Homegrown Democrat

by Garrison Keillor

  Good manners are democratic. Your mother taught you to be kind to all whom you meet, everyone matters, don’t look down your nose at the sales clerk, don’t jerk the cleaning lady around. When I run into Minnesotans in foreign places, I notice their good manners, which aren’t about forks or the intricacies of protocol but about kindness and the ability to see beyond yourself. They don’t bitch about the weather or the service or the food or the foreignness, they look on the bright side.

  Your mother didn’t raise you to be a jerk who sucks up to power and treats the help like dirt. Go ahead and prosper, but mind your manners. And don’t pick on the vulnerable. You go backstage after the Lake Wobegon High School production of My Fair Lady in which your niece played Eliza like a fence post all night and there she is, trembling, shaken, ashen-faced, and you say, “It was good, Lindsey. You really connected with that audience, it had so much resonance and honesty.” So she doesn’t torture herself over this debacle. So she has no talent—so what? No need to face the whole truth all at once.

  Sports is a democratic world: everyone sees the ball game for himself and snaps his own mental picture of the runner sliding home, safe or out, and your outrage at the ump for a lousy call is genuine. The corporate sky box is the worst place to sit; you miss the camaraderie of the bleachers and the acerbic wit of young men drinking beer. A player earning $14 million a year doesn’t bother us at all. He didn’t land the job because he’s the owner’s nephew, he got it because he could cover the shortstop position and hit the curve ball, and it’s baseball that we pay to go see so why shouldn’t talent be rewarded? But if he bobbles an easy grounder or takes a called third strike down the middle of the plate, the bleachers will have plenty to say to him.

  I sit in the ballpark and think of young men on the troopships sailing the Atlantic to North Africa and Sicily and Normandy, afraid of death and yet believing in their own survival. They planned to escape death and return home to live the life that we live now, loose and easy, watching the ball game on a June night, eating a bratwurst slathered with mustard. Right up to the moment of their death, they dreamed of this good life, the outfielders poised in the twilight, the little kids tearing around under the stands, the pitcher peering in at the catcher and going into his stretch, checking the runner at first—a pure democracy: all batters get three strikes, the strike zone the same for everyone, also the base paths and fences.

  When the old white CEO gets in a cab at the airport, if he wants to converse with the young black cabdriver, sports is what they can talk about. Not their summer vacation plans, not cars, not homes, not politics. Basketball.

  Then there is the democracy of jokes. Telling a joke right is a skill, like hammering a nail, and anyone can learn it. The man walks into the bar with a handful of dog turds and says to the bartender, “Hey, look what I almost stepped in!” Anybody can tell that joke. You join a group of strangers in a bar and listen to their jokes and after an appropriate length of time, you tell yours. The reason men fart more than women is that women don’t keep their mouths shut long enough for the pressure to build up. You tell a simple joke simply. You deliver it dry, not too much topspin, and you do the setup in a clear concise manner—a guy takes his boy deer hunting and they’re creeping through the woods—and here you can embroider a little, and then you feed them the punch line—and the man says “Son, this is your first deer hunt, it’s a very important time in your life, it marks your passage into manhood, do you have any questions?” and the boy says, “Yes. If you die of a heart attack, how do I get home?” If you tell it well and don’t oversell the joke, or apologize, or laugh more than they do, and if the joke is a new one, you’ll be welcome here. A man went to the Lutheran church on Sunday morning and after the service he stopped to shake the pastor’s hand. He said, ”Preacher, I’ll tell you, that was a helluva sermon. Damned fine.” The pastor said, “Thank you, sir, but I’d rather you didn’t use that sort of language.” The man said, ”I was so damn impressed with that sermon I dropped a check for ten thousand dollars in the collection plate.” The pastor said, “Holy shit.”

  Chapter 10

  A CIVILIZED PEOPLE

  There was an old liberal named Kurt

  Who wore his heart on his shirt.

  The poor pay of teachers

  Or the death of small creatures

  Left him shaken and visibly hurt.

