Homegrown Democrat

by Garrison Keillor

  We Democrats are at our worst when we lose touch with our principles—the protection of the powerless, paying attention to real consequences in the lives of real people and not flying on slogans or glib phrases—and we try to emulate Republicans as we did in signing onto the “war” on drugs that has ruined so many young lives. In our nation’s capital, nearly 50% of black men between 18 and 35 are either in prison or on probation or parole—nationally, it’s a human disaster: 6.6 million Americans in prison, nearly half of whom are black men. The cruelty of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 is stark indeed, and of sentencing guidelines that impose mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug possession—guidelines in the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that sailed through Congress without benefit of public hearings, drafted before an election by Democrats afraid to be labeled “soft on drugs”—and so a marijuana grower can land in prison for life without parole while a murderer might be in for eight years: no rational person can defend this, it is a Dostoevskian nightmare and it exists only because politicians fled in the face of danger. That includes Bill Clinton, under whose administration the prosecution of Americans for marijuana went up hugely so that now there are more folks in prison for marijuana than for violent crimes. More than for manslaughter or rape. This only makes sense in the fantasy world of Washington, where perception counts for more than reality. To an old Democrat, who takes a ground view of politics—What is the actual effect of this action on the lives of real people?—it is a foul tragedy that makes you feel guilty about enjoying your freedom. Here I am, drinking coffee in a café in St. Paul and tolerating this shameful savagery in our midst. If the State cuts off your right hand with a meat cleaver on my account and I don’t object, then it is my cleaver and my fingerprints on it. I don’t dare visit Sandstone Federal Prison for fear of what I’d see there. People who chose marijuana, a more benign drug than alcohol, and got caught in the religious war that we Democrats in a weak moment signed on to. God help us if we form alliance with such bullies as would destroy a kid’s life for raising cannabis plants.

  Nonetheless, for all I can say against Democrats, we are the party that upholds the generous spirit even when we ourselves are mean. We are the party that respects the individual, believing that each American is complicated, poetic, full of mystery and genius, capable of profound love, also capable of meanness, which makes it important for politics to be charitable lest we unleash the mob. This is never far away, the crowds with torches howling for the Jews, or blacks, or Mormons, or Japanese.

  I became a Democrat because I was eager and hopeful, not because I was angry. Anger makes for amusing radio shows but it’s got a short shelf life. It’s a crummy way to live. Your mother was right: forgive and forget. Live in the present and you’ll be happier. Your old bachelor uncle Art who camps in his easy chair grumbling about the New Deal and how the Depression was a hoax and anybody who wanted to work could get a job but no, the gummint came in with its WPA (We Poke Along) to reward the indolent, and Pearl Harbor was arranged by that drunken womanizer Roosevelt to get us into the war and we shouldn’t have been fighting Hitler anyway, Stalin was the real enemy, which you wouldn’t know from reading the papers because they’re all owned by Jews—you wouldn’t want this dear man to be put in charge of anything that matters. Let him wave a flag at the Fourth of July parade, but don’t let him give a speech and embarrass your kids. And don’t put him in charge of the lunch: leave that to people who can run things. In Minnesota we had an angry skinhead governor named Jesse (The Body) Ventura who slouched into office on 37% of the vote and turned out to be an opportunist whose first act in office was to sell the book rights. He was a troubled soul, thin-skinned, a growler and ranter and snit thrower. After four years of him it was a relief to go back to politics as usual, where soft-spoken people with ordinary chest sizes sit down and negotiate and get the job done. He was a professional wrestler, used to working within a simple story structure, but politics isn’t a story, it’s a process. It’s not about confrontation and threat and revenge and triumph. It’s mostly about civility. Most men and women in politics are there because they genuinely care about people and want to do good things in their behalf. Most people who ever saw it up close came away impressed.

  WHAT DO-GOODER DEMOCRATS HAVE DONE FOR YOU

  Civil Rights. In 1960, when I entered college, there was a whole large swath of America where white people and black people had to be careful how they mingled and what they said to each other. Colored passengers sat in the rear and white passengers in the front in cities all across the South. The drinking fountains, the schools, the churches, the polling places, American apartheid evident everywhere. People marched in the streets to claim the right to vote and faced state troopers who stormed them with clubs and tear gas. And when the marchers sang “We Shall Overcome,” simple decency told you to sing with them. At the Democratic National Convention of 1948, Hubert Humphrey had spoken out for civil rights and provoked Strom Thurmond, the segregationist and father of a child by a young black servant of his family, to walk out and take a hike to the Republican Party where he truly belonged.

  Jimmy Carter was prospering in Plains, Georgia, and owned a fertilizer plant and a peanut shellery and warehouses, and then the White Citizens Council pressured him to join their crusade and boycotted him when he refused, which stuck in his craw and got him interested in running for governor. He didn’t like to be pushed around by arrogant guys who poke a finger in your sternum and tell you what to think. Like the colonial ancestors who got pushed and poked by the royal governors and then started to poke back.

