Garrison Keillor: Just Another Ex-Funny Liberal.

I know that I have probably beaten this particular horse back to life by now, but I couldn't resist showcasing another example of a liberal who was once funny, but now because of a vibrating hatred of George Bush and everything conservative, has descended into the purgatory of cliché and humorlessness.

I have always liked Garrison Keillor. Listening to A Prairie Home Companion on a dark Saturday night while making dinner used to be truly one of the most pleasurable moments of the week. The vignettes, the skits and especially the News provided a soothing, homey backdrop to the communal cooking that Sherry, Caitlin and I used to indulge ourselves in. But since the run up to the Iraq war--no, probably even before that, almost as soon as the planes hit the towers--no, no before that even, back when Al Gore lost Florida--APHC has become a one man-one audience bile-fest, sometimes still funny, most times not.

Garrison has taken it upon himself to proclaim what a liberal is, what a conservative is and why the rest of us are too damn stupid to make up our own minds. The biggest problem that Garrison has is that he is filled not with affection for liberals, but for an overarching hatred for conservatives. He sees nothing in conservative thought that is the least bit funny, so when he attempts to be funny about conservatives, he just comes off as a sore loser wielding a very dull ax.

His latest sad attempt at exposing conservative evil is in the new issue of The Nation which, since the departure of Christopher Hitchens has itself become as humorless and strident as Pravda during the Khrushchev era. Garrison tries to show how enlightened and open minded he is by admitting to the reader that he listens to a tiny bit--but only a tiny bit--of right-wing talk radio. He makes his confession before telling us why he really, really hates right-wing radio. This would be a clever exercise if P.J. O'Rourke hadn't done something similar already and with much more success and humor. But then, Keillor is no O'Rourke. O'Rourke is funny.

But I suppose that imitation is the highest form of something, so I'm willing to look the other way and not make the charge that Garrison here is lazy and unoriginal. I'll save that for some other time. I assume that Garrison is trying to make some sort of point about how it's a good thing to familiarize oneself with the enemy (kind of like learning French) but he doesn't end up doing liberals any good at all. In fact, I wish he wouldn't try to help so much. Liberals have enough to deal with, like taking their party back from deranged conspiracy nuts and putty-footed candidates, without having to reel Garrison Keillor back in from the deep end.

In O'Rourke's piece, he tells us that he doesn't listen to conservative radio because of the value of having an argument. Standing around agreeing all the time makes for a fairly boring afternoon for all. Garrison, on the other hand, wants everybody to agree with him, and he detests anything that challenges his self-proclaimed liberal world view. (I will refrain from the usual argument about who's really liberal and who's actually a closed-minded buffoon. I will).

Garrison starts the piece with some nostalgia to loosen up the audience. It's homey Garrison again. You know, the one from the heartland. But then the fangs become visible:

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.

This actually is funny, in a way. I am often amused by people who rail against others for being closed minded and then set about stereotyping vast groups of other people--people who don't think as they do. This is a common, rather stupid technique that doesn't work with anybody past the third grade. What has APHC and Garrison himself become but an echo chamber? When was the last time a conservative was on his show? Now that would be funny. How about ol' P.J.? I would put O'Rourke up against Scary Gary any day.

In the previous paragraph, Garrison illustrates for us just how open-minded he is. And aren't we all thankful for it?

They are evil, lying, cynical bastards who are out to destroy the country I love and turn it into a banana republic, but hey, nobody's perfect. And now that their man is re-elected and they have nice majorities in the House and Senate, they are hunters in search of diminishing prey.

Now this is just sad. And it's not very good writing, either. I know that bloggers aren't supposed to be real writers, but I have read advice from bloggers as diverse as Duncan Black and Glenn Reynolds that if one wishes to garner an audience, one must have something compelling to say and a compelling way to say it. The only thing compelling about this tired non-argument is the example of how paranoid a once talented showman has become.

Garrison contends that he doesn't worry about right-wing radio because it's kind of like the Two Minutes Hate from 1984. In other words, it keeps the crazies from going after all the peaceful-minded liberals. But Garrison can't help himself and he shows his own failure at anger management:

[W]hen 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.

Well, at least the liberals are now saying that Bush is clever. I guess one has to build up one's opponent if one has lost to said opponent twice. But deceitful, corrupt and destructive are all nice touches. So too, the rhetorical trick of forming an insult by supposition.

No, Garrison doesn't like conservative talk radio. He ends the piece with a public radio plug, which is to be expected. After all, someone who has more or less lived on the public dole for most of his career needs to feed the monster every once in a while. It worked for Bill Moyers.

The sad thing about liberals like Garrison is that he gives liberals like me a bad name. I listen to NPR and read the New York Times but I don't put my brain away while I do it. Garrison is telling his reader that the only place to get the "authentic experience" is to listen to people just like him. The irony here is that no one but people just like him are listening anymore. How open-minded can he be? Just how liberal is that? I know that Garrison thinks he's helping us to better understand that half the country's population are either stupid or evil, but really, Garrison, don't do us any favors.

When he opens his mouth I want to hear stories about Guy Noir or funny Minnesotans or laugh at a new ketchup commercial, not some flaccid complaint about the president's motives. This isn't an argument against entertainers talking politics. I'm all for reading anybody who can write well about politics, no matter what they do for a living. But Garrison's political schtick is so filled with vitriol that it's just not up to his usual stuff.

So by all means, Garrison, do your show and write your books. Even write articles criticizing the Bush policies or Dick Cheney's corporate connections. Slam Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh all you want. But please. Do it well. If you can't write compellingly, don't do it. Stop assuming that you speak for all liberals, because, brother, you don't. And while you're at it, get some new material.

Otherwise: shut up, Garrison. Really. Just shut up.

UPDATE: Seems like some readers at Huffingtonapalooza  just loved Garrison's rant, although there are a few stout souls peering through the veil.

Comments

[Cult of Liberty]

You shocked me! You sounded like a Rightist right till the end. Bravo!
The next step is to learn about supply-side economics and history and realize that the master plan is impossible. This will lead to your final emergence from leftism and into the land of sunshine and rainbows and tax cuts that is the GOP.