Spilling The Two Secrets I Know About Garrison Keillor

Spilling The Two Secrets I Know About Garrison Keillor

About now, I figure, Garrison Keillor has about wrapped up his last PHC show, at the Hollywood Bowl, the one the rest of us get to hear and blubber over tomorrow evening.

A friend of mine was at last week’s Tanglewood show, and texted that half an hour after it was off the air, the place was still going nuts and he was doing curtain calls & encores. Of course the rest of us didn’t get to hear that. I bet the same thing is going on now at the H-Bowl; wonder if it will make it to the website later.

The thought of all those encores just rubs in the separation anxiety. Makes me wonder if he’s letting it all hang out on this very last time. Maybe if he’s even telling those two secrets I know about him.

Well, to heck with wondering: I’ll tell them here, to all three of you who might pause to read them . . . .

The one, which if it isn’t an actual secret is I think untold, I learned the day I actually met him, shook his hand.

That was in Washington DC, after a book party in The big Florida Avenue Friends Meetinghouse there. The book was a collection of stories by Russian and American writers, put together by a joint committee, and supposed to be a contribution to ending the Cold War.

This was just before Gorbachev came in and turned all that upside down. Garrison had contributed a story, and showed up at the party.

After I shook GK’s hand, we both leaned over the refreshment table, and I saw that it was just the two of us there for the moment; everyone else was in scattered clusters, many of them murmuring in Russian.

I Figured I only had a couple minutes, so I pounced, and asked the question that had nagged at me all the years I had been listening to the show and reading his stuff.

It was the question that he & all U.S. Males of his generation had an answer to.  Including me. (If you’re of that generation, or believe you’re familiar with it (us), think for a minute and see if you can guess what it was . . . .

“Garrison,” I asked  “what did you do about the draft?”

He smiled, picked up a cracker with some cheese on it, and told me. This is from memory, but I’m pretty sure I got it straight.

He said that when he was at the University of Minnesota, he was all against the war (i.e., Vietnam), and had been in a few protests, and after some pretty dramatic stuff he reached a point of particularly high dudgeon, and before it passed he wrote a letter to his draft board & told them he would NOT submit to the draft, forget about it, come what may. And what “come what may” in those days could  mean was up to three years in the slammer for draft refusal.

And then . . .

He smiled again, chuckled slyly.

–And then, he never heard from them. Nothing. And pretty soon the draft ended, and he got a job in radio, and all that.

(I think what happened was that the draft board adjourned to the Sidetrack Tap, and one of the guys had GK’s file in his overalls pocket, and when he staggered off to use the facilities, he made it back to his barstool and the file didn’t.)

But that last part is unconfirmed.

Sure enough, GK got no further than this when we were interrupted and he was steered away to meet someone important. So I didn’t get to even start telling him my own (pretty boring) draft story. But I didn’t mind; I came away with a souvenir of our encounter that was of lasting value.

The other one really is, I think, kind of a secret. Except that he told it on his show one night, so there must have been others who heard it. But I only ever heard him mention it that one time, and never since. So maybe it was more of a hidden confession.

It came at the end of 1990 or an early week of 1991, just days before George H. W. Bush and General Schwartzkopf unleashed forty kinds of hell on Iraq in Desert Storm.

I was then working nights at a big post office in suburban DC, slinging big sacks of mail, feeling completely awful about the impending war, and completely powerless to doing anything to stop it, listening on a walkman to hourly reports about the enormous military buildup, when his show came on. I was glad for the spell of relief, the music, the banter, the silly ads, and the chance to hear of someplace where there had been a quiet week.

Except when Garrison started his riff, he soon veered off into a monologue about vocation, about getting a call from God. (This is from memory 25 years ago, but I think I still have the gist).
The call, he said, was to be a prophet, one of those who was to tell people the bad news about the wrath that was to come, and was coming damn soon.

Garrison knew the prophets well, and the coming wrath as well, having been raised among “sanctified people.”

But maybe he knew the prophets too well, about how Jeremiah was hunted, jailed, and almost killed; Amos was banished; Hosea was made a public fool and cuckold; and Ezekiel went stark raving nuts. Because he flat out refused this call. Told God he was not up to it, and to find someone else.

God accepted his refusal, but did not let Keillor off the hook. Rather, Keillor was told that instead of becoming a prophet, he would now become a “liar.” (That word I remember specifically.)

He would become the kind of liar who told people comforting, amusing stories that diverted their attention from the bad news they really needed to hear and grapple with, those messages they would habitually reject, along with the messenger. And that he would be good as such a liar, successful in the eyes of the world. But the world wouldn’t know about the refusal that underlay this outward show of fame and fortune.

Once he started this confession, I tossed away the last mail sack, and retreated to a semi-dark corner of the room and listened, transfixed, until it was done. He didn’t close with any call to action or repentance. Probably he diffused the stark bitterness of these moments, deftly camouflaging them as part of the weekly story, sliding obliquely back into anecdote or music.

But the declaration did not sound like fiction to me, not one bit.  It sank into my memory and has lodged there ever since.

A few days later, the war started, and was indeed horrible. But his life, and mine, went on.

In 2015 I visited St. Paul, and friends drove me past the big new house Keillor has built there (much smaller than Trump Tower, yet vastly classier). We also visited the nearby storefront bookstore he started as a kind of vanity project. I’ve paid good money from my small budget to see him a few times. And I don’t begrudge him any of this. Or his career as a “liar.”

