On this day in history something awful happened, and nobody remembers it anymore – except Garrison Keillor.
And on this day in history something significant happened that changed lives, and nobody remembers it anymore – except Garrison Keillor.
Also on this day, a poet, a novelist, a scientist, a musician, a politician was born. No matter how obscure they may be now, Garrison Keillor sends birthday greetings.
When the host and creator of “Prairie Home Companion” signed off on his public radio show, he received end-of-an-era accolades, including a superficial phone call from President Obama. (Really now, Garrison, what difference does it make how “cool” a president is? Would a higher “cool” quotient improve Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump?)
In the fanfare that surrounded Keillor’s last “Prairie Home Companion,” there was occasionally a brief mention that his “Writer’s Almanac” would continue being broadcast on some public radio stations.
It got the boot from my public radio station (KOPB) in Portland, Ore., several years ago. I can imagine the decision-making that went into it – “Garrison Keillor’s just another old white guy.”
I continued subscribing to it electronically, where a more complete edition than the broadcast version can be found at www.writersalmanac.org. It’s the perfect complement to the day’s news. It provides context.
Take July 2, for example. While NPR hosts continued to predict doom because a majority in Great Britain voted to leave the European Union, “Writer’s Almanac” featured this bit of historic news: In 1776, The Second Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia and adopted a resolution for independence from Great Britain.
“The 13 colonies had been warring with Great Britain for over a year because of steep taxes, the Stamp Act of 1765, and the fact that they were being ruled by a king an ocean away, with no voice in Parliament. Though some colonists wished to remain under British rule, many did not.”
Depending on your viewpoint, that vote in 1776 turned out to be a good thing. The United States found its independence, and Great Britain continued to survive. Two-hundred and forty years from now, how will people look back at the Brexit vote? Will anybody remember it?
Or consider this item, also from July 2: “It’s the birthday of civil rights activist, lawyer, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (1908), born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Marshall’s ruling in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case (1954) was instrumental in ending legal racial segregation. Marshall was the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court (1967).”
The entry goes on to describe Marshall’s evolution as a legal scholar and his historic ruling on Brown vs. Board of Education, including his statement, “Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place.”
As “Writer’s Almanac” notes, the ruling “changed the landscape of American education forever. Thurgood Marshall died in 1993. In the aftermath of his death, one obituary read, ‘We make movies about Malcolm X, we get a holiday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, but every day we live with the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall.’”
For better or worse, our public education system proves it.
On historical matters of race, “Writer’s Almanac” is especially relevant. One day, Keillor revisited Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old black girl in a starched white dress, kneeling and praying on a street in New Orleans in 1960, while a white mob surrounded her.
Keillor’s recollection was prompted by the birthday of Robert Coles, author and child psychologist who witnessed the scene. He later co-founded the magazine “DoubleTake,” about ordinary people and their lives.
In “Almanac” fashion, Keillor plucked this perfect quote from Robert Coles: “We should look inward and think about the meaning of our life and its purposes, lest we do it in 20 or 30 years and it’s too late.”
On another day, Keillor revisited William Faulkner’s stance on segregation and integration. Faulkner was opposed to segregation but also rejected federal intervention.
Keillor recalled that when black author W.E.B. Du Bois challenged Faulkner to a debate on the subject of integration, the author declined, saying there was no debatable point between them. Faulkner conceded that the position Du Bois would take was right morally, legally, and ethically.
Keillor’s summation: “Faulkner believed that a slow and moderate approach to integration was simply a matter of practicality.”
On still another glimpse into race, there was this entry one year for April 29th, the birthday of Duke Ellington, born Edward Kennedy Ellington in 1899:
“His father’s job as a butler paid well, his mother dressed him in fancy clothes, and so his friends gave him the nickname ‘Duke’. When he was seven years old, a piano teacher refused to teach him, because he wouldn’t stop improvising and experimenting with off-tone chords. So he taught himself to play by studying the family player piano.”
