Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 05.30.22

Garrison,

I thought you’d lost your soon-to-be-octogenarian mind calling Romney conservative. Possession of 14,000,000 bloodstained dollar bills is not conservative. The man’s a weasel. But to embrace his idea we remain static? Think, man! Keep your eye on the shell.

Buddhists call it impermanence. We’re not going backward, sir. Ever.

Kind regards,
Jim Duffey

Oldsmar, Florida

I think George F. Will would call Senator Romney a conservative so I will too, but you have a perfect right to disagree. But the NRA’s version of the Second Amendment is madness and I think the Second should be disposed of and I hope you will second that.

GK

Garrison, 

For all these years of admiration my thinking was that you had a very strong moral backbone. Why do you propose not to do shows in Texas when so many here nearly worship you? By your example and with your terrific abilities you can do shows that teach us better standards and entertain us while doing it. In fact do twice as many shows here in Texas and I know you will change many minds. Never give up!! All of us can benefit from you.

Bill McCarron, MD 

Dr. McCarron, I am not a preacher when I go out on the road, I am not out to change anyone’s mind, I’m out to tell stories and sing with the crowd and give people a good time. But after what I’ve written in the column about guns, I don’t dare go to Texas. A man alone on a stage feels vulnerable. I didn’t feel that way in Denver but I would in Texas. My choice, and it has nothing to do with lack of backbone. I’m not out to change Texas; I leave that to you.

GK

Mr. Keillor probably knows Iris DeMent’s “Going Down to Sing in Texas,” but if not, I suggest taking a listen tout de suite. It’s one of our most perfect contemporary protest songs. 

Best, 

Aimee 

It’s a great song for Iris but there’s too many words for me to ever try to learn it. And the line “Go ahead and shoot me if it floats your boat” is not a line I’d toss out to my audience; it’d make them feel awful.

GK

Dear Garrison,

I have shot every kind of gun for 50-plus years, mostly at dime-sized paper targets at 100 yards. For decades I carried a concealed weapon for my work, and I hunt. I never had any desire to shoot anybody. 

I know a lot of people who would repeal the amendment in a heartbeat. Some of my relatives are gun-phobic and are physically repulsed at the sight of a gun.

Another reason I keep a gun is self-defense. If some bad actor tries to crash into my home, I want a gun to defend my family. I have heard all the excuses for not having a gun and they are much the same excuses for not having a motorcycle. “You’re going to hurt yourself.” But I’m an adult and I choose to defend my family in the gravest extreme. By the way, I’m one of those people who would grab a gun and run into that school to confront the shooter if I had to. I can hear the cries of “false bravado,” but I don’t care.

If the AR-15 was banned tomorrow, other more lethal guns would immediately take its place. The media never interviews the real experts on guns and killing, i.e., trained killers — our military snipers. They can explain how many different types of guns and cartridges can cause carnage. It’s a lot. Even the ubiquitous single shot .22 rifle that us kids used to plink at tin cans can be a horribly lethal weapon in the hands of a sniper. The Israeli Mossad’s weapon of choice for assassination was a little .22 Beretta pocket pistol. There are probably 50 to 100 million .22 rifles in America.

A person with severe mental illness can buy a gun because his mental records will remain invisible to a gun (NICS) background check. We need to amend privacy laws to fix that loophole. We should ban body armor and raise the age to buy a gun to 21 rather than 18. 

All these threats about another civil war by Trump and his people must be taken seriously. 

Clay Blasdel

Buffalo, New York

Thanks for writing. It isn’t often I get to hear this point of view. My dad was a farm boy and he and his brothers weren’t hunters, they only kept a rifle to guard against foxes and raccoons that the dogs didn’t chase away. He carried a snub-nosed pistol in his job as a railway mail clerk, but he regarded it as a joke since the accuracy was so poor. I didn’t know anybody back then who kept guns. The idea of owning a “machine gun” was utterly weird and outrageous. That’s still my feeling. You and I are on two different sides and your side has the Supreme Court and the Republican Party and you are winning, and the country is flooded with guns and I hear that the AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in the country. This isn’t the country I grew up in. We’ll have more and more massacres, and there will be horror at some and one week it’ll be 21 dead and eventually we’ll see 30 or 40 and what nobody can gauge is the effect of fear on our common lives and our comfort in gathering in large groups. That’s the direction we’re heading in and I don’t see much hope it’ll change but I don’t have to like it.

GK

Dear GK,

Whenever Biden stated that we must confront the gun lobby, I thought, “How?”

