Homegrown Democrat

by Garrison Keillor

  And old Wall Street Journals

  To keep the fronts of her frocks full.

  IT HAS RAINED all morning on Republican and Democrat alike and at noon I go to the café. A soft and glittery world after rain. The urge to strive and accomplish and succeed relaxes on a rainy day. The chain gang is canceled, public hangings postponed. It’s the day to savor the vast goodness of life. Once the water collects in rivers, men can fight over it and apportion it away from the gardens of the poor and lavish it on the fairways of the rich, but for now, it is simple socialism in the form of precipitation. Our neighbors’ yard glistens, the dark brown patches where their three boys and our daughter have worn holes in the turf, scuffling around the swing set. I walk past Jim and Debra’s house and the old Field house and turn the corner. A little girl died here two years ago. For weeks afterward, little bouquets of flowers were laid there and a little Styrofoam cross. There is tragedy that nobody can rescue you from. A thoughtless moment compounded by happenstance and a child is killed and you spend the rest of your life looking at the X and wondering why did it happen like that when it could have happened so many other ways. And on this same corner I once saw a bride and groom, just the two of them, in white and black, cross the street under an umbrella, heading for their reception at the University Club, in a downpour, he holding her hand up and forward, as if leading her in a dance.

  I sit and drink coffee in the corner café on Selby and remember the Ten O’Clock Scholar near the U where I hung out forty years ago. Fishnet hung from the ceiling and candles burned in Chianti bottles and silent men played chess in the corner and sometimes a chick with a Swedish last name would sing the blues, I’m going to town to get my ashes hauled because my good man he left me in the fall and I sat in back, studying people, smirking at the ones who looked as if they might come from the horsey suburbs like Wayzata or North Oaks. The student art on the walls was all browns, ochre, black wash, shadowy, ominous, lonely figures, woodcuts, storm clouds, dark houses. Dark was cool and to be anguished meant you were serious.

  I think if I sat here long enough, I might see my 18- year-old self walk in the door. He’d stand by the cash register and scan the room and his gaze would be merciless. I dread him looking at me. Here I am, walking softly into my sixties, a little astonished at my good fortune in life; when I was 18, I was poised on the crest of the hill, about to plunge down the slippery slope to a lifetime of failure. Nine years later, an unsolicited story of mine was bought by The New Yorker magazine and this stroke of good luck began to reverberate in my life. The New Yorker was a name that rang loud and long in the minds of midwesterners, and my association with the magazine was a powerful juju. I wrote a story for The New Yorker about the radio show The Grand Ole Opry at WSM in Nashville and that opened the door to my starting A Prairie Home Companion in 1974. No commercial station would’ve been interested, and the classical music stations of public radio wouldn’t have been either but there was that interesting item in my résumé, my connection to The New Yorker and that juju opened doors. It helped that my boss William H. Kling happened to harbor a secret affection for antique radio and of course it helped that I worked awfully hard (which one must do if one is not naturally gifted—as Grandma said, “What we lack in our heads, we must make up for with our feet”) but looking back, I see that The New Yorker’s acceptance letter in the spring of 1969 was a magical coin dropped on my doorstep. So much happened to me as a result of that one thing—a minor New Yorker underling, riffling through boxes of stuff, came across my little story and snatched it up in her hand—and had she not, I’d be driving the Grand Avenue bus or waiting tables at the Lexington Café.

  I always saw the radio show as a job, but one I do by reflex, so it doesn’t depend on ambition or initiative or creativity. The Great Listener is standing over me, holding an old tennis ball, and as I look up at Him, panting, He throws the ball into the bushes and I tear after it and bring it back. I do that every week, over and over. I suffer over it as much as my mother dreaded knocking on doors to sell cookies but I am a lucky man. It goes back to when I hired an illegal alien to take care of my apartment, a handsome black-haired Tibetan woman whom I paid well, and she saved her money and brought her daughters to America from Nepal and they all became legal and moved to California, and on the morning she said goodbye, she held both my hands in hers, and she cried harder than anyone I ever said goodbye to, and she left a long white silk Buddhist prayer scarf tied to the door handle, and ever since then, I’ve had so much good fortune, I can’t tell you.

