Minnesota Soul-Mate

It's been so long since I've read any lively social and political commentary by an intelligent and unapologetic American "liberal" (besides Twain, that is) that I found myself silently weeping, last week, most of the way through Garrison Keillor's 2004 collection of essays on the state of the nation, called "Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America." Indeed, I felt as if Keillor had suddenly unlocked the cage in which, several years ago, the country's "conservatives" had locked me, with a gag in my mouth.

"Go get 'em, boy!" I muttered to myself as I underlined particularly zingy passages for Ginny, my Bush-averse co-pilot through life.

In my 66-year-old life, I absorbed the "liberal" viewpoint from, first, living for 35 years in New York, then six in Minnesota, which, together with Wisconsin in the late-19th century, was the home -- or "hotbed," depending on your political affiliation -- of Progressivism.

And what is that? I could look up a dictionary definition, but that would bore the socks off both of us. I'd prefer to give you what I think amounts to the same thing, from Keillor's preface to his book: "America at its best," he writes, "is a generous and redemptive land occupied by amiable, optimistic, sentimental, humorous people. Europeans can be shocked at how reflexively friendly we can be with people we don't know. We meet strangers over a cup of coffee and suddenly we're telling about the crazy uncle who ran off with the church secretary. We rally to help people we never met. Amiability is the basis of civil politics: you don't cheat people you like; you don't abuse people who might become your friends. That's the America I know." There, doesn't that beat a dry dictionary definition?

Maybe the essence of "liberalism" is a basic trust in people, a willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt. Keillor himself writes, "I am a liberal and liberalism is the politics of kindness." And maybe the great-grandfather of modern American liberalism is Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. president who saved our capitalist system during the Depression in the 1930s.

Garrison Keillor first came to our attention with his "Lake Wobegon Days," a light-hearted and wildly funny series of sketches about growing up in a small, fictional, midwestern town, based loosely on Saint Paul, Minnesota, among people of Norwegian descent. I guess if you had to categorize the book, you could, in a pinch, call it "satire, but without a harsh bone in its body." The local Lutheran church is called "Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility." He writes a syndicated newspaper column called "The Old Scout,"and a long-standing radio program called "A Prairie Home Companion," a kind of homegrown variety show, free of all satirical political commentary. His other books tend to be continuations of his Lake Wobegon childhood in the 1950s, sweet-tempered and light-hearted.

That's why his "Homegrown Democrat" comes as something of a welcome shock to me. For against his memories of civility in his home-town in childhood he sets word-photos of the current, Republican-rooted harshness and selfishness. When he (roughly the same age as I) recalls the way he was brought up to observe the middle-class sense of decorum, it all rings a bell: "If, for example, there is one meatball left on the platter, you do not take it, you take half of it, and someone takes half of that, and so it is endlessly divided down to the last crumb."

Laughable? Sure, but it's also one of those little rituals by which you wordlessly show you recognize you aren't the only person at the dinner table, that you don't plan to wolf down more than your fair share.

"I live in Minnesota," Keillor writes, "for the plain and simple reason that I am not so different from these people, and I want my daughter to feel she is one of them, too. And because the social compact is still intact here, despite Republicans trying to unscrew it and put it up for auction."

So, what has happened to our country? Republicans, that's who.

"The government of our good country has been heisted by cynics and crooks, and their chutzpah is astonishing… One can debate whether Mr. Bush is the lousiest president in our history or the first or second runner-up to Warren G. Harding or James Buchanan, or only worthy of dishonorable mention. Petulant, vain, devious, enormously talented, and in the end, meant to be forgotten. Whoever designs his library, don't make the parking lot too big."

In the age of Buchanan or that of Harding, one of the advantages of the American presidency was that even if an incompetent was chosen by the American electorate, it didn't matter much. What, after all, could happen, especially since we were insulated from the rest of the world by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans?.

Now, however, we don't have the luxury of letting an incompetent Republican call the shots. George has two more years in the White House, and in that time he's perfectly capable of destroying our country -- or letting Dick Cheney do the job for him.