Yet as I began to read the article on Keillor’s firing, a giant red flag sprang up almost immediately: MPR was not making public why they had fired Keillor, save that they had done so for “sexual misconduct,” which left only the explanation given by Keillor himself.
#GARRISON KEILLOR PROFESSIONAL#
He was the face of a kind, humble, rural liberalism a liberalism, I should add, that is far too rare in American political discourse today.Ī sense of dread set in, then, when I first saw the headline of an article delivering the news of Garrison Keillor’s firing from Minnesota Public Radio for “sexual misconduct.” So many men once believed by the general public to be professional and decent have, in recent weeks, been exposed as predatory sleazeballs, and while a few of the exposed didn’t shock me in the slightest (Roy Moore, Bill O’Reilly), quite a few did (Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer), and thus I was fully prepared to find the worst when it came to the dismissal of one of my admired authors. He is a warm old man with a tender voice who - up until recently - had found his life’s purpose in public radio broadcasting and in writing. In short, while Garrison Keillor isn’t necessarily one I would consider an “intellectual influence,” his work has always managed to bring a smile to my face, as it no doubt has done for millions of other people. It was democracy as a story told by a village elder near a fire, rather than a lecture delivered by an overly-polished plastic hack.
But nevertheless, Homegrown Democrat was the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” It was a book that was able to present a set of political ideas not as a set of political ideas, but as a deeply personal reminiscence of community and citizenship.
My transition from libertarianism to liberalism was more of a journey than just one book or thinker. Thus, when reading Lake Wobegon Days - Keillor’s tales of a fictional small Minnesota town and its quirky inhabitants - I felt like the aging author had bottled in a really wonderful way the charms and eccentricities of a nation as it was decades ago, while at the same time steering clear of the sunshine-and-roses territory of Propagandaville.īut it was the second work of Keillor’s that I read, his nonfiction Homegrown Democrat, which proved to have the greatest impact, convincing me to ditch my naive and juvenile libertarianism for a practical and caring liberalism that stressed a balance between heart and mind. Cultural nostalgia, for me, is not about glossing over a civilization’s injustices, but about finding and momentarily amplifying a civilization’s redeeming aspects (a role, by the way, which nostalgia also plays when it comes to our personal histories). While the trend among elites in the United States - especially intellectual elites - has been to declare nostalgia for America’s past ignorant, misguided, and even harmful, I have always found these declarations to be sanctimonious, self-flagellating, and frankly more than a tad bit annoying.
I first discovered Garrison Keillor at a used bookstore in 2014, when I bought his novel Lake Wobegon Days a story which I had been drawn to primarily because of how big a sucker I am for American nostalgia.
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