Homegrown Democrat
Page 11
My 16 oz. Americano with an extra shot of espresso, two biscotti, comes to $4.95. I am 61 and in my mind the value of a cup of coffee has stayed right around 35 cents but I‘m willing to pay extra for the pleasure of being with Democrats. I grew up with these people, they are where my world begins. A civilized people, who love the hubbub of the city, the yawp and jabber of the crowd, the slang and gossip, the old songs and legends, the great bootstrap stories. The ambitious immigrant who puts his kids through college. The person who overcomes a handicap to climb the mountain. The lucky lunch ladies who for fourteen years put a quarter apiece in the pot every payday to buy a lottery ticket and then won, Phyllis, Susan, Judith, Roseanne, Betty, Mary, Alice, Donna, Barbara, Karen, Doreen, Cathy, Elaine, Nancy, and two Kathleens, $95 million, and the next morning went to work and served lunch. The people who persevere. Duke Ellington and his elegant band barnstorming the segregated South, adored in London and Paris and Copenhagen and they couldn’t get a cup of coffee in Georgia or Alabama. The young painters in their low-rent lofts in the Village when New York was the center of the art world. The poets who slept in train stations and sold their blood as they gathered their gift together. Dancers subsisting on ramen noodles, actors who walked ten miles to save bus fare, violinists scarfing up leftovers at the country club wedding reception, their big meal of the week, novelists scraping by without health insurance, writing until 3 A.M. month after month with no idea that anything will come of this rigorous life. There’s a reason why 95% of people in the arts are Democrats. An artistic gift is dropped on you by God and if you attend to the gift and are true to it, you will sometimes be in serious need of a helping hand. Art is an imperative stronger than commerce. Republicans don’t understand this. They cherish you if you’re rich and famous, they can’t do enough for you if there’s nothing you need, but when you’re hard up, don’t go to the front door of the Manor, go around to the back and the hired help will take you in. And art speaks for the powerless. A poor child in the street is a better choice for point of view than the tycoon in his study: this we know. Ishmael rather than Ahab; Huck rather than Judge Thatcher. The democracy of letters is hospitable to outsiders: readers are curious and adventuresome and want to see beyond their own bailiwick and crave news from the wrong side of town. Artists tend toward an outsider point of view, are drawn toward stories of failure, know that satire is always in behalf of the underdog and the outnumbered, and are committed to the forbidden and dangerous and thrilling thing, namely, the truth. This makes them unwelcome in the Republican Church, which is not (thank you very much) about the outsiders, the wrong side of town, or poor children.
Chapter 11
THE GOOD DEMOCRAT
A young social worker named Dede
Came home from work and said, “Sweetie,
I feel sort of wobbly
So pour me a Chablis
And don’t be emotionally needy.”
1. Democrats distrust privilege and power. Power unchecked runs amok, tears up the garden, and the privileged become sluggish and dull if nobody talks back to them. We think royalty should ride bicycles and carry their own luggage; we think famous people ought to fix their kids’ breakfasts and attend their school concerts. We don’t like divas who abuse the help, or rock stars who devastate hotel rooms, or CEOs who get big raises when the ship is sinking, or anybody riding high who spits on the peons below. If you earn $14 million a year, you better keep your nose clean and not try to write off your family vacation as a business expense. (Congressman Martin Olav Sabo of Minneapolis authored the Income Equity Act that would deny companies a tax deduction for excessive executive compensation, that is, the portion of the CEO’s salary that is more than 25 times the salary of the lowest-paid full-time company employee. If starting pay for the lowliest file clerk is $18,000, then the CEO’s salary in excess of $450,000 is not deductible as a business expense. The act has been kept bottled up in the House Ways and Means Committee, a little nod toward democracy that is anathema to Republicans.)
