So. We have a vulgar, unstable yo-yo with a toxic ego and an attention deficit problem in the White House and now we can see that government by Twitter is like trying to steer a ship by firing a pistol at the waves, not really useful, but what does it all add up to? Not that much, if you ask me, which you didn’t, but I’ll say it anyway.
We will survive this. He will do what damage he can, like a man burning books out of anger that he can’t read, but there will still be plenty of books left.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Garrison Keillor created and was the longtime host of “A Prairie Home Companion.”
I went to my high school class reunion last week and the gentleman’s name never came up. He’s been front-page for months, every bleat, blurt and yelp played over and over on cable news. But among my old classmates, not a word. They spoke with awe and reverence of their grandchildren (we’re the Class of 1960), some about travel, plumbing projects, beloved old cars, stories of youth and indiscretion, nothing about death or Trump. After five hours with them, I have no idea whether their wing is left or right. Remarkable.
Marvin Buchholz and Wayne Swanson are still farming, though they, like the rest of us, are 75 or close to it. They both know what sweet corn is supposed to taste like. Dean Johnson is still tinkering with cars. Rich Peterson is in terrific shape, thanks to teaching phys ed all these years. His parents ran Cully’s Cafe out back of the Herald office where I wrote sports when I was 16, and I’d come in to eat hot beef and gravy on white bread and potatoes while reading my own immortal words in black type. They loved their boy, and he turned out well.
Bob Bell and I discussed some classmates whom I considered lowlifes and hoods because they wore black shirts with white ties and drove old cars with flame decals and loud mufflers, but he saw a better side to them and stood up for them, and good for him. His dad was an attorney, so Bob grew up with the idea that everyone deserves a good defense.
Carol Hutchinson was a librarian, Vicky Rubis a schoolteacher, Mary Ellen Krause worked at the town bank, one of the sparkplugs who kept our hometown’s enormous Halloween parade going all these years. Carl Youngquist and I remembered our basketball team of 1958, a good bet to win State but we lost in the early prelims to a bunch of farmboys from St. Francis. St. Francis! It was like Rocky Marciano being KOed by Mister Peepers.
It’s a privilege to know people over the course of a lifetime and to reconnoiter and hear about the ordinary goodness of life. By 75, some of our class have gotten whacked hard. And the casualty rate does keep climbing. And yet life is good. These people are America as I know it. Family, work, a sense of humor, gratitude to God for our daily bread and loyalty to the tribe.
If the gentleman stands in the bow and fires his peashooter at the storm, if he appoints a gorilla as head of communications, if he tweets that henceforth no transcendentalist shall be allowed in the armed forces, nonetheless life goes on.
He fulfills an important role of celebs: giving millions of people the chance to feel superior to him. The gloomy face and the antique adolescent hair, the mannequin wife and the clueless children of privilege, the sheer pointlessness of flying around in a 747 to say inane things to crowds of people – it’s cheap entertainment for us and in the end it simply doesn’t matter.
What matters are tomatoes. There is an excellent crop this year, like the tomatoes of our youth that we ate right off the vine, juice running down our chins. There is nothing like this.
For years, I dashed into supermarkets and scooped up whatever was available, tomatoes bred for long shelf life that tasted like wet cardboard, and now I go to a farmers market and I’m astonished all over again. A spiritual experience. The spontaneity of the tomato compared to the manufactured sweetness of the glazed doughnut. An awakening takes place, light shines in your soul. Anyone who bites into a good tomato and thinks about Mr. Trump is seriously delusional.
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