Boring Old Man
I don’t usually pay attention to Garrison Keillor. He’s occasionally on doing some odd snippet about books or something at 8 in the morning if I’m still listening to NPR as I pull into the parking lot at work. The only coherent thought I ever have about him is that he has the classic NPR voice. I am dimly aware that he writes in addition to doing that godawful boring radio show of his.
InstaPunk was kind enough to savagely demolish some of his blather today. InstaPunk nails him to the wall, and I'm going to continue to pile on. Garrison Keillor is emblematic of the worst kind of psuedo-intellectual crap in America. Only his vision of America is authentic. Everybody else’s vision is somehow wrong, because only the wise and all-knowing Mr. Keillor can discern the true American spirit. Apparently, it has a lot to do with small towns in the middle of nowhere. This is one of the reasons I’ve always found him to be so incredibly tedious. I’ve been to small towns. I generally leave as soon as possible. Small towns have little in common with my way of life, which is as thoroughly American as it gets.
Funny, but I’ve never heard him express any knowledge or liking for the way of life I grew up living. I am one of the unabashed millions of white boys from the ‘burbs. There are two different ignorant mindsets about the “authentic” American experience. You either have to live in BFE nowhere, or be inside the dense urban gritty core. Somehow, the vast numbers that don’t live in either place aren’t really living the American experience. Funny, but there seems to be a lot of us out here. Maybe Mr. Keillor could come visit sometime and learn something.
InstaPunk was kind enough to savagely demolish some of his blather today. InstaPunk nails him to the wall, and I'm going to continue to pile on. Garrison Keillor is emblematic of the worst kind of psuedo-intellectual crap in America. Only his vision of America is authentic. Everybody else’s vision is somehow wrong, because only the wise and all-knowing Mr. Keillor can discern the true American spirit. Apparently, it has a lot to do with small towns in the middle of nowhere. This is one of the reasons I’ve always found him to be so incredibly tedious. I’ve been to small towns. I generally leave as soon as possible. Small towns have little in common with my way of life, which is as thoroughly American as it gets.
Funny, but I’ve never heard him express any knowledge or liking for the way of life I grew up living. I am one of the unabashed millions of white boys from the ‘burbs. There are two different ignorant mindsets about the “authentic” American experience. You either have to live in BFE nowhere, or be inside the dense urban gritty core. Somehow, the vast numbers that don’t live in either place aren’t really living the American experience. Funny, but there seems to be a lot of us out here. Maybe Mr. Keillor could come visit sometime and learn something.
posted by T at 5:09 PM
1 Comments:
curtsy,
I'll repeat myself since you seem to have missed the point. My way of life is not the only "authentic" American existence. However, it is an authentic American experience and is as authentically American as any other. The life I lead is simply not possible in any other country. Unlike Mr. Keillor, I'm not going around insisting that people that have differing experiences are somehow inauthentic or unamerican. There are more varieties of American experience than either Mr. Keillor or you seem prepared to accept.
Can the suburbs be criticized on any number of grounds? Yes. Can they be criticized for not representing an American way of life? No. Do you get the point now?
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