  THE BLUE-TINGED girl brings my coffee with a grand hauteur that makes me sort of proud of her. It’s that old piss-on-your-shoe spirit of the underdog class that seems rather scarce these days. Corporate America is very successful at training this out of people through flattery (“You are a vital member of the HellMart family”) and terror (“Smile and show your gums or you’ll be fired and have to leave town to find work”). School tries to knock it out of you, the church coaxes you to be passive and sweet, but the human spirit is resilient and the blue-tinged girl refuses to curtsy. “Coffee smells good,” I say. A faint smile or grimace on her lips. “Better than Starbucks,” I say. “Right,” she says. My irony detector detects irony. She reminds me of myself when I started to think that I was a writer. There wasn’t much evidence of it, so what could I do but try to look the part, smoke unfiltered smokes, practice irony, and carry myself with some grandeur. Here she is, making maybe eight bucks an hour with tips, not beautiful or especially gifted or smart, but with a grand attitude and a big urge to be somebody. I wish her well. I wish I could give her a word of advice: lighten up, kid.

  “You want lunch?” she says. The lunch menu is written on a blackboard on the wall. Then I notice the green Wellstone pin on her shirt. “Did you know Paul?” I say. She nods. I imagine he came in here to eat and, being Paul, he reached over the counter and shook everybody’s hand. I don’t: I’m a writer. We are lurkers in corners, observers, and fishers among men. Paul relished public life on the highways and byways, bobbing into a crowded café, encountering people. When he went out for lunch, he made a point of sticking his head in the kitchen afterward and shaking hands with the cooks and the dishwashers. I was a dishwasher once and if a U.S. Senator had appeared in the steam of the scullery and taken my hand, it would’ve made my day, that’s for sure. You saw Paul in the Twin Cities airport, waiting to fly back to Washington, talking, a little knot of passersby around him, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he talked. He wasn’t seduced by comfort and flattery and he kept his point of view as an outsider. He served in the Senate for twelve years, a short voluble Jew representing a state of tall laconic Scandinavians and Germans. People liked him who didn’t necessarily share his opinions, because he was loyal to his people, the bus drivers, the waitresses, the dishwashers, the cleaning ladies. He wasn’t a Senator for rent, he spoke up for people who need speaking up for, he saw things from ground level, like a novelist, like a Democrat. He and Sheila had an apartment three blocks from here. On the morning of October 25, 2002, they drove down Selby Avenue to the downtown St. Paul airport to board the charter plane that would crash in the cold fog in the woods. That was a year and a half ago and the blue-tinged girl is still loyal to him. Electioneering is a demanding discipline, a combination of marathon dancing, flagpole sitting, and competitive pie eating. He’d done that for a year and was a month away from beating his slippery opponent and getting to take a vacation with Sheila and spend time at the movies, and his pilots got off the beam and landed in the trees. He was afraid of flying and not much else. He preached against fear, as people of my generation should. We old Democrats think of them often: Paul and Sheila and daughter Marcia and their staff, Will and Mary and Tom, dying a few days before Election Day, 2002.

  Our beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest political strategy ever. Easy to plant: an ominous silence, distant sirens, mouth breathing. A drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate the federal regulatory agencies, bri
ng public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich, and your approval numbers will stay high.

  Meanwhile, Republicans do very little for their own people—look at the family farm in the Midwest: a sinking ship. That courageous and intelligent tribe is walking the Trail of Tears. The number of dairy farms is in steep decline, even as milk production rises, thanks to factory farms with herds of 500 hormonally souped-up cows who put down 20,000 pounds of milk a year. Dairy farming was what permitted very industrious people to earn a living on poor land, it’s fundamental to our culture, and we’re sad and pained to see it go. The Republican prairie towns are drying up and blowing away, the supermarket bulletin boards post notices that say ALCOHOLISM and DOMESTIC ABUSE and SUICIDE with hotlines to call for confidential help. Meanwhile the urban tribes of bullshitters are prospering, holding their bullshit powwows in big hotel ballrooms, bloviating about Strategizing the Global Deconstruct, monkey talk, but the b.s. industry is vertically structured, so if No. 1 and No. 2 and No. 3 take something seriously, then you (No.