  I was a pale awkward boy of no great acumen, lost out on the periphery, and I managed to write myself into the center of things. I created a town and made myself the authority on it. I have been reckless, confused, sunk in misery, and squandered many chances. I have made sensible decisions that turned out to be stupendously dumb. But I love to go tearing off after the tennis ball on Saturday nights. Saturday is a long day of work, and then, at 5 P.M., the performance of A Prairie Home Companion, and afterward I get in my car and drive up the hill to home. A good day of work. Not so bad a deal, though when I look out the window and see Nathan Hale in the dark, contemplating his mortality, I do think about my own.

  In July of 2001 I went down to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and had an operation to sew up a leaky valve in my heart and by Labor Day I was on the road promoting a new novel. On September 10, 2001, I gave a reading at the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Union Square in New York City and around midnight, I sat with a few friends at a sidewalk café on 14th Street, the World Trade Center Towers shining in the night to the south of us, and enjoyed a big tray of Malpeque oysters and a Tanqueray martini. Eight hours later, it happened, the unthinkable, the black smoke and flame, the plane hitting the tower, the second plane banking into the second tower, the fireball, the buildings collapsing an hour later. I was up on West 90th Street and heard the first plane go over, heading down the Hudson at a desperately low altitude, and a few minutes later my phone rang and it was my friend Tony in the Village who had seen the fireball and was weeping.

  It was, for a time, a catastrophe for which there was no name, there being no term for hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings, no single place name like Pearl Harbor, so people referred to it abstractly as It or “all of this,” as in “Before all of this happened, we were thinking of going to Europe.” Only after two or three months did people start to call it by its date, 9/11.

  Like most New Yorkers, I kept putting myself in the place of the people on the planes: you take off from Boston and ascend through the cloud cover and about the time you get out your laptop, there’s commotion up front and sounds of struggle and men going through the cockpit door and panic wells up in your chest and you say the Lord’s Prayer and something tells you that the end has come and you will never see your children again and the silly argument with your wife about the Visa bill was your last conversation.

  Or you’re standing in the dining room on the 101st floor, picking up coffee and a bagel and cream cheese and dreading the conference about to begin which you were hoping not to attend, and there is a jolt that knocks plates off the table, and you think, Earthquake, and then there is smoke, and you dash to the stairwell, and it’s full of smoke, and you sit on the floor and call 911 on your cell phone, and something in the voice of the woman at the other end tells you: that’s it, Bud, it’s over. Those people on the 101st floor started their day out here on the streets with the rest of us.

  All that week, we heard stories of men and women in the towers who, in a horrible moment, stifled their fear and looked out for others. All week, New Yorkers went about their business quietly, thoughtfully—no horns honking, no cursing and flipping the bird, none of the usual smart-ass stuff—and on Friday, there was a twilight vigil all over the city. People stood on the sidewalk holding candles, in front of brownstones and luxury co-ops and public housing projects and on street corners, some of them singing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and “America the Beautiful” and �
�Amazing Grace.” I stood with a bunch on West 90th and then I walked around the Upper West Side and saw little groups of old lefties and diehard liberals standing on sidewalks holding candles and singing about the fruited plains and spacious skies, the thoroughfare of freedom across the wilderness, and O beautiful for patriot’s dream that sees beyond the years; thine alabaster cities gleam undimm’d by human tears and sang it with tears in their eyes in the midst of the shining city that was the dream of so many immigrant patriots. A little knot of singers in front of each building, New Yorkers in communion—Who organized this? Whose idea was it? I didn’t know but at the moment it seemed almost spontaneous.