And my answer is: campaign finance reform. Remove the quid pro quo lobbyists completely. I know this is a hard idea with many details to be worked out, but it is a really good answer. If each qualified candidate receives exactly the same amount of money (from our tax dollars), the equality ensures fairness. And I should think that our representatives, free from the shackles of fundraising, would have a great deal more time to spend on meaningful legislation that is now separated from special interests.

Stay well, Stay safe,
buz

I don’t see this getting past the courts after Citizens United v. FEC. Sorry.

GK

I have been listening to The Writer’s Almanac on my Saturday jog through the Utah countryside for what, ten years now? Despite your daily reminders to keep in touch, I just barely heard about TWA’s demise. Oh the horror of it!

I recall years ago on a summer run hearing Jane Hirshfield’s poem, “I Ran Out Naked in the Sun.” The power of suggestion being what it is and being quite alone … I took my shirt off.

That is good progress for a repressed Mormon boy (now more precisely members of the Church of Jesus Christ — we are more like Lutherans than you might imagine) and it was well worth the sunburn. Walt Whitman, another gymnophile, was similarly liberating.

I’ve written fan letters to three people in my life, the author Jean Craighead George, who replied the day before she died; Mr. Rogers, who I’m told replied personally to all his fan mail, including mine; and the poet Richard Wilbur. You’re the fourth and in good company. Thanks for being the poet laureate of my weekends lo these many years and the best G.K. since Chesterton.

Aaron Nydegger

Aaron, I loved doing The Writers Almanac but after I was fired by Minnesota Public Radio in 2017, the Almanac was taken off the air and the underwriting canceled and some good people managed to keep it going in reruns for a while but it’s just not possible to subsidize it anymore. We were careful to choose poems that spoke directly to the listener and could be absorbed in one listening even when distracted, and that was our guiding principle. I still do some of those poems when I do shows. Maybe someone will come along to revive the Almanac and if so, I wish them well.

GK

Garrison:

Your recent posting about “expeditious” prompted me to write. At 18, I was hired at Bamberger’s Department Store in Newark, N.J., to work as an expediter in the toy department (4th floor) during the Christmas rush. I didn’t expedite much, mostly I kept the merchandise in order on the shelves and babysat annoying kids while their mothers shopped on other floors. It was in the fall of 1967, just after the summer riots in Newark and my boss was (and remains to this day) the most hateful, prejudiced, white man I ever came across. That job, as were most experiences at 18, was an eye-opening affair. Pax vobiscum.

Arthur Sharon

Et cum spiritu tuo.

GK

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I, like one of your recent correspondents, am also a loyal Republican listener. You remind me of what I wish I could be against if we ever get back to some civil sanity. You know, like the guys who sit around drinking coffee at the Chatterbox who manage to argue about politics and still manage to work and go to church together. Although a recovering CPA, English major is my spirit animal, so I have to point out that Mark H. misspelled either ketchup or catsup in his letter to you. And while we’re at it, can you weigh in on vocal fry and uptalking? It was tolerable when it was isolated to Valley girls and Australians, but it’s gone epidemic.

Mike

Vocal fry and uptalking have not gone epidemic (or viral) among the people I know or come in contact with. We don’t growl and we only use rising inflection when asking a question. I think you and I need to talk, Mike.

GK

Mr. Keillor,

I know that your first reaction is to not want to come to Texas because of what has happened. I am a conservative who believes that all people have a right to go where they wish and will respect your decision to avoid Texas but is this the answer? I believe all voices must be heard because this keeps happening. I for one would be glad if you came and used your unique ability to cover all spectrums of everyday life. You can enrich us, but if you avoid us, then alone we must go. Thank you for listening. 

Joe Lamer

You’re welcome.

GK

Re: Who vs. Whom (should it be Dr. Whom?) I’m equally at a loss. Before COVID, I regularly visited the Fogler Library at nearby Univ. of Maine on Tuesday mornings whether or not there was a chemistry seminar. One lovely summer morning, the librarian at the reference desk was a young student who was wearing a T-shirt that had a cartoon of a scholarly looking, bespectacled owl with the caption, “Whom?” I burst out laughing and complimented her on her choice of shirt. She answered that she was an English major. How appropriate for a reference librarian who could get “Who” as a question.

