Jul 4, 2016

Garrison Keillor’s Prophecy and Apostasy

Garrison Keillor. (Trishhhh / CC-BY-2.0) 1 2 3

Garrison Keillor. (Trishhhh / CC-BY-2.0)

This piece first appeared at Sam Husseini’s website.

On what was billed as his last show, Garrison Keillor, host of “A Prairie Home Companion” got a call from President Barack Obama and they traded extensive compliments, with Keillor telling Obama he was “the coolest president.”

Keillor’s signing off on July 4 weekend was likely calculated to extenuate his presumed ties to all things Americana, but for me it actually highlighted his hypocrisies and contradictions.

For one, my favorite story of his was set on the Fourth. I’d long thought that any reasonable person who hears that story would concur it was his greatest. Unfortunately when I asked him about it last year, Keillor himself clearly wouldn’t fit into that category.

The story — which he told shortly after the 1991 bombing of Iraq — was simply titled “Prophet.” When I heard it at the time, it gave me a sense that there was a silver of hope in turning the U.S. public around regarding the country’s place in the world. My girlfriend back then gave me the cassette tape collection that included the story as a birthday present.

Until lawyers expunge it from the internet, you can listen to that story on here. I’ve excerpted the heart of it below.

I tolerated Keillor’s unevenness for years after that, listening on and off. I had an unsatisfying run in with him in 1999, but I’d overlooked that and his various annoying proclivities, especially his seeming incessant avoidance of the moral sins that created the U.S. — because he told the “Prophet” story. But you never really know someone until you have a chance to ask them a couple of questions, as I did when he spoke at the National Press Club last year.

He began his talk at the Press Club by bemoaning that people rarely addressed particular things he’d written. They’d just say “good job” — as you “would say to a child who had had a bowel movement. … As I look back on my career in broadcasting, nobody had ever complemented me on a specific thing. Nobody had ever quoted back to me some brilliant thing I had ever said. It was always general. ‘We like your show.’ ‘It really relaxes our children.’ ‘We listen to it late at night.’ And it occurred to me that perhaps I had spent 40 years in radio as a sort of comforting baritone presence and that nobody heard anything in particular that I had said.”

I felt so good, because I had submitted a question about the “Prophet” story which he told decades earlier. Surely he’d be floored that someone remembers that story. Perhaps seeing that that’s what resonated with people he would be compelled to use his pulpit to do more of that caliber of commentary.

The moderator of the event, then Press Club President John Hughes did ask that question: “One of your greatest stories on ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ was the ‘Prophet’ which you told during the 1991 Gulf War. What would a prophet tell us now?”

But Keillor basically renounced the story: “I am not in the prophecy business and sort of regret that monologue. I’ve been trying to forget it for years and years. It was one of my ill-advised ventures into political commentary. I had almost erased it from my mind, John. You brought back a little tiny bit of it. That’s p-r-o-p-h-e-t? I have no idea — I have been around and seen a lot of young people in the last month …”

He yada-yada-ed for a bit about passing the mantle, but the point was made. [See video.]

Here are the most substantial chunks of the “Prophet” story:

I recall when I was a little boy, going to the volunteer fire department Fourth of July picnic. My family doesn’t remember this at all, but they have very poor memories. … I got the beans on my plate and I had the bun and I had just put the wiener in the bun and I was just squeezing the ketchup and the air turned white and it was snowing. Snow was falling and everybody was amazed and then somebody said, “oh no”, they said, “It’s fluff from the cottonwood trees, it’s just seeds coming down from the cottonwood trees”, and so, that was that, but then I looked down at my plate and there was nothing there. Now cottonwood fluff does not melt. Seeds don’t just disappear. It was snow on the Fourth of July. A snow flurry hit Lake Wobegon on the Fourth of July when I was a boy, but if you talk to anybody, including my family who was at the Volunteer Fire Department Bean Feed that day in 1951 on the Fourth of July, they will tell you that was fluff from the cottonwood trees that came down. I was the only one who knew the truth. A terrible responsibility for a child and one more reason to leave town, you know. There were too many things that I was the only one that knew them…

Stunning thought, but when God sends snow down on the Fourth of July, that indicates to me that he is talking to us in a loud voice and apparently I was the only one who saw this and therefore, the only one who might have a hunch what God was trying to tell us, but I turned down the privilege, thank you very much, no thank you. To be a prophet was too much for me then and it’s too much for me now. To be a prophet is hard work anytime and anyplace, but you never want to do it in a town of less than 2,000 population. If you live there and if you come from there. To stand and to tell people the truth that they have been successfully avoiding is not a pleasant business in a small town.

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