Garrison Keillor: "Nonbelievers, please leave Christmas alone..."
(Tim, w/thanks to Gary) As I remember it, Garrison Keillor became a different kind of humorist back around the time of his first or second divorce. Once, back in the late seventies, he sent Dad a note telling him he'd been a fan of Dad's writing when he was a college student. In the early nineties when I edited a compilation of Dad's "Out of My Mind" pieces from Eternity, I asked Mr. Keillor if he'd write a short intro, and he was quite gracious to do so.
But I must say I've seen a hardening of the conscience in Mr. Keillor's humor and have largely lost my appetite. Then tonight, David and I had this piece forwarded by our dear brother, Gary Knapp. Yes, it's a little bit caustic, but I had to chuckle. Also to rejoice that Mr. Keillor still confesses Christ. He grew up a Covenant child. Pray for him, will you?
By the way, the most amazing part of this piece is Mr. Keillor's complaint...
about "all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck."
Didn't he know he's never supposed to mention Jews except in a laudatory way? Next thing you know, National Review will be running a cover article about how Garrison Keillor, too, has become something approximating, and yet not quite, anti-Semitic. Then again, it's likely a lot easier to smear Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran than Garrison Keillor.
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Comments
Tim,
Thanks for that.
I would still enjoy listening once in a while if it weren't for that awful whistle -- surely the man can afford better-fitting dentures! Every time I hear the News from Lake Wobegon, I think the man must have known some of my relatives and their friends and neighbors.
Kamilla
I read and loved the first edition of "Out of My Mind." Also "Gospel Blimp" and "I Saw Gooley Fly."
(c:
As to Keillor... he despises practicing Christians, loathes them. He has a pulsating, miserable guilty conscience. One poison footnote in one of his books pours out as much vitriol as I've ever seen.
I used to love listening to him, but heard the change over the years, the bitter hatred of practicing Christians in his folksy old stories. He likes to keep them in his audience, even while ridiculing and despising any of them who does anything distinctively Biblical with his faith.
Yeah, I have to say that his "down home appeal" is way too laced with a liberal, anti-Christian agenda. It kind of turns my stomach, because I think, "Why not come by it honestly instead of trying to take these passive-aggressive jabs during a supposed 'wholesome' show?"
I know what you commentors, mean, but the column that is the subject of this post seems very different. Has he reformed?
Yes, Dan, that's been my sense, also.
Eric, that's what I've found myself wondering. This piece is so out of character, as his characters has declined the past decade or so. God, please make it so.
Love,
My question as well. I have to wonder if "leave us alone" is more an aesthetic argument than spiritual. That said, I'm TIRED of really lame secular "Christmas" songs, too.
Liberals always cut their own a lot of slack. No doubt they would turn a blind eye to anything that Keillor would say that they might find unsavory. That is until they decide that he clearly isn't on their side. You will know if he has reformed by the enemies he keeps.
I like National Review, the online edition at least. Is being critical of Keillor really what they would do?
Dear Denver,
No, but check out their smear of Buchanan and Sobran back in 1990 (if you can find it). From that time, I had little respect for Buckley. As Sobran describes Buckley's essay: ""Bill Buckley never called me anti-Semitic, in fact he denied that I was anti-Semitic, but he made a serpentine charge that I somehow deserved to be falsely accused of anti-Semitism!"
For an account of the mess: http://english.pravda.ru/letters/2002/02/07/26286.html
Love,
Hmmmmm. Yet Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran were (and remain) oddly silent about a church filled with conniving pedophiles and the allegedly celibate men in black & purple robes who enabled them to rape children.
That would be their own, of course. You know, the one whose colorfully attired leaders now claim they didn't realize child rape was such bad a thing.
Frankly, as a veteran of Catholic schools I could've done with a bit more kitsch songs by Hebrews and a bit less "confused" priests and frustrated-to-the-point-of-mental-illness nuns. True, I did manage to escape any actual molestation by the former, but not everyone is as lucky. Had I been a cuter boy who knows what might've happened? There were certainly enough stories going round.
But I digress . . .
Well, Merry Christmas!
You needn't recognize it as a snow-capped pagan ritual if you don't want to. Go ahead, pretend it's an eternal 1956 and that your childhood memories, customs and beliefs are what's normal and godly and the true way of the world for all time. After all, that's what Pat does.
Finally, if anyone else writes unfavorably about the literal descendents of your ostensible Lord and savior, i.e., da Jews, please be sure to post! (It must be painful knowing so many Jews become doctors and physicists and computer programmers and scientists while you've devoted your own lives to sorry fantasy and ritual, huh? Well, if it's any consolation realize that you probably weren't smart enough to do much more.)