  Such a rare moment in New York and so fervent, its message one of simple communalism: we are all here together. Along with the pages and pages of obituaries in the Times it was the most moving aspect of the week after 9/11—the spirit of New Yorkers silently rallying to each other. It reminded me of my first clear experience of New York, when Dad brought me to the city in August 1953. I was 11. He came to visit some friends in Brooklyn whom he’d met when he was stationed at the Army Post Office near Times Square during the war. We stayed with them in their little apartment in Brooklyn. One hot night, unable to sleep, Dad and I went for a walk and stopped at a candy store and got a couple sodas and stood on the curb and drank them. Across the street was a park, a square really, a block long on each side, with trees and grass, park benches around the perimeter facing the sidewalk. The park was full of people sleeping on blankets. Families curled up together on the grass, asleep. Not hoboes: families, escaping from hot apartments to the cool outdoors, sleeping in a little island of dark in the middle of the great shining city, and on the park benches sat men, smoking, talking in low voices. Dad and I stood and looked at them and nothing was said but that picture of nocturnal encampment became a permanent memory of the city, along with Ebbets Field, Coney Island, pushcart peddlers, the Empire State Building, and the Staten Island ferry.

  It was the worst of times and the best of times. The event drove out trash TV for a week or so, and all the lazy cynicism of the young, and talk radio started talking about something real. (There was a tone of maudlin self-absorption that crept in gradually, and on the first anniversary of 9/11 National Public Radio broadcast two hours of claptrap, a couple dozen overwrought navel-gazers calling in to share their feelings about 9/11 and how it, like, meant for them, you know, like, the loss of innocence or something, people who had lost nobody in the disaster, hadn’t been within a hundred miles of it, but nonetheless had feelings to share. It made you want to poison their fish tank.) Down in the Village, closed to motor vehicles, people walked in the streets, dust and smoke still hanging in the air but restaurants were open, even sidewalk cafés, people making heroic attempts at normal life, trying to enjoy a glass of wine and a bowl of steamed mussels and talk about the kids and movies and jobs and only mention in passing the horror and destruction a couple miles away—Do you think they’ll find survivors in the rubble? No, I doubt it.—What a city. Hit with terrible force and two days later people were attending movies again. Down near Trinity Church and Wall Street and the Woolworth Building, heartbreaking devastation, thousands of bodies, exhausted police and firemen, and all over the city, people in grief and shock, and yet classical musicians made the long trek down to St. Paul’s Chapel a few hundred feet from the rubble of the Towers and played Mozart and Bach and Haydn for the salvage workers taking a coffee break. Evil had struck us, but life went on and we accepted it as a gift. There is no closure, no resolution, we simply go on.

  Who could have guessed in those quiet anguished days in New York the political rewards that the Republicans would reap from all those deaths? How George W. Bush, who has never accepted the slightest responsibility for 9/11 though there is mounting evidence that he had been warned in quite specific terms in the months prior, so smartly stood amid the smoking rubble and spoke into a bullhorn and, back in Washington, snatched at a Democrat’s idea for a security superagency and set out to create an immense new bureaucracy to paper over the mistakes of immense old bureaucracies and an ad agency came up with the weird name, Homeland Security, a word Americans have never used to refer to the U.S.A., a word you’d expect to hear spoken in a war movie by a man with a monocle flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots, a new Achtung Department to put out warnings and recommend duct tape to seal doors and windows and caches of bottled water and dried fruit in the basement, and he suckered some Democrats into opposing his Achtung bill on grounds it violated civil liberties and also stripped government workers of certain rights, whereupon he wrapped the flag around himself in the 2002 election and played patriotism like a $29 accordion and portrayed Democrats as Al Qaeda sympathizers and then, postelection, launched a war against Iraq which had exactly nothing to do with 9/11 that anyone knew of, and made plans to hold the 2004 Republican convention in New York to capitalize on the tragedy, which he has exploited as the Defining Moment of his Presidency and used to squelch dissent and render the press supine and soften up the opposition to his right-wing judicial appointments and his gutting of the regulatory agencies, all of which would have been anathema to most of the people who died in the Towers. Some of them were Republicans, true, but New York Republicans are a lot closer to Democrats than they are to George W. Bush.

