What I found out in Kansas

The Column: 03.06.25

I became a cheerful person when I was in my twenties and got a job in radio. I’d been a mediocre student and was trying to be a poet but was averse to poverty so I needed a job and I landed the early morning shift because nobody else wanted to get up at 4 a.m. I come from somber fundamentalist stock, but I knew my job was to be lighthearted on cold dark Minnesota mornings, which is sort of like being a chaplain on Death Row, and I learned to impersonate lightheartedness and got good at it. And now I’ve been doing it for sixty years and actually love it.

I did a show at the Fox Theatre in Hutchinson, Kansas, last week that was one of the happiest of my long career, had a couple wonderful hours with a thousand Kansans, many of whom may have voted for this disaster of a president and his tycoon in the black cap and shades who’s running the government. But we didn’t talk about that. We sang “My country ’tis of thee” and The Battle Hymn of the Republic, including the verse about the circling camps and the dews and damps and dim and flaring lamps. We omitted political commentary entirely.

I am good at deletion. I deleted tobacco 40 years ago and alcohol 25, stopped them by simply not doing them anymore: you go through a rocky few days of distracting yourself with popcorn or writing limericks or drinking gallons of herbal tea and pretending it’s whiskey.

I finished a novel this week called So Long, Wobegon, which has been a wooden yoke around my neck for three years. I accomplished it by deletion. You write and you write and you write and you cut about 29/30ths of the whole mess and you’ve got something darned decent, maybe better. Non-writers don’t know this; they think writing is a talent, but it’s actually a drive, you’re driven to do it and once it’s on the page you can tell what is dead leaves and rubbish and you delete it. The laptop is a beautiful tool that lets you highlight the rubbish and click on CUT and it’s gone. A miracle.

Back in my youth I grew a big black beard that I wore to make myself look literary, same as I chain-smoked and soaked up whiskey in the belief that it was required of an author, and the day I went to a barber and got a shave was one of the happiest days of my life. Writing is in your head, it’s not a Look.

I did the show in Hutchinson with my singing partner Heather, the Tallest Best Vocalist in America, and our piano player Rich the Intuitive, and it was a piece of cake. She’s half my age, conservatory-trained and I’m a grumbly baritone but she turns me into a sweet alto — another miracle. We sang the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” and Blake and Yeats and Burns and Emily Dickinson and Paul Simon —

Meanwhile the tycoon in the black cap and shades is in charge, and the Republican Party, once anti-communist, is doing Putin’s bidding, and the White House is lost in irrational whimsy in imitation of William McKinley. It’s a wretched time in American history and it was a happy night in a small town in Kansas.

I came home and our dinner guests were despairing about the damage the guy in the black hat has done to USAID, the pregnant women and the children who will die of preventable diseases all because we’re no longer in the business of humanitarianism, we have ceased, by executive order, to be a benevolent nation. It’s all true but I took the opposite position, that cheerfulness is the American way, that despair is defeat. Do your best and forget the rest. Good cheer is contagious, can make you courageous. Pick up your feet and clap on the backbeat.

My generation was lucky. Our parents endured the Depression and the war, and we grew up with a plenitude of opportunity. We owe it to the kids to clean up this disaster. The Democrats need to set aside identity issues and unite as Americans to save the Republic.

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Garrison Keillor is headed to City Winery locations near and far this May and June. Attend the show for limericks, poetry, singalongs, the News from Lake Wobegon and more!

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