So It Goes

"Prairie Home Companion" -- My Candidate for National Treasure

 ABOUT SIX WEEKS AGO, my family and I went to see a live show of "A Prairie Home Companion" at Wolf Trap, the performing arts center in the Washington area. In summary, it was a wonderful evening, full of the usual "Prairie Home Companion" fare of nostalgia, humor, great music and literary brilliance.

But I'm easy to please. I've been listening to the show since the late 1970s and feel like I've practically grown up with it. Through it, I've discovered so many musicians whom I have since followed religiously. And I've spent many a Saturday night swept away by Garrison Keillor's pastoral and sometimes existential "News From Lake Wobegon" (which I now listen to via my iPod; the podcasts of the "News" are available online for free.)

In fact, while I've been meaning to write about this performance much sooner than today, July 4th seems like a perfect occasion to pronounce the program and Keillor, the show's mastermind (pictured above right), national treasures.

I know that sounds a bit over the top, especially to those who might dismiss the show as corny, overly sentimental, anachronistic and too precious sometimes for its own good. To a point, I can understand why they feel that way; if you think of the show in a certain way, all those characterizations are true. But I guess I like a little bit of all of that in my life, especially when it is spooned out as perfectly as this show does.

For example, before the show officially started with its theme song, Keillor warmed up the Wolf Trap crowd by walking slowly and without any accompanying commentary to the very back of the house (which is outside), solemnly singing every verse of "America the Beautiful." Then it was on to the "Star Spangled Banner."

Everyone of the crowd of a few thousand was on his or her feet, many singing loudly and passionately. It was as if Keillor was saying, "Before we can go through this experience together we must find something that will bond us, a common thread that everyone -- at least everyone brought up in American society -- can relate to and call his or her own." Sounds a bit sappy, right? Maybe, but not to the people who were there.

Keillor and Company tap into that shared consciousness, into American mythology, not merely to preserve cultural artifacts of the past but also to allow us to figure out what it means to be American today.  And they do it with choral music, old nuggets of musical Americana -- from Stephen Foster to Bob Dylan -- quaint greetings from audience members to friends and family back home, joke shows, poetry, and sketches and faux commercials that were in style when radio required listeners to conjure visual images in their own minds. This is not mere background noise. You have to truly pay attention.

What emerges are patches of aural imagery that, if you listen week in and week out, make up a mosaic of the American Experience. 

Of course, like any representation of America that you might see in, say, a museum or through a movie, the one you get from "Prairie Home Companion" is uniquely shaped by one vantage point -- namely Keillor's, which is informed by his own life and surroundings in Minnesota. When we stop to celebrate America, as we do on July 4th or on Thanksgiving, or to articulate what it is that makes America distinctive, we are contemplating a myth.

By myth, I don't mean a falsehood but rather a narrative that embodies the values of a nation. Most nations have such myths, and the key to creating a coherent culture is to find ways to demonstrate those values, as "Prairie Home Companion" does every week. And it does so in a way that can be accessible to everyone regardless of whether they've grown up Lutheran in a small farm town "on the edge of the Prairie," as Keillor describes Lake Wobegon. Even a Jewish guy like me who grew up in Indiana and lives now in the Washington, D.C., area -- and others with more disparate backgrounds -- can relate because it contains common personal and communal ingredients that so many Americans share regardless of who they are.

Do you see now where I'm going with this idea of the show being a nation treasure?

One of the most common themes Keillor has come back to repeatedly for years in his "News from Lake Wobegon," is the contrast between the quaint, God-fearing and unambitious atmosphere of his fictional town against the marvelously fast-paced, glimmering but sometimes heartless culture of the big city (whether it is Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York City, Paris, Los Angeles or, you name it). People are constantly going to and from those places to Lake Wobegon, and the juxtaposition is always insightful and humorous and often poignant.

Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, he described this year's commencement ceremony at Lake Wobegon High School and how all of the graduates saw it as a gateway moment to the glamor, excitement and opportunity of the big city. The big American city is, in the Keillor narrative, dynamic and full of possibility. It is constantly tugging the sleeve of every Wobegonian. By contrast, people who remain in Lake Wobegon sit around complaining about their problems, fear change and shun ambition as immodest and almost an affront to God.

Keillor has also spoken frequently about his life -- though it is often hard to tell which of these autobiographical tales are fact and which fiction -- and most of the time of his youthful yearning to go to New York and become a famous writer. or to Paris, and live the life of an intellectual. (Ironically, he has cultivated his literary fame from Minnesota.)