Bob Buntrock

Orono, Maine

GK,

I appreciated your column about the tragic shooting in Uvalde. For many of us, the recent spate of gun violence in our country stands as a sobering contradiction to the ideals and aspirations of what makes for a great nation. It seems we are being shocked out of our tranquil lives more frequently these days to recognize that America is slowly imploding internally. Why worry about China or inflation when half the country fears a liberal conspiracy to replace white people and are clinging to their guns in order to defend themselves from creeping socialism, degenerate immigrants, racist history teaching, and baby-killing mothers. Meanwhile, half of our national civic leaders, like Ted Cruz, want to arm school teachers so they safely teach the three Rs. In contrast to our gun-addicted nation, I read that the Canadians have responded to our mass shootings by implementing stricter gun policies in their land. You may want to return to Minnesota to be closer to the Canadian border when the insurrectionists and the evangelical Christians take over this country. 

Bert Swift

Cut and Shoot, Texas

I never heard of Cut and Shoot until you wrote and now I google it and find it’s a town of a thousand not far from Houston. As for stricter gun laws, it seems to me that the Supreme Court may soon rule that a state has no right to limit the unlimited rights granted by the Second Amendment. In our current situation, we may find the country radically changed by four men and a woman with lifetime appointments, a sort of autocratic regency, and if so, we’ll just have to live with it. Minnesota is no exception. Friends in Minneapolis are hearing gunfire these days in neighborhoods where it never was heard before. So some neighborhoods are hiring off-duty police to patrol their streets. This seems like a step backward, but I’m living on the 12th floor and if I stay in and keep the shades pulled, I should be okay.

GK

Dear Garrison,

Only being halfway through your beautiful novel Boom Town, I felt I needed to write you anyway. There are so many beautiful, eloquent words and thoughts that this is one of your most memorable novels yet. It’s spiritual, compassionate, thoughtful, and simply wonderful. What’s beautiful is when people are thoughtless, you rise above them in compassion and understanding and do so in a humorous way. BUT you do so with humility and without an ounce of ego. Your compassion and ability to zero in on what makes people tick, how they think, is truly amazing.

I love your books and late at night I laugh and laugh while my husband sleeps and the bed shakes so much I fear I’ll wake him up. During the day I read him passages. For example, you mentioned boring Plainview. That’s where he was raised, and he thought it was hilarious because it’s true.

Thank you for your beautiful (and, may I add, signed) novel. I truly love it.

Mary Kanz

Mary, this is the sort of letter every author dreams of reading and one is all a person needs. So I shall start on a new novel, which is called OLD FRIENDS and is set in Lake Wobegon and it’s based on the idea that “There are no answers, only stories.” When you’ve known people for 30, 40, 50, 60 years, you have a common history and language, you know each other’s secrets, and your disagreements are unimportant. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, what old friends argue about is whether it was Mr. Bauser’s ice-fishing shack that Bruno the fishing dog burned down or was it someone else’s. I’m only a few thousand words into it but so far I like it.

GK

Dear Garrison,

Thank you and Bravo! for your column today on Uvalde. 

I like all your stuff, but lately the political columns mean the most to me. I hope you will write sometime soon about the Constitution and its relation to democracy. We all know that the Founders were afraid of mob rule and put checks and balances into the Constitution to prevent it, but it seems to me that currently there are two more checks beloved of Originalists that are not actually in there — the filibuster and all-powerful political parties — and these two unconstitutional additions have brought us to gridlock.

Such are my thoughts, but I believe yours would be more interesting.

Mark Speyer

New York

Mark, I look to you to elucidate this. I am turning away from politics and starting a new career as an octogenarian stand-up comic. Wish me well.

GK

I’m not a member of the NRA. I don’t own a gun and never have. I only fired a gun in mandatory ROTC 54 years ago. I am a fan of yours, not a troll. I assume your error was in good faith. I suspect that much of the AR-15’s allure is its military appearance.

An AR-15 is not an automatic weapon. It does not “spray a great deal of lead and kill as many people as possible.” It is semi-automatic, which (I believe) means that it ejects the spent cartridge and chambers a new bullet, discharge of which requires a separate trigger squeeze. There probably are more than 10 million AR-15s in circulation in the U.S. (You can google it and get widely varying estimates.) Those surely are not all owned by mass-murders-in-waiting. Semi-automatics are widely used in hunting sports.

I have heard that AR-15s are more easily converted (illegally) to fully-automatic than are most or all other semi-automatic weapons, but I don’t know if that’s true.

Please take heed to the facts.

Roger Bennett

Thanks for the note. I’m a writer sitting at a table writing on a laptop that I don’t really understand, nor am I good with plumbing or electricity and changing oil in a car is a challenge for me and my knowledge of firearms is minimal, so I have no reason to doubt you. But I’m still thinking about the little girl lying on the floor of room 112 in Robb Elementary surrounded by dead classmates who called 911 and said, “Send the police now, please” and whose funeral was this week.

GK