Garrison Keillor's Irony

Or, “How a Seemingly Mild-Mannered, Highly Educated Radio Man Exposes Himself as a Plagiarizing Rube”

Garrison Keillor demonstrates a remarkable dearth of erudition and honesty in a story published in “In These Times” titled, "We're Not in Lake Wobegone Anymore: How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?"

Keillor lampoons the right as the home of “hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.”

But what if old Garrison’s wrong? What if, instead of finding us “deaf, dumb, and dangerous” because we're, well, hairy-backed and all that, they think we're ignorant, gullible, and mendacious because we've made a millionaire many times over of someone who anxiously appropriates the appearance of learning while feeding himself a diet of Cliffs Notes and Maureen Dowd? What if, that is, the left's favorite satirist is a divine poseur?

To drive home the point that, when you’re reading Garrison, you’re encountering the mind of an Unusually Sophisticated Urbane Righteous Person, he closes his essay with one of those observations such folks sling out when they want to remind an audience of their bona fides:
“Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.”

There’s only one (well, actually two) problems with this: First, it’s not true; second, JFK said it 41 years ago.

Turning to Volume One of my dog-eared copy of Charles Singleton’s translation of Grandgent’s Divine Comedy, which fell apart years ago when I was reading it in grad school, I found this text in Inferno III, 31 – 51:

“And I, my head circled with error, said, ‘Master, what is this I hear? And what people are these who seem so overcome by pain?’
“And he to me, ‘Such is the miserable condition of the sorry souls of those who lived without infamy and without praise. They are mingled with that base band of angels who were neither rebellious nor faithful to God, but stood apart. The heavens drive them out, so as not to be less beautiful; and deep Hell does not receive them, lest the wicked have some glory over them.’
“And I, ‘Master, what is so grievous to them that it makes them lament so bitterly?’
“He answered, ‘Very briefly I will tell you. These have no hope of death, and their blind life is so abject that they are envious of every other lot. The world does not suffer that report of them shall live. Mercy and justice disdain them. Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass on.’”

Note that this occurs in Inferno, Canto III, on the vestibule just outside the real Hell. Dante and his guide Virgil don’t climb out of Hell until Canto XXXIV, which gives him a tidy XXXI Cantos to go before getting to the bottom of hell, which is frozen. But there’s plenty of heat along the way and, after all, he hasn’t really entered Hell just yet; that doesn’t occur until he and Virgil traverse the Acheron on the bark piloted by Charon.

But if Keillor is guilty of not reading his Dante, we can’t honestly charge him with writing the text in question. That’s because it was spoken, word for word, by John F. Kennedy on June 24, 1963, in Bonn, West Germany, at the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps.

Staying true to form, Keillor fails identify the sin the lukewarm souls committed: Acedia (sloth). (Then again, not having read the text, one can hardly expect him to know the details.) One of the seven deadly sins, acedia debases these souls in the eyes of the other, worse miscreants (and demons) in Hell, a condition that makes them long for oblivion via a second death as an alternative to the nothingness that is their post-mortem existence. Singleton calls this a “terrible irony,” and indeed it is. And Dante knew how to employ irony as well as any other poet, ancient or modern.

Exemplar of sloth, agent of acedia, Keillor revels in rich displays of irony. An all-American boy from the heartland, where humor is earthy and hard work the mark of a virtuous man, he trades in hollow insults and the politics of the sneer. Satirist for sophisticates and scourge of greedy, war-mongering dimwits, he lifts his sting-lines from a long-dead president remembered for his Potemkin Camelot and thereby commits the same dumb mistake about one of the seminal works of the Western canon.

But somehow that’s an appropriate avenue for Keillor’s mistake: It's enough for such folks to mouth platitudes (or write them) in order to slander the intellect and honor of the very Americans he claims to represent. A wink and a nudge and the right people will know who’s in your sites, and why. And hey, it’s a lot easier than reading all those old books.