How many young blacks in 21st Century America would look down their noses at a butler’s job? How many Black Studies professors in 21st Century America would cast a butler’s job as demeaning and racist – without ever considering that many white families in early 20th Century couldn’t afford a player piano, let alone a butler?
Keillor keeps alive famous writers nobody reads anymore: French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, born Aug. 26 in Rome (1880) who said, “I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts.”
Apollinaire would see through the phony inclusiveness our politicians and media shove on us in 2016. Loneliness may be the human condition, but nobody wants to be crammed into a box – even with people “who look just like them.”
Keillor reminds us of the words from now-dead writers who may have seen our future better than we see our present: “Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ (1932), is about a future in which most human beings are born in test tube factories, genetically engineered to belong in one of five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. There are no families, people have sex all the time and never fall in love, and they keep themselves happy by taking a drug called ‘soma.’”
Unfortunately, the “Writer’s Almanac” with its small, daily doses of history has never captured the media fanfare of Bill Gates’ “Big History Project.”
Several years ago, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder started the Big History Project after watching David Christian’s Big History DVD series while working out on his treadmill. Gates was captivated by the charisma of the Oxford-educated historian, especially his history of the world in 18 minutes.
“I just loved it,” Gates told the New York Times. “It was very clarifying for me. I thought, ‘God, everybody should watch this thing!’”
With his money, he set about getting everybody to do just that, especially with a captive audience like high school kids. In 2011 with funding from the Gates Foundation, the Big History Project started with several high schools and has since grown to more than 700.
Like anything involving education and large sums of money, it has attracted praise, criticism and controversy. Some students and teachers love the big-picture approach to history where humans are barely a footnote. Some educators feel like Bill Gates is telling them what to teach.
“Andrew Carnegie built libraries, but he didn’t tell people what to read,” said Sam Wineburg, a Stanford education and history professor.
Some students are left wondering if the Big Bang had a point.
“So when you really think about it, what are we doing here?” Moss Arnold a 10th grader at Kenwood High School in Essex, Md., told NPR. “It just makes you think that really everything will be meaningless soon.”
I don’t have an easy answer for him.
Neither do I have Bill Gates’ billions. But I did send Writer’s Almanac a $60 donation.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
I had forgotten about Writer’s Almanac. Thanks for the reminder! I went over there today and read about the first woman who was executed by the U.S. What a story!
I stopped being a regular listener to Garrison’s show. I was tired of his “fart” and “booger” jokes. He’s too smart for that. I look forward to see what he does next with his writing.
Bill Gates has become controversial in education because of his obsession with Common Core and test scores. I have former colleagues still teaching who say his money isn’t worth it. Too many strings and demands attached. Gates is no Dale Carnegie.
Yikes! I meant ANDREW Carnegie. Like the guy you quote, Carnegie built libraries but didn’t tell people what to read.
Your slip-up made me wonder what Dale Carnegie would have been like if he’d had billions of dollars. He would probably be more like Bill Gates than Andrew Carnegie.
I leafed through a copy of Dale’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” He’s like Gates in that he wants to change people’s behavior through education. But he doesn’t think it takes large sums of money to change them — just his inexpensive paperback with its inexpensive advice. His advice can be interpreted as cynical and simplistic. Are people that easy to manipulate? Given the sheep-like nature of many people, probably.
It’s not surprising that his book sold millions of copies. One section is called, “Six Ways to Make People Like You.” Can you really “make” someone like you? In Carnegie’s book, it mostly comes down to pretending to be interested in other people. With all the self-absorption and tribalism in our country now, who wants to work at making people like them? Join a group and demand a law requiring that everyone else accept and respect your tribe.
I don’t know what Dale Carnegie would advise to Americans in 2016.
I was reading about Ida Tarbell today (and McClure’s).
As you know, it was her full blooded attack on John D. that exposed a vast, collusive, and ugly monopoly. Would that Gates and his confrere’s got a dose of similar action.
