. They are talking to an audience that is stuck in rush-hour traffic, in whom road rage is mounting, and the talk shows divert their rage from the road to the liberal conspiracy against America. Instead of ramming your rear bumper, they get mad at Harry Reid. Yes, the wingers do harm, but the worst damage is done to their own followers, who are cheated of the sort of genuine experience that enables people to grow up.
There you have it. Democrats are just better people than Republicans: brighter, more imaginative. They don't really like living in a free society. These are the words of a left wing bigot. His listeners on the right of the political dial deserve better than that.
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