I suppose the most powerful man is a deranged person with a loaded gun who has nothing to lose, and here are we, vulnerable because we have loved ones and a life that is precious to us, and between him and us stands the power of government. I choose not to walk through the streets of St. Paul with a pistol in my pocket because it strikes me as slightly demented. Because it’s not 1845. Because having one doesn’t fascinate me. Because my sympathy is with the cops who have to think about guns every time they walk up to a front door or pull someone over to the side of the road. I count on the civil society to defend me. Defending the powerless against the powerful is a basic task of government, an article of faith in the America that I grew up in. Walking into the supermarket, you are powerless to investigate the meatpacker who packaged these Glo-Brite wieners so the government must do it for you. The government is there to do battle with those who would sell you cars that are firebombs or TV sets that cause cancer in small children or vitamins that make hair sprout on your palms or hamburgers made from deceased springer spaniels. Every year the bank examiners come around to look at the books and make sure that the president of First Texas Trust isn’t siphoning your money to his account in Geneva—how did Republicans manage to make this an issue? You can’t suddenly change the rules to suit yourself. You can’t stop the train and kick off the people you don’t like. You can’t tower over people and roar and screech and spray saliva on them. You can’t prey on the preoccupied and slip in a 2% surcharge on the electric bill and thereby filch a billion dollars a few cents at a time. You can’t sell bad meat or water the beer or charge 25% interest or piss in the public water supply. You can’t put a quarter in the collection plate and take a dollar out. Democrats thought that this was understood.
2. Equality is Democratic bedrock. Democrats believe in writing your own story and putting it up against other people’s on a level court and let the game begin and more power to you, sing your song and do your dance, but don’t be under the illusion that you invented yourself. Don’t be so superior you’re offended at the thought of the progressive income tax. There is an old geezer in a captain’s cap with a hundred buttons pinned to it and an electric fan suspended from the brim, an orange vest with badges and flag decals, who rides around the neighborhood from time to time on a three-wheeler with a fringed green canopy over it and a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker and a horn and a bell, with a look of royalty and privilege about him as if he were the Duke of Northumberland accompanied by the Royal Fusiliers, which is fine by me—self-expression is a fine thing—but I look at him and realize why I love the liturgy of the Anglican Church: because we didn’t write it, those are everybody’s words. Collective expression is the rare thing; self-expression is common as dandelions. An old Democrat is of course in favor of freedom of self-expression—go tattoo whatever vulgarity you want on your forehead, go sound your barbaric war cry—but this old Democrat prefers the King James and the Lord’s Prayer and the old Lutheran table grace (Be present at our table, Lord. Be here and everywhere adored. Thy children bless and grant that we may feast in paradise with Thee) and all the common treasures from blues to children’s rhymes to John Henry and Frankie and Johnny and Jon Jonson of Wisconsin to knock-knock and lightbulb jokes to aphorisms that express the ordinary skepticism of people. We reside in a city of memory and share the avenues with the others. It is a wicked world, in which the power to do harm is so great and the power to do good so slight and an angry fool can do more damage in a day than a hundred wise men can fix in a year, but here we are, we must do our best and do it as a people and when I’m in a crowd singing “America the Beautiful” I get emotional about the pilgrims’ feet and the alabaster cities and the heroes proved in liberating strife, which belong to us all and don’t need improvement.
A writer starts out trying to express himself and show how thoughtful he is and even occasionally brilliant and as he loses interest in that, what sustains him is the love of the common language, English, whose beauty is that it ha
s been enriched from below, by street patois and criminal lingo and teen slang and black English and immigrant languages. Prizes for brilliance are a dime a dozen: what’s really special is to write something that speaks for others.
