Apologies to those of you who check Rob' blog, too, but for those of you who haven't already seen Garrison Keillor's bullshit in Salon and Dan Savage's rightfully irate reply, check 'em out. As Rob would say, Keillor is dead to me--except that he was never alive to me in the first place. I almost always found Prairie Home Companion tedious, dull, and too self-absorbed.
What I wonder is--what does he think about lesbian parents? Certainly the flamboyant dresser stereotype doesn't exist...but I'm sure he'd have something to say about kids and softball injuries, or something. Geez. What a dumbass.
GK made an apology, and I just read it. How totally lame. The comments are pretty depressing, too--if I didn't know better, I'd run off to write a column on the cluelessness of straight people. But I do know better, and so should have Garrison Keillor. If he was trying for satire, it sure didn't work, and (as someone in one of the comments wrote) dredging up old stereotypes does more harm than good.
Ok--enough soapbox. Now back to transcribing the conversation Jenny & I had last night about getting Maddie stoned on catnip for my linguistic anthropology assignment....
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Seems like his apology was just to say "Hey, I was just joking - and all of my friends in my inner circle would recognize that for me to talk about 'family values' that way is all in good fun, because of course I couldn't ever actually believe that non-traditional families aren't okay, etc, etc." All this might actually be okay, except that in real life he does everything possible to make sure that his listeners and readers don't know the truth about his own personal life, but instead think of him as Mr. Mom-and-apple-pie, with a bit of a liberal bent. Here from Wikipedia is his real marital/family history:
"Keillor has been married three times:
- To Mary Guntzel, from 1965 to 1976. The couple has one son, Jason, born in 1969.
-To Ulla Skaerved (a former exchange student from Denmark whom he famously re-encountered at a high school reunion), from 1985 to 1990. Keillor is mildly notorious for having dumped his long-time lover and PHC producer Margaret Moos to marry Ulla. The marriage failed when Keillor had an affair with his Danish language teacher.
- His current wife, violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson (b. 1958), from his hometown of Anoka,whom he married in 1995. They have one daughter, Maia, born in 1998."
If he included his real specifics in his commentary about family values (even in just a tongue-in-cheek way), he could probably get away with his "just joshin'" apology. Sort of like the way black folks are allowed to call other blacks "nigger" - because everyone knows they're black too. But Keillor hides his real persona (indeed, how many of his fans know that his real first name is Gary, not Garrison?), so his "apology" just shows him to be what he really is - a hypocrite.
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