  11) take it very seriously. Farmers are horizontal, especially in North Dakota, and must actually know how to do real things. Manure will go only so far for them. The fence lines have been plowed through and the fields have become a half mile long and there’s no such thing as the lower forty anymore, it’s the lower four hundred. There are a few farms where you still see thirty or forty Holsteins standing out in the mud and manure, but the thousand-head dairy factory is becoming the norm. People who don’t have that kind of capital try to scratch together a living making crafts or trading stocks on the Internet or dealing antiques, which there are a lot of in the country. They scrape along, meanwhile braggarts and bullies rise to power and acclaim. Why, Lord? And why does the Minnesota State Legislature make it legal for anybody with a Wheaties box top to carry concealed weapons so that now Your Houses of Worship must display an ugly sign, GUNS ARE NOT PERMITTED ON THESE PREMISES? Why this Wild West weirdness in our midst? It rankles us, and so does our Republican governor plumping for the death penalty (no executions here since the hanging of William Williams in 1906 when the trap was sprung and the man fell and his feet touched the floor and three deputies had to grab hold of the rope and haul him up and hang on for fifteen minutes while he slowly strangled—the grisliness of it civilized us for a hundred years) in the wake of public anguish after the kidnapping and murder of a lovely young woman in the Red River Valley last November, her tragic death to be the door to barbarism. The rancid vapors of right-wing radio swirl around us and the spirit of the prosecutor stalks the land. The war in Iraq is bad business, the administration’s foreign policy is for domestic consumption, security is mostly for show—elderly ladies are asked to remove their shoes while cargo containers drift over the border uninspected. The government is in the hands of blackjack dealers. But have courage. All is not lost. This is not Iran, or the Age of the Hapsburgs, it’s America. The people will be pushed just so far. They will clap for the naked president just so long and then they’ll laugh and when they start laughing they won’t stop.

  Meanwhile, I’ll have an egg salad sandwich. Cheap at the price: $3.85. I give her a ten and get change and put a five in her tip jar and she sees this. She doesn’t smile—she can’t be bought—but her eyes soften. Overtipping is allowed. She spreads mayo on the bread and a half cup of egg salad and two leaves of lettuce and slices it on the diagonal and sets it on a plate.

  I take a seat at a corner table facing the window. A blustery spring day. The mutter of cars and buses as they pull up to the STOP sign. Western Avenue, once the city limit back when little farms lay between St. Paul and the milling city of Minneapolis. On the corner is the old drugstore where F. Scott Fitzgerald came to buy his cigarettes the summer of 1919 when he was living in his parents’ garret, a Princeton dropout and failed ad man and former lieutenant who never got to fight, and wrote the novel that made him famous, This Side of Paradise. Book and author caught the crest of the Jazz Age and swept to fame, romance, celebrity, wealth, happiness, insanity, desperation, failure, desperate resolution, vain hope, sudden death, but when he walked down that sidewalk over there and turned the corner at Selby Avenue he was just a writer engrossed in the task of trying to turn a loser into a winner. He was born two blocks from here in 1896. His mother had lost two babies and he was the third, and she devoted herself to him and from her lavish love sprouted a boy who believed he could throw the long touchdown pass and win the unattainable girl, be a war hero, and write the Great American Novel.

  St. Paul was an outpost to him, a city of Swedes and onionheads, a cold colony he would escape and find his way to Manhattan, and Paris and Hollywood. The land of bitter winds and smug self-effacing people. And yet when Fitzgerald said, “My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness,” he was talking about St. Paul.

