Post to the Host

Comments from the week of 11.14.21

Mr. Keillor,

I hope this doesn’t sound too goody-two-shoes but one thing I enjoy about your writing is the absence of profanity. More and more, especially among humorous writers, I come across gratuitous use of street language that feels like somebody took a swing at me. I’m not arguing for sanitizing or bowdlerizing but it just strikes me as trashy when the writer tosses in curse words or obscenities. To what do you attribute this restraint on your part?

Paul Rasmussen, Belle Harbor

My parents, of course. “Goodness gracious” was as close as my mother came to profanity. Late in life, I think she said, “Oh man.” Now our daily life is studded with profanity and obscenity and the result is desensitization and immunity, it’s no more shocking than dog barks, whereas the words “Goodness gracious” still has (for me) a bite to it, I can feel my mother’s dismay and disbelief, which now I feel, seeing the forces of individual narcissism take arms against the idea of social responsibility and argue that the state has no right to tell you to get vaccinated or wear a mask or to drive at a safe speed or send your kids to school — those who hope to make a world in which children can be sent off to the factories to work a 16-hour day for 50 cents an hour and forget about measles shots or the purity of food and drugs. But you didn’t ask me about that so forget that I said it.

GK

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Garrison:

Responding to your climate change story, I’d like to introduce an overlooked option to cut emissions by buying less fossil-dominated energy:

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-11-09/climate-math/ 

This hasn’t made the discussion because it’s promoted by an unknown guy in Corvallis: perhaps you can put some light on this senior citizen’s effort to offset the dismal legacy of his generation.

Rick Barnett

Thanks for the link. A very sensible proposal for conserving energy by launching a massive program to seal homes and avoid thermal leakage. Too bad it didn’t make it into the infrastructure bill just passed by Congress.

GK

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GK,

A car that runs on urine. Brilliant! Get Bill Gates on this right away!

Best,

Cliff Adams

Thanks. I thought of it when a friend said, “You’re in journalism.” My mind leaped.

GK

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GK,

Those of us who agree with Senator Josh Hawley that American manhood is under attack by elitist cultural liberal pinheads really need your help. It’s clear to many of us that the future of this country depends on voices like yours who can elevate the virtues of rugged Midwestern masculinity and self-reliance. We know you are a reluctant patriot, but please offer some encouragement for us guys to reverse today’s trend towards giving pushy women more power and indulging wimpy men who no longer want to wear the pants in their families. As Senator Hawley has pointed out recently, this nation needs a “revival of strong and healthy manhood” to keep men from “withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography and video games.” You have the literary ability to be our point-man in this effort to save American manhood.

Carl Magnusson, Pasadena, Texas 

You’ve written a masterful post, Carl, and I’ve read it twice and can’t decide if this is satire or the real thing. Well done.

GK

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GK, 

You said you don’t publish the complimentary letters, so I’ll be quick and crass. 

OK, I can’t. 

An old professor and I have read TWA for over twenty years. We send emails commenting about once a week, but we always know the other is reading. It’s been very nice. We’re both Church of Christers, so you’ve always had us with the a cappella. 

We both went through very dark times with a child who went ahead unexpectedly. Discussing and reading your poems every day provided us with sustenance, meaning, perspective … a relational grist to beat back the silent dark. Thank you. 

I wrote this poem for him. He really does this. I doubt any of this would have happened without TWA. Just wanted you to know. 

He Reads Poetry to His Wife 
 
each night— 
taking home treasures to say 
like flower bouquets 
and tossing them at her feet. 
When babies come 
and spring blooms 
he has a verse adept—
and in coldest winter 
through the darkest time 
when every line wept. 
No—he doesn’t ask her to read a poem. 
They sit down or prop up 
and he inflects 
and pauses 
and waits 
and whispers 
warm rhyme. 
Savoring the words as one 
somehow sets free— 
she never asks 
“Do you love me?”

Sincerely, 

Nathan Dahlstrom, Lubbock, TX 

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

I am writing from Germany (so please excuse any mistakes I might make).

It was at the University of Gottingen where I came to know the News from Lake Wobegon thanks to a professor of American literature. Through the internet, CDs, and books, I have been following the news from that small town that I (and many of my fellow students at the time) love.

Mr. Keillor,

a haiku

Me too hit you hard
were a sacrificial lamb
You should go TikTok 

I’ve loved PHC since I started listening in the 1970s. I miss you. I recently found TikTok and I think it would be the perfect medium for you. Even if you just release old stories, TikTok was made for you.