After all, I needed those “lies” as much as anyone else in his audience; as much as he did. And that one “secret” moment of truth somehow made it all more bearable.

Later I found the audio of this “Prophet” monologue on Youtube; it’s since been removed, but a lengthy excerpt from it follows below:

From “Prophet” — early 1991:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/05/garrison-keillors-prophecy-and-apostasy/

Here’s the most substantial chunks of the “Prophet” story:

Keillor: I recall when I was a little boy, going to the volunteer fire department Fourth of July picnic. My family doesn’t remember this at all, but they have very poor memories. … I got the beans on my plate and I had the bun and I had just put the wiener in the bun and I was just squeezing the ketchup and the air turned white and it was snowing. Snow was falling and everybody was amazed and then somebody said, “oh no”, they said, “It’s fluff from the cottonwood trees, it’s just seeds coming down from the cottonwood trees”, and so, that was that, but then I looked down at my plate and there was nothing there. Now cottonwood fluff does not melt. Seeds don’t just disappear. It was snow on the Fourth of July. A snow flurry hit Lake Wobegon on the Fourth of July when I was a boy, but if you talk to anybody, including my family who was at the Volunteer Fire Department Bean Feed that day in 1951 on the Fourth of July, they will tell you that was fluff from the cottonwood trees that came down. I was the only one who knew the truth. A terrible responsibility for a child and one more reason to leave town, you know. There were too many things that I was the only one that knew them…

Stunning thought, but when God sends snow down on the Fourth of July, that indicates to me that he is talking to us in a loud voice and apparently I was the only one who saw this and therefore, the only one who might have a hunch what God was trying to tell us, but I turned down the privilege, thank you very much, no thank you. To be a prophet was too much for me then and it’s too much for me now. To be a prophet is hard work anytime and anyplace, but you never want to do it in a town of less than 2,000 population. If you live there and if you come from there. To stand and to tell people the truth that they have been successfully avoiding is not a pleasant business in a small town.

Back in 1918 in my town, back when the streets were lined with flags and when school children sat for hours of deadly nonsense about glory and honor and this war was a war to end all wars, this war would usher in a New World Order. Sat and listened to this there was a man on a bench outside a grocery store and turned to the man next to him and said, “I wish they’d take the flags down, I don’t think there’s any glory in this war, it’s just a bunch of politicians.” And the word got around town of this man’s remarks, this slur on our country … and people would not speak to him again for a long time…

You have become a scourge. You have become a prophet and it’s time to time to hit the road Jack. You gotta get out of this town. Well, that never happened to me and I’m not ever going to have it happen to me. That’s what God was offering me when he had the snow fall on the Fourth of July and I saw it. He was saying, “Witness to people about this. Reveal the truth of this and be a prophet.” I said, “No thank you, I don’t want it.” He said, “This will be a great service to people whom you love, to tell them the truth”. I said, “Well they’re not going to thank me for it. I know that for sure. People hurt prophets. They throw sharp things at them. They rip the clothes off them and they make them sit for long

sit for long periods of time in uncomfortable positions on top of sharp objects that are extremely flammable. That’s what they do to prophets. I don’t want that. I don’t want any pain whatsoever. I don’t ever want to experience any pain. Minor dentistry is more than enough for me. So, no thank you. I don’t want to be a prophet and tell the truth. What can I do that’s the opposite of that?” And so, I got into this line of work. Telling lies and I’ve never regretted it, which is a terrible thing to say in front of children. To say that you’ve spent your life telling lies, but I have and I’ve had a wonderful time, and I have been very well rewarded for this, and I have been congratulated by all sorts of people including members of the clergy, whereas if I had been prophet and told the truth, I would be broke and I would be unhappy myself and I would be despised and I would be condemned from most pulpits in the country. No thanks, I don’t really care for that. …

No, it’s not that I don’t know what a prophet would say, you see. I do. It’s not for lack of a message. I’m not interested in saying it. If there were a prophet, of course, a prophet would tell us that America is a country that God has blessed so much, we have not suffered as other people have. We don’t know what suffering is like. We have not known war in our country since 1865. That experience of war in 1865 was so horrible in this country, the Civil War, that we did not lift our hand against anybody for years and years after that. [note even here, Keillor ignores wars against the native population.]

But over the years we’ve become so prosperous and we have developed technology that allows us to deliver war to other people, and it never falls on us. We have no idea what war is like in this country. Our soldiers know, but when they come back to tell us, we don’t know what they’re talking about. We don’t know what war is like in this country and so it behooves us to be careful. And to rain down death on people and then to gloat over it is not becoming in God’s eyes. This is not good. To rain down destruction from this country, which knows so little suffering that our own navels become the source of our suffering is not pleasant or good in God’s eyes. We should be very careful, very careful. This is what a prophet would say, I think.

But who wants to say it, because prophets have an approval rating of five percent, only in some places. No, I’d rather be in my line of work. … God was disappointed in me at first, but He’s come around to seeing this more and more from my point of view. … God made mistakes…you spread the truth around and it becomes common and people ignore it. … Whereas, with someone like me, if I ever do tell the truth, people remember it. … I remember every time I told the truth. Like a snowfall in July — you remember every time.