3. We Democrats are inclusive and integrationist to the core. We cross social lines and climb through strata. We are fond of cities where people merge and life bubbles up from below, where high society hangs out with show folks, bankers meet dancers, Lutherans consort with Catholics, Samaritans mill among Judeans and black and pink and brown and Jesus moves among the publicans. If we go to Copenhagen, we choose not to stay at the luxury hotel where the staff is careful never to speak Danish in your presence, we prefer to stay with a Danish family so we can eat what they eat for breakfast, watch their TV shows, meet their kids, feel that we’ve brushed elbows with real life. We think gated communities are creepy, exclusiveness on principle is un-American. The all-male golf club is a charming relic of Victorian times, something out of P. G. Wodehouse, and God bless the old boys in their knickers with their mashies and niblicks, but leave me out, please. Every time I’ve found myself in exclusive surroundings—sitting on the dais at a dinner, mingling with the thousand-dollar donors—I feel a sad diminution of energy and spark. Irreverence is the engine of wit and you’re more likely to find it in the cheap seats. I’d rather not travel to places like the Middle East or Indonesia where an American travels from one secure compound to another: I’d rather stay home and be a free man than a prisoner of security. The Ritz is the Ritz, a fortress against happenstance, but a person craves street life and a day spent bumping around in Brooklyn or Montmartre or Marylebone Street. Whitman said, “I find letters from God dropped in the street and every one is signed by God’s name.” God’s grace is in the street, among the tourists and the hayshakers. I walk along Wabasha Avenue in St. Paul and a man steps up and asks, “Aren’t you Garrison Keillor?” I am, and he sticks out his hand and says, “I’ve never read your books but I’ve heard a lot about you.” And pauses a beat and says, “You don’t suppose you could spare a few bucks for an old bum on the street?” What excellent timing the man has. He grins at me and touches my arm. He could be a fund-raiser for Yale or the Metropolitan Opera, but instead he shares his talent with the general public. So I reach in my pocket and find a bill and it’s a twenty, more than I was planning to donate, but I hand it to him, and why not. Genius should be rewarded.
4. Democrats are city people at heart, even if we love the country and small town life, as I do, nonetheless the city is the crowning achievement of society. A farm is a farm but a city is history. The Lord makes counties but cities are built on the love of conversation and the profound industriousness in our natures, the need to be busy reshaping the world, peddling our wares, making coffee, jabbering, ordering new stationery. We St. Paul Democrats cherish old buildings and the history of our steamboat and railroad town, and the stories of James J. Hill and Archbishop Ireland, the French who settled in Frogtown, the Swedes of Swede Hollow, the shanty Irish, the Mexicans on the West Side. And so we fight against the 16-lane freeways the Republicans want to build to usher themselves swiftly and smoothly from their office towers to their distant green paradise. We scrap for neighborhood development money and fight for the branch library, the little park down the street, the cul-de-sac to defeat the speeders.
We are pedestrians. Walking is a cure for the blues and it’s the way to look at stuff. St. Paul is a walking city, like New York or San Francisco. You amble down Selby Avenue and check the health of the boulevard trees and listen to the birds tweedling in them, see the brown beer bottles under the hedge, the dog delicately pissing on the tree, see the bees hovering around yellow petals—good news that perhaps we haven’t yet poisoned the garden—and you amble farther, your disposition sweetened by a little exertion, you pick up the common parlance and the hum and rattle of the street and other pedestrians, the different shades of faces, odd signature bits of clothing, mannerisms, interesting gaits, manifest attitudes, dramatis personae, snatches of dialogue drifting past, phrases of love and irritation, slang, vagrant obscenities. Benevolent children and their dogs, coffee and pizza smells in the air, boom boxes, the whine of tires, the rumble of buses with enormous portraits of news anchors on the sides all air-brushed and dopey like news anchors in every American city and in the bus windows above their vacant mugs are the Edward Hopper bus riders heading downtown to clean the offices, peddle papers, wash dishes, a busload of long-suffering humanity. And the lovers, faces shining, out for a walk, newly joined, oblivious.