Peace and love,
John

You’ve intrigued me, John, and now I’ll have to consult with my daughter and the few twentysomethings I know to see what they think. I am only a writer, not an Influencer, and so the Web is all strange and interesting to me. I sit and write at a laptop computer and then print out the pages on paper, double-spaced, and make revisions with a pen, crossing out, writing in the margins. I love writing more than ever and I care less and less about what happens to it afterward. I seem to be happier than I ever was in my early years, or middle years, and I’m grateful for that and take things day by day, but I’ll ask around among the young and see what they say about TikTok.

GK

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I live in the U.P. of Michigan, and the area I live in is in northern Marquette County. Our moose herd is a healthy growing bunch of Bullwinkles. I saw your one-man show at the Rozsa Center in Houghton many years ago. Your describing how we used to hang laundry on a clothesline outside to dry, especially to the young kids in the audience, was hysterical. We listened to your show every Saturday night — it hasn’t been the same. Take care, and our best to you (including the close to 700 of my moose neighbors).

Ed Wales 

As a Minnesotan, I know Houghton as the home of Michigan Tech whose hockey team used to gang up on our Gophers, but I am all over that now, no hard feelings. I hope you walk carefully among the tall pines and do not intersect with any moose. If a Wales were to be attacked by moose, it would likely find its way into the New York Times, and they’d have fun with it, but I’d feel bad. As for the clotheslines, I am of the last generation to remember them. I remember how, in winter, the sheets and towels would freeze, and we’d carry them into the house like lumber to thaw. I suppose I should put this in a book somehow, lest it be forgotten.

GK

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Dear Garrison Keillor,

I read the Writer’s Almanac every day, but I can’t afford to send you any money. I am 90 years old and haven’t much, while I still like to cook beans and rice and make rum balls for Christmas.

I have a big favor to ask you. Surely you have heard that the children are dying of starvation in Afghanistan, and they don’t have warm homes either. Winter is coming in Kabul. You may have seen the intrepid journalist Jane Ferguson, who is there now, after a brief evacuation spell in Doha. She must have a photographer friend who follows her talking to the mothers holding their emaciated babies. One very good writer, Gwynne Dyer, writes in my local paper, the Bangor Daily News, telling us that Afghan money is held in U.S. banks, and our good Christian president won’t release the money because of the new foreign policy that we are so glad he has announced. It seems, however, that a feature of it substitutes something like sanctions instead of war-making, and his minions will not release the money because the Taliban is bad.

Please, please, Mr. Keillor, you can tell your eager and wide-reading public about this evil. It is utterly heart-rending. Can’t we take a bet on the Taliban government that they may want to buy all the food available in the world to feed their children, and the mothers, too?

Carmen Lavertu living in Thomaston, Maine, in a warm house.

Thanks for expressing your view, Carmen. I haven’t been keeping track of affairs in Afghanistan and don’t think it would serve any useful purpose for me to start agonizing about it. I’m a few years behind you and life seems to get smaller as I head for 80. I make a life with my near and dear, I donate to the Holy Apostles soup kitchen downtown, which is feeding the hungry of New York, I plunk my donations to Episcopal Relief, I hand out money to panhandlers, I patronize restaurants that donate leftover food to food shelves, I sit in my warm apartment and write, I do this, I do that, and I hope the Taliban shows some mercy to its own people.

GK

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Good morning, Mr. Keillor.

I was hoping you could help settle two bets. My friends and I were wondering if, when you delivered your monologues on the PHC on the radio, you spoke all of them from memory, or if you read them from notes or teleprompters?? (My money was on notes.)

Secondly, I bet you would be too busy to respond to this message. My friends said a man of your indisputable probity would most certainly get back to us.

Thanks for your time. Hope all is well. And I don’t mind if you lie to settle the bets in my favor.

Sean, Hershey, Pa.

Sean, I didn’t read the News from Lake Wobegon for fear it would sound read and I didn’t memorize it because I’m not an actor and couldn’t make it sound natural. So I wrote the monologue out — five pages, single-spaced, on Friday and looked at it Saturday morning and winged it and it sounded better that way and usually I remembered the essential parts and forgot the lit’ry stuff. I recommend this if you’re asked to give a speech. Don’t read it off a lectern. Write it, make it organized and clear, look at it before you speak, and then stick your hands in your pockets and talk to the crowd. It really works. What was the second question? I forget.

GK

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

After having enjoyed your radio show for years, and the Lake Wobegon books, I was pleased to receive from a friend the link to The Column, and now read that regularly, and with interest.