  The Sixties was a watershed time for Republicans: they seized a great political opportunity and shoved Abraham Lincoln into the closet and took up Stephen Douglas’s flag of states’ rights (“I care more for the great principle of self-government . . . and the great inalienable rights of white men . . . than I do for all the Negroes in Christendom”), which carried the Republicans to power in one national election after another. What exactly it is that Republicans have done for the South other than wave the flag and the Bible, I don’t quite fathom.

  Girls with Ponytails. A girl today can look forward to a life of such opportunity as her old grandmother wouldn’t have dared imagine back in 1960. Betty Friedan did her part along with other big brassy women, the 1963 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women recognized the fact of sex discrimination, and in 1972, Congress passed Title IX legislation making it illegal to discriminate against women in employment and in education, including sports, and from this came the legions of lean girls with ponytails tearing around the basketball courts and soccer fields of America. The self-confidence and discipline and physical joy of sports were not so available to the girls I went to high school with. Girls who loved games beyond puberty were thought to be odd, mannish, unattractive. Today, you see dads in the bleachers who jump up and cheer their daughters more fervently than dads ever dared to cheer their sons, with great depths of feeling, Republican or Democrat—American dads have become feminists in behalf of their daughters, a tidal change for which you should thank the Democratic Party, like it or not. Girls who aren’t feminists have risen on the same tide as girls who are, the southern Baptist confederate Republican girls of Charlotte and Birmingham have risen along with the leftist granola girls of Cambridge and Berkeley. The women who agitated for sexual equality and the men who listened to them first were Democrats. Republicans would have been content to have the ladies make lunch and be winsome and deferential. Thanks to Democrats, your daughter can think about going to medical school or pushing off into the corporate shark tank or choice C or D or E, and the world seems more normal with women circulating freely in it. Young women today don’t tiptoe around men or avert their eyes like vestal virgins; they speak up and expect to be heard. Men and women mingle more or less unself-consciously as equals and a man who cannot deal with this is considered definitely weird.

  Clean Air. No-smoking laws: a major intrusion by do-gooders into people’s lives, and
pity the poor office workers huddled in doorways smoking, but almost everyone sees it as a step forward, away from the smoky classrooms and offices of my youth, and a kindness to us all. I smoked Luckies and Pall Malls, three packs a day for twenty years, and quit before the posse arrived, a good thing because I would have hated being sent outdoors to smoke, but in the end, I would have gone, grousing and complaining, and eventually quit. They say you can’t legislate behavior, and maybe you can’t, but you sure can give it a push in the right direction. Or so Democrats believe.

  Geezerhood. If we’re lucky, we get old, and there is more dignity in old age today, thanks to Medicare. Ask my mother: she’s 88 and lives in her old home among her mementos, putting one foot ahead of the other, stubbornly independent, whereas her father languished in a nursing home in his old age and saw his savings dribble away and died at 73. She has arthritis and various other ailments, and life is diminished on account of them—she doesn’t drive a car or garden (except for the plants on her deck) or whomp up big dinners and she takes great care navigating a snowy sidewalk—but life is pretty good. She sits in her old living room and looks out at the lawn that was a cornfield when Dad dug the basement in 1947 and built the house board by board and planted spindly trees that grew into a grove of giants, where her six little kids tore around and where a solid double off the bat of cousin Don smashed the picture window in the summer of 1954. Fifty Christmas trees have stood in that corner of the living room. Dozens of children in graduation gowns were photographed in this room. Grandbabies were brought here to be adored. Dad died in the downstairs bedroom. And one large cornerstone in her life is Medicare, which, for the grand sum of $58.70 a month, gives her quick access to physicians, a visit to the emergency room if need be, even a trip to the Mayo Clinic to see why she is feeling so fatigued these days. She ran up about $5,000 in medical bills last year of which she paid only $146.

  I would gladly pay her bills but then she’d need to involve me in her decisions and would lose some of her privacy, a precious thing to my mother, who went through a rough time fighting off colon cancer and chose not to say much about it. If I were her benefactor, she would feel she was a burden. It is so much simpler and better for everyone to simply say: old people have a right to health care and that’s that.

  Medicare is the creation of Democrats and it has changed old age. If you’re old, you aren’t expected to accept pain and misery as your cross to bear and sit quietly by the window and sink uncomplaining into the dark. You’re allowed to feel you can totter off to a clinic and claim the attention of a doctor and recite your complaints and hope to feel better. “I have trouble breathing. My knees hurt.” Well, let’s have a look. If you’re 90 and really hoping for five more good years, we’ll do what we can for you. Maybe you can have ten. If you’re depressed, ask your doctor about drugs, and if you need help to function sexually, ask about that. Even if you’re 80. This is new. Medicare says that even though you’re not working and may need special help with the ordinary business of life, nonetheless you have value in this society. This is a Democratic idea. Be a howling right-winger if it gives you pleasure, but nonetheless milk comes from cows and Medicare comes from Democrats.

  Pregnant Teens. Legal abortion is due to Roe v. Wade, not to Democrats, but we have defended it, even those of us with moral reservations about it. As the teen pregnancy rate declines and the abortion rate along with it, we can see the day approaching when this angry issue recedes, and we pro-choice Democrats can reconcile with our natural allies in the Catholic Church. The Church is morally offended by abortion and it is also offended by poverty and social injustice in ways that Republicans never could be: to oppose abortion, as they do, and also promote low wages and harass welfare mothers and hack away at public services—this is moral dishonesty that staggers the mind. This is stepping on the drowning woman’s hand as she grabs onto the gunwale.