I like to hang out in New York, on the Upper West Side, a sort of National Left-Wing Park and Bird Sanctuary, and walk up Broadway past the street where George Gershwin wrote “Rhapsody in Blue” and the building Isaac Bashevis Singer lived in when he wrote his tales of Jewish village life in Europe—Holden Caulfield’s hotel is nearby where he met the prostitute—and feel in the soles of my feet the vital connection between liberals and cities and artists: the common faith that genius and courage and artistic energy rise up from below and if a nation puts too great burdens on the young and the poor and the dispossessed, if the strata harden, the nation will stifle its own genius. You don’t encourage invention and ambition by giving a quarter-million-dollar tax break to a $15-million-a-year man. Give the bus driver’s bright children a chance to get a great education for free. That’s an investment. Board the New York subway in the morning among the young editorial assistants and fledgling security traders; ride in the early evening with violinists and cellists heading for work at Lincoln Center and in the Broadway pits. Walk into the deli and there’s Emanuel Ax, one of the greatest pianists on the planet, looking over the cheese selection. Not far away is the neighborhood of Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, and Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington, who all came bubbling up from the ranks, and Ellington’s great arranger/composer Billy Strayhorn (“Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Lush Life,” “After All”) who was gay before that was permissible in broad daylight. So many artists flocked to the city of New York because it has always been okay to be gay there. In the 1850s, Walt Whitman traveled freely in the bohemian gay demimonde and behaved flamboyantly for his time and nobody tried to run him out of town, the same Whitman whose “O Captain, My Captain” was one of my dad’s favorite poems. It’s a liberal city and it relishes people who are exercising their freedom and having a big time.
It’s okay to be an artist or a writer in New York, same as it’s okay to be alone. You can eat alone in a café and not feel weird, or the corner deli will sell you half a sandwich and one small brownie. It’s okay to talk to yourself in public. Okay to go around on Rollerblades wearing a Donald Duck mask. It’s okay to cry in public. No one will think less of you, and people may even offer you some of their medication, or tell you about something going on in their lives that’s worse. Same deal in the Democratic Party. Be yourself. Had George W. Bush been a Democrat, he wouldn’t have had to deny his colorful past. Cocaine? Tell us about it. Draft-dodging? We know about that too. Among Republicans I feel like a rare osprey, stuffed, labeled AUTHOR. Among Democrats I’m not all that different from anybody else.
5. Democrats believe in individualism. Social class does not tell the story, nor religion or political party or race or nationality. The important distinctions are between individuals, not between groups. Between two siblings, a vast unbridgeable gulf might exist, whereas between male and female, white and black, straight and gay, Eastern and Western, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, there is ever the possibility of liaison, friendship, union, miraculous intimacy. People who ought to be enemies are not necessarily. You and I, whoever we are, drifting down the Mississippi on a raft under the stars, fugitives from repression and intolerance, make common cause even though I am Christian and you are something else—this is the spirit I’ve always found among rank and file Democrats. So-called identity politics is Pundit Speak and nothing important to real Democrats. We believe tha
t individuals are mysterious and elude attempts to categorize them, that all true stories are about individuals and stories purporting to represent Womanhood, Manhood, Jewishness, the African American Experience, Gayness, the South, the Rural Midwest, are fairy tales, sermons, promotional copy. The Great American Story is Huck Finn sticking with the nigger Jim and not betraying him to authorities. The westward migration was away from the class-bound money-dominated East toward the frontier where a friendlier spirit of individualism prevailed and a man was not held in contempt because he was broke or drunk or dressed oddly. (Oscar Wilde was a big hit when he toured the mining camps of the West.) The legends of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl and the Good War are about perseverance but also about grace and generosity between individuals who didn’t know each other. The friendship of the prince and the pauper. Unlikely friendship is a pure American theme. The strangers in the club car on the Sunset Limited, in the Chatterbox Café on Main Street, and now on the Internet, the great urge to be understood as individuals, not types. In Europe we are thought naive for our rush to be friends and exchange phone numbers and make lunch dates. To a Dane, friendship is no simple matter, but an American leans toward you and starts talking about his childhood, his family, and may tell about his bipolar problem or his AA experience or his sufferings at the hands of his children, and it spurs him on if you are Danish, he insists on trying to leap that gap. The reason for fairness as a political principle is simple—you don’t screw people who are, or could be, might soon be, your friends.