I seldom feel strongly enough about politics or others’ opinions and thoughts to consider posting to the host but am compelled now to address your recent comment: “‘Woke’ was an arrogant term never used by mature people except ironically.”

Coincidentally, this was in a column a few weeks ago, by Michael Harriot. 

Fourscore and three years ago, Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter—a self-titled “musicianer” who was heralded as a “Bad Nigger” who “makes good minstrel” by Life magazine—explained how he came to create one of the first racism carols. Named after nine young Black men who had been falsely accused of raping two white women, “Scottsboro Boys“ was a protest and a warning to Black people about the evil that awaited anyone who dared traverse the borders of Alabama. At the end of the song, he told the story of meeting two of the wrongly convicted men and—just before the recording faded into silence—the legendary singer coined a phrase that would become a clarion call to Black America until white people discovered it eight decades later.

“I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go down through there,” Lead Belly said of Alabama. “Just stay woke. Keep your eyes open.”

You can read the full article here.

Thank you for years of delight.

Sincerely,

C.B.

I don’t believe the young progressives who popularized “woke” ever heard of Lead Belly or listened to that recording. I stand by what I said. By “woke” he meant to be wary, beware, and the whites who used the term had nothing to fear. They used it as a mark of superior awareness. I think we’re past that now. In San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland, we’ve seen the damage that Wokers can work.

GK

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Dear GK,

You mentioned “the school bully” and my mind flew back fifty years to my own experiences. You were lucky if there were only one. My high school had a complicated hierarchy of bullies. As a naive, polite farm boy, it was difficult to negotiate, trying to stay invisible. I did get a beating by the supreme bully, though. And years later, he suffered a chronic back pain disability. Not that there is any connection.

These days, the adult bullies have been unleashed by an atmosphere of political idiocy. Men display foul language on banners in their yards, bumper stickers, and huge flags on their pickup trucks. It is ugly out there. Men openly display their racism, misogyny, and hateful natures. One need only look to the events prior to, during, and after the event of January 6, 2021 to see this uprising of bullies.

It’s sad. 

Stay well, stay safe,
Verl Wisehart

I was a better coward than you, my friend, and I learned invisibility so well that I made a career out of it on the radio. The one bully who took an interest in me was electrocuted in his late twenties when he went to fix a water pump and neglected to turn the power off. Now I go to class reunions and mingle with some of the hoods and we’re just a bunch of friendly old guys commiserating. Old age solves the problem.

GK

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Sir:

Those creatures with LARGE brains tend to regard those creatures with SMALL brains as inferior or unimportant. Yet, without worms, there would be no soil. Without soil, there would be no growing things. Without growing things, there would be nothing for me to eat. And without eating, there would be no ME!

Arrogance comes in many forms, but gratitude comes in just one. Be grateful for EVERYTHING! The universe has seen fit to include you as part of this bountiful, terrible, delightful, wonderful world.

Give thanks. Be grateful.

Steve Cavin

Thank you, sir. My wife goes out walking in New York and sometimes, to her horror, sees a rat. Today, to her disgust, she saw a dead one. I suppose I should tell her about the useful work rats perform but I don’t think I’m going to get far and when it comes to gratitude for snakes, that’s hopeless. But I appreciate your thoughts about worms.

GK

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Mr. Keillor:

In a recent column, you mentioned waking up at night and reviewing your regrets and having a hard time getting back to sleep. I have the very same experience. Of course, it’s none of my business, but you brought up the subject in the column, so I venture to ask you: what sort of regrets do you agonize over?

Melissa, Minneapolis

“Agonize” is too strong, Melissa. It doesn’t come close to agony. I am a very contented man, more so now than back in the busy years of what you could call my “prime” and that’s why I recommend old age to everyone I know. But I do lie awake and remember my sins — the lack of generosity to my first wife, a general selfishness, separations badly handled, foolish real-estate decisions, the years I spent trying to write for The New Yorker, neglect of elderly relatives in their last years, giving up the show in 2016, and the bad decision I made in 2017 when a man and woman, former freelance employees, accused me of misconduct and demanded a million dollars and anonymity. I decided to keep a low profile. I regret that I didn’t invite reporters over to the house and let them read all my emails and answer all their questions. Secrecy is a terrible idea. It’s taken as an admission of guilt and it makes for a permanent wound. So this rattles around in my head and then I listen to my wife breathing next to me and I remember the lucky day in the spring of 1992 when we met. A seafood restaurant on 90th and Broadway. A three-hour lunch. I think of our daughter and the sound of her laughter. I go to sleep on that and then it’s morning and I sit down and write.

GK