Me, I console myself with the knowledge that the nonsense that is organized religion is fading and one day such silliness as Presbyterianism, Islam, Judaism and Catholicism will be as irrelevant to most Americans as haggis. (Wales, of course, is already well on the way to being done with Presbyterianism. Wales! Can the land of Walmart and Dairy Queen be far behind?)
I believe the main revival among the Welsh was actually Methodism, Terry. Now Scotland, on the other hand.....
....and if you want the hopelessness of Europe, I guess that's your right, but as for me and my house,........
...never mind the little fallacy you indulge about "well, since Buchanan and Sobran didn't talk a LOT about this, they therefore didn't care about it...." Evidently the Logic class you took at St. Mary's didn't exactly bear fruit.
Incidentally, when William F. Buckley died, Christopher Hitchens waxed nostalgic: "(Buckley) picked an open fight with the John Birch Society, (took) on the fringe anti-Semites and weirdo isolationists of the Old Right, and helped to condition the Republican comeback of 1980. Was he really, as he had once claimed, yelling ‘stop’ at the locomotive of history, or was he a closet ‘progressive?’" [A Man of Incessant Labor, Weekly Standard, March 10, 2008]
As one wag put it, Buckley started out athwart and all that yelling "Stop!", but ended yelling "Uncle!" Neocons were critical to his project, although after giving up NR to the young men, he did eventually admit he'd been wrong about what Podhoretz in "Commentary" labeled approvingly, World War IV.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/world-war-iv--how-it-s...
http://vdare.com/piatak/080320_buckleyism.htm
Terry G. - Regarding Christendom there is much to poke holes in, many sins have been committed falsely in the name of Christ, which will be judged by Christ as you will be. The historical resurrection of Christ, however, is something I challenge you to disprove. The foundation of Christianity is not born out of a desire for rules and rituals (though many make it so), its foundation is based on something that happened one Sunday morning just outside of Jerusalem in a place you can see on Google maps and with your own eyes if you travel there. If someone can disprove the over five hundred people who testified to Christ's bodily resurrection by producing his dead body, as his contemporaries were unable to do even with the Roman authorities and Jewish power on their side, then Christianity would go away. We are here because it happened and because we are terrible sinners in need of Christ's forgiveness. Unless you likewise repent you will spend eternity paying for your sins along with those in the church who falsely claim the name of Christ. Terry, I charge you - repent and trust Christ to cover your sin before you find yourself standing before the throne of God with no covering for your sin!
In other words, Terry, all of us who claim the glorious Name of Jesus are even worse than you think. So we've fled to the Cross and Blood of Jesus Christ for mercy, and received it there from the Father God Who sent His Son to die for us. Out of His love for His Son. Out of His love for us. Out of His love for the world.
This is foolishness to unbelievers, but infinite wisdom to us. And now we live for Jesus.
Repent and believe in God's love and mercy, dear sir.
Under His precious blood,
Garrison Keillor should keep one thing in mind the next time he mouths off---that Christ was a Jew (whether he likes it or not.) The Apostles were Jewish (whether he likes it or not) and Jews have been paid to write Xmas songs by music publishers (whether he likes it or not). Big f' deal!! There are Jews that see Xmas as an American holiday and celebrate it along with their Christian brothers.
If someone named Charles Osborn the 3rd wrote a song about Hanukkah, you wouldn't hear a peep out of the Jewish community (unless the song was awful.)
Sorry, but in my opinion, Keillor should shut his homely yap and go back to his make believe worlds where there are no Jews.
p.s. Here's another message for Keillor. Please do not use the word "dreck" any longer--for it was created by Jews and not meant to be used by "non Jews." I suggest that anyone of the Jewish faith to use that particular word to describe the work of Garrison Keillor.
Chopper,
Orrin Hatch did write a song about Hannukah!
And you are correct, at least as far as I know. I haven't heard of any Jews or Jewish groups complaining about it.
See that? No Jews (that I'm aware of) were publishing articles complaining and asking Hatch to stop writing songs about a Jewish holiday. Keillor is just a smug and arrogant Grinch (he actually looks like the Grinch). I hope he drowns in Lake Wobegone.
Chopper,
If you want to have a discussion, a good start would be to address the substance of this (or some other) post in some meaningful way.
If all you have to offer is to assert that GK is anti-Semitic, then you only serve as the example that confirms the last paragraph.
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