  That is the stink drifting through this election year. The New Yorkers and Jerseyites who died in the collapse of the Towers and what this shallow and hard-shelled man failed to do for them that he had sworn to do and how he stood on their graves and gave a sermon diametrically opposite to what they believed. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security, and patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.

  The men and women who rode the elevators up to work that morning came in on PATH trains from New Jersey or rode in on the Long Island Rail Road and then took the subway down to the WTC or they rode the Lexington Avenue subway down to City Hall and maybe walked across City Hall park behind the Boss Tweed building and the Woolworth tower. I used to have an office in the Woolworth. I remember the neighborhood. The crowds of suits heading to work, the bike messengers, the Wall Street crowd. There was a lunchwagon on the street with an Arab guy in it where I stopped for a cup of coffee and a bagel every morning, and after two mornings, he knew that I wanted a large coffee with milk and a poppyseed bagel with cream cheese and scallions. After two mornings he knew this. Now that’s what you call free enterprise.

  Those men and women were part of a world utterly different from that of George W. Bush’s Texas. They belonged to a world of theater and books and street life and freedom of thought and the democracy of the subway. They deserve better than to be the platform for intolerance and the demolition of social services and handing out bonuses to the rich.

  Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No. 1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, and then I think of that nonreader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people and with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, some good TV ads, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term, I feel a little warm behind the eyebrows.

  But I refuse to be furious. I am a happy Democrat living in a great country, at home in St. Paul, Minnesota, where no matter what, there is a lot of satisfaction going on a good deal of the time. Complaint is a cherished art form, here as in New York, but the streets of St. Paul are clean, the cops and firemen are the finest in the land, the parks are lovely, the old Victorian houses are cherished, and the new Italian restaurant three blocks from here, the one with the shady patio and the terrific risotto, is thriving mightily. The social compac
t is still intact, knock on wood. Life is pretty good in St. Paul. Call it apathy, but really it’s satisfaction. Or poise. As Whitman wrote—

  Me imperturbe, standing at ease in Nature,

  Master of all, or mistress of all—aplomb in the midst of irrational things,

  Imbued as they—passive, receptive, silent as they,

  Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought;

  O to be self-balanced for contingencies!

  O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.

  When I was young I was more perturbed by irrational things and loved the insurrectionist swashbuckling aspect of politics, the forces of Reason storming the Bastille, the good peasants baring their butts at the Blanc Palais, the king’s courtiers mincing and fawning on Meet the Press, the royal artillery barrage of TV commercials, the ferocity of the peasants’ attack on the Royal Flank, the shudder and screech as the regime collapsed in 1968 and again in 1974—it was all terribly gratifying back then in my trumpet days. I’m older now and mellower, and prefer the tuba. Richard M. Nixon had his points: he went to China, he got the cleanup of the Great Lakes under way, he put Harry Blackmun on the Supreme Court. Lyndon B. Johnson was revealed in the transcripts of his long anguished telephone calls to colleagues, a different LBJ from the one we loved to despise back then; he was a man in despair over Vietnam who saw all too clearly the cataract he was being swept toward, that dreadful and wasteful war that poisoned our politics and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people because Democrats were afraid of being called “weak on communism” and so the ship got on the reef and we didn’t know how to reverse the engines.

  You go to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington today and look at the names on the Wall, you feel united with the folks around you, the families still in grief for boys long gone, the old vets, the schoolkids. All the political divisions that tore us up thirty years ago don’t seem so important now compared to the loss of those lives. There is a feeling of solidarity that you also get at the Lincoln Memorial and Ellis Island and Gettysburg.