Then again we could do with a Republican activist like TR as well.
Keillor devoted the first 8 years of this century to insulting people like myself and to having a snarking good time. Consequently, I wish him and PRI to hell.
I did enjoy him for a quarter century and I’ve also been to the Fitzgerald Theater and been entertained by Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me.
You are very correct, too in praising The Writer’s Almanac. I enjoyed every entry that I heard. However, by 2008 I was considering fire-bombing the public radio station. I’d volunteered for the inbred and insular bunch once too often. I decided to quit listening instead.
A little nostalgia does seem in order tonight, however. Recall the palmy days of the Black Guerilla Army? Eldridge merrily meditating raping white women as a legitimate political act? The ever pertinent Minister of Defense Huey P.? Chatty Cathy Boudin setting a salt and pepper cop pair up for murder?
Well, the president, white liberals, Black Lies Matter and the media have lit the fuse and it’s not gonna end well. Not at all.
I loved your fire-bombing comment, Larry.
Earlier today I listened to OPB’s “Think Out Loud” carefully and respectfully interview Teressa Raiford. She has spouted some fiery rhetoric of her own in the past few years, but the media respect keeps coming. (She blames Portland Public Schools for the death of her nephew who was shot at 2 a.m. on a street in Northwest Portland — hardly during school hours. Witnesses said the shooters were young, black males.)
But a fire-bombing comment from a white guy named Larry who used to work for public radio? Somebody better call Loretta Lynch.
Last night after the news out of Dallas, I happen to watch a documentary from 2011 called “The Interrupters” (from PBS’s “Frontline” series). It’s about a Chicago group of former gang members who are “violence interrupters” for an organization called CeaseFire.
It is two hours of non-stop, meaningless violence, mostly among blacks but also some Hispanics. It reminded me of when I covered gang shootings in San Bernardino (mostly black vs. Hispanic). Even the funerals were the same.
At the beginning of the film there is a scene where a group of young black males are laughing about how scared the police are. Yet the media wonder why cops (of all races) are quick to a pull a gun on a black suspect? Actually, the media don’t question that. They just assume it’s racist cops.
When the American media and so-called leaders like Teressa Raiford talk about “systemic racism,” it’s a one-way street.
You are right. The media, more than any other institution, have lit the fuse. The media show no leadership. They hand a megaphone to the Teressa Raifords but would never to think to ask why a young woman, sitting next to her boyfriend bleeding from a gunshot wound, would choose to videotape his death rather than try to stop the bleeding.
I’m providing a link that seems to expand the discussion, or at least might have that possibility. Of course the sort of site and its bias are obvious, but it might include actual facts:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/07/08/confirmed-philando-castile-was-an-armed-robbery-suspect-false-media-narrative-now-driving-cop-killings/
Meanwhile, I like the rest of the English speaking world will continue to struggle against the subjunctive.
I don’t intend to double post but believe I may have fat fingered away a prior.
Here’s a link from a source many will consider dubious but does seem to have verifiable observations and so plausible conclusions. It too is of a piece with the rotten media aspect of matters. Puts me in mind of the editing out of the Trayvon killer’s scalp wound, among many other incidences.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/07/08/confirmed-philando-castile-was-an-armed-robbery-suspect-false-media-narrative-now-driving-cop-killings/
The President is once again in a bind. In an insight similar to the Muslim Fort Brag Major who gunned town his fellows while shouting “Allah uh Akbar” Obama is at a loss as to why the Dallas fellow killed all of those white cops:
“First of all, I think it’s very hard to untangle the motivers of this shooter,” said Obama. “I’ll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents…I think the danger is that we somehow suggest the act of a troubled individuals speaks to some larger political statement across the country.”
Dallas police chief David Brown, who said the suspected shooter, the now deceased Micah Xavier Johnson, “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
Sometimes a cigar is a smoke.