  As long as we have pregnant girls of 12 and 13 and 14, there will be abortion. For them, and for others, the prospect of parenthood is grim beyond words. A 13-year-old girl is too young to be a mother, and if she is living in poverty with an angry drug-addled mother of her own, she doesn’t stand much chance of bringing up a healthy child and having any decent life herself. So, rather than leave her to suffer the consequences of her behavior, we allow the drastic and merciful step of abortion of the embryo. The pro-lifers who demonstrate at Planned Parenthood clinics and hold up pictures of bloody fetuses should rather hold up signs with the number of hours per week they’re volunteering for child care, and then we’d take them more seriously.

  We live in a culture that so exploits sexuality that little kids grow up in a red-light district, even suburban and small town kids. Kids get wired early on into sexual roles, girls of 9 and 10 dress like streetwalkers, and it isn’t left-wing academics who are selling this to them, it is corporate America, and it’s the symbiotic link between puritans and pornographers (similar to that between prohibitionists and bootleggers) that makes the game go round. Janet Jackson’s right tit, exposed on national TV at the Super Bowl, was the talk of the nation, more in bemusement—after all, the woman had products to promote—but the usual voices of shock and dismay were raised, thus raising the promotional value. Why do Republicans not get this? Their sulfurous views about sex, their obsession over it make the prize more attractive, and so, in the United States, girls under 15 are at least five times more likely to get pregnant than girls the same age in Old Europe where sex is viewed as an ordinary part of life and nothing to huff and puff about. A little secularism might help. If your daughter were 15 and pregnant, scared to death, weeping, angry at herself, embarrassed, you would do whatever you had to do to do right by her. You would not send her to the Rev. Falwell. You would not throw her to the winds to drift into depression and despair and deliver her child in a toilet and leave it in a Dumpster to die. And you wouldn’t want anybody else’s daughter to drift that way either.

  Oddballs. Mental illness is not the shameful secret it used to be—if you suffer from depression, if you’re alcoholic, if you have an autistic child, you can look other people in the eye and say so and expect them to be decent about it. You just say, “I’m bipolar,” or “My son is schizophrenic,” or “My daughter has apraxia,” and that is that. “Oh,” they say, and you talk about it, or you don’t, and life goes on. This can’t be chalked up to Democrats, but it should be on the list of civilities. Yes, the country has swung too far toward confessionalism, but mental illness needs to be named and acknowledged so it can be accepted and put in its proper place and life can go on. I often think of Lonnie and Ronnie and Dorby who went to grade school with me, and who were different, slower, more lumpish—we didn’t know what was wrong, nobody said, we weren’t supposed to ask—and then, somewhere in junior high school, they simply vanished. Where did they go? What was their problem? Nobody would say it out loud. Things are different now.

  Cops. Law enforcement is better. Way better. Cops are more likely to be trained professionals and not bullies in a uniform. They look more like us and less like a Moose lodge. Those old bull elephants are gone who liked to swagger up to a carful of teenagers and make them get out and poke them in the chests and threaten them. The Iowa state patrolman who pulled me over late one night years ago, told me to get out and lie facedown on the shoulder of the road while he radioed my license plate number to headquarters, and twenty minutes later told me to get up and get the hell out. My offense—I knew it and he knew that I knew it—was that I had long hair. That sort of cop is gone. In St. Paul, if your car has been broken into, you get prompt service: the officer comes to your door, fills out the forms, gives you some tips on prevention, and gives you a cop’s view of what’s going on in the neighborhood these days. You feel well served. The result is greater respect for the law, which is just common sense: that’s our badge on their chests, our lives and property that hang in the balance. Republicans have a dark urge to privatize the police, which is yet one more of their disastrous ideas: law
enforcement is not a business, it is a calling, a pure public service. Sensible Democrats know this.

  Tolerance. Make fun of p.c. to your heart’s content, but there is less outright cruelty toward the vulnerable in everyday life. All the ramps that got carved into curbs at intersections, according to federal specs in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, for people in wheelchairs, (also a boon to parents pushing strollers and kids on bikes): that’s new, a little monument to sensitivity. The ADA, like the gay rights movement, was built on the women’s movement, which was built on the civil rights movement which gave us the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a large moment in American history. In my youth, you heard respectable men tell jokes about Hebes and Yids and coons and niggers, and then came the Montgomery bus boycott and Greensboro and the first sit-in, February 1, 1960, and things changed. Not everything, but some things. Decent people don’t wink at racism anymore. The country is more tolerant. Gay men and women are neighbors, friends, relatives. When I was a kid, our Boy Scout troop sent a basketball team to play a black team at Phyllis Wheatley settlement house in north Minneapolis, and it was rather dramatic to us Anoka kids. They were Negroes. All of them. Black. It was something of a Large Gesture of Brotherhood on our part. Today it would just be fun.