  When I was still in high school, I came over to this neighborhood to walk around and think about him. It astonished me to read the opening of Gatsby and “Winter Dreams” and The Crack-Up and think, “The man who wrote this grew up a few blocks from Jean and Les’s house.” When Grandpa rode the streetcar to St. Paul to take out his naturalization papers, the pretty boy in knee pants and swinging his book strap might have been Fitzgerald. Up and down the avenues, past the old brick and stone mansions of the Hills and Griggses and Weyerhausers and Ordways, I anguished in a rather grand way about death, my death, and how nobody ever would know I had the grand ambitions that I had, poor little me, dying unknown, unsung, the tiny obituary (Student Succumbs to Flu). I used to sit on a little triangle of grass behind a statue of Nathan Hale, his hands tied behind his back, about to be hanged, and watch approaching headlights on Summit Avenue and think, in a satisfying and literary way, about how alone and lost and misunderstood I was. (In fact, was not; was encouraged by many, and found good teachers wherever I looked; had been lucky my whole life.) I looked at a graceful old house and imagined how happy life would be if only I owned it, a brick palazzo with French doors opening onto a terrace from which I could extrapolate a life of affection and amiable conversation. Dark ladies smoking Herbert Tareytons, their long legs draped over a stone balustrade, speaking in low urgent tones about a book, an important book, terribly important, the book, and they rise as they talk, and their expressive hands map out the New World this book foresees in the mist, having torn the roof off the old one. I love the conversation of passionate believers. I was brought up by cautious people who taught me to make haste slowly and yet I have always wanted to get more than one life including some passionate ones, a St. Paul one but also a Parisian one, and a cowboy life, of course, and a show-biz one, and a literary one, and a secret life as, say, a bartender in a seaside town in northern California. I lived a lot of lives vicariously as a reader and then invented a few lives of my own. When, at the age of forty, I bought a big green frame house with a porch on Goodrich Avenue, it only made me more restless. I pulled up stakes and moved five blocks away to a brick house with a walled garden, then jumped to a belle epoque apartment in Copenhagen where I paced and plotted my escape, then to Central Park West in New York, then to a log cabin in a grove of aspens in Wisconsin with a family of wild turkeys who came and went. And then landed back here in St. Paul, near Nathan Hale, and here I have stopped.

  A couple of patrons nod to me as I walk by and I nod back. I hear my name whispered, and the sound of it triggers a reflex: you’re being watched, try to look intelligent. I am in that gray eminence stage of life when people take you for someone notable though they don’t know what for. “Are you famous?” a girl asked me once; I shook my head. A person doesn’t have to be if he doesn’t want to. Fame makes you moody and the writing goes dead and you grab hold of the gin bottle. So don’t get famous. Line up with the rank and file where the fun is.

  Sometimes I feel a hot stare and detect hostility—we Minnesotans don’
t care to be patronized, as the old Variety headline said, STIX NIX HIX PIX, and plenty of Minnesotans are crusty about me and Lake Wobegon, thinking I’ve hixed them. Nonetheless I am perfectly content here.

  When my mother was 15, she lived a few blocks from here with Aunt Jean and Uncle Les. She’d been sent over from Minneapolis by her dad because she had a rebellious streak, went to movies, liked to talk with boys, went to dances. She attended St. Paul Central and studied to be a nurse and after school she went around selling homemade cookies to help pay her way in the world. I think of her, carrying a boxful of bags of cookies along Summit Avenue and screwing up her courage to march to the door and ring the bell. And the lady opens the door and Mother says, “Good afternoon, would you care to purchase a dozen fresh peanut butter cookies?” And a balloon appears over the lady’s head: NO. And a string of bubbles and another balloon: There ought to be a law against beggars. And the door is closed, whammmm, and the girl blushes and her heart sinks and she heads toward the next house. A long afternoon on the cookie route.

  It’s like the beginning of a fairy tale, “The Peanut Butter Cookie Girl,” in which she is about to eat all her cookies and perish in a snowbank and then a prince shows up with a crystal slipper in hand. The truth is, my mother would’ve found a prince like Fitzgerald insufferable. She had the plain good manners of working people who didn’t indulge flamboyant self-dramatization. My mother can be very sniffy toward rich people and so could Dad. He felt superior to people who spent money to show off. Felt uneasy in fancy houses or around wealthy people. Had no desire to meet the Queen. Preferred a Ramada Inn to the Ritz. No Cadillac, thank you. He took pride in modesty and spending money carefully because, after all, you worked hard for it, didn’t you?