Still -- and here is the delicious tension of his narrative -- even those who go away are wistfully nostalgic for the quiet, simple and slower-paced ways of Lake Wobegon. I remember at least 20 years ago, Keillor once told the story of how many former Wobegonians, who subscribed to the local paper, the Herald-Star (owned and edited by Harold Starr), wrote passionate letters to the editor when they read that certain buildings were being torn down or other changes to the landscape were in the works. Even though many lived far away and hadn't visited the town for years, they wanted it to remain exactly as it was when they were there.

They were yearning not only to preserve what defined them personally but also what remains an archetype of the American Experience: a place where everyone looks out for one another, where we are unencumbered by the adverse trappings of the big city and where certain virtues remain intact and uncorrupted. This may be a leap, but that's perhaps why so many July 4th celebrations are local, quaint and feature opportunities for neighbors to come together.  Perhaps because of a cultural instinct we acquire by just living here, we're trying recreate something that defines our understanding of at least one aspect of American life, one which most of us will leave behind as soon as we suit up and go to work the next day.

That is one vision of the American myth that strikes this American in his kishkes and that has kept him listening loyally for all these years. As brilliantly sappy as it all can be, "Prairie Home Companion" recharges my American batteries every week. Check it out if you don't already.

Jeff

Photo credit: Brian Velenchenko via "Prairie Home Companion" Web site.

Beyond Blame In Blacksburg

AFTER A HIGHLY PUBLICIZED TRAGEDY such as the one that occurred at Virginia Tech on April 16, our media routinely sift through every detail  searching for explanations.

That is a perfectly understandable and, most of the time, appropriate exercise, especially in cases like this one where there were no apparent provocations and the scale is so shocking -- as if the violent loss of even one life is not shocking enough. Indeed, I'm no less curious than the next guy in wanting to learn more about the shooter, his motives, his background and the ways in which he schemed to perpetrate this terrible crime.

The picture that has emerged in less than a week of intensive reporting is one of a severely troubled person. I'm not qualified to make such a pronouncement, but everything I read and hear suggests mental illness in the realm of psychosis, something that in many cases could be dangerous to society if untreated, which apparently it was with Seung Hui Cho. But, again, I'm truly not qualified or completely informed to say.

This is the time following any such tragedy when media and other voices troll around for others to blame, a time I don't especially care for.

Did the university act appropropriately by not informing the student body of the first shooting on campus? Did weak state law in Virginia allow Cho to run amok by preventing authorities to institutionalize him when he was obviously mentally ill? Are our gun background check laws, which prohibit sales to mentally ill people, too easy to foil and therefore partially responsible?

Are Cho's poor parents, who must surely have seen the danger signs, responsible by not taking their son out of school? What about his teachers from grade school, middle school and high school, who report he was always an aloof and strange student, prone to violent writings? Some kids along the way teased this socially inept immigrant boy. Don't they bear some blame for building the rage to the point of explosion on April 16?

The Korean American community, proud and sensitive of its place in American society, and diplomats from the Korean Embassy in Washington have issued their own collective apology for what happened at the hands of someone who immigrated to the U.S. with his family from South Korea at age eight. Should the community have felt so remorseful?

After Governor Tim Kaine's special task force reviews what transpired that day in Blacksburg, after we have some distance, there will surely be some lessons about what some might have done differently during the chaos. And we might see new laws about how to treat mentally ill people who appear to be dangerous. And maybe, just maybe, we will see some progress on gun control laws. But I wouldn't bet on it, especially in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where many proudly bear arms (including the Democratic U.S. Senator, whose aid was arrested trying to bring one of his bosses firearms into the U.S. Capitol recently). No doubt, too, the personal injury lawyers will, on behalf of the victims, be all over this and find someone to blame legally.

But something tells me that we can piece together an exhaustive second-by-second account of that day and a full pyscho-profile of Cho going back to his birth on the outskirts of Seoul, but will never fully understand what happened on April 16 in Blacksburg, Virginia -- let alone, I hate to say, how we may prevent something like it from happening again.

This all reminds me of the terrible Tylenol tampering case in 1982 when someone -- never to be caught, I believe -- put cyanide into a lot of tablets. Several people died. I remember a woman I worked with expressing a sense of helplessness and saying something to the effect of 'we all have to trust one another not to do something like this, otherwise we can't go on.'

To be sure, the pharma companies came up with tamper-proof bottles, but something tells me that if there's a will for some crazy person to taint a bottle again, there's a way. There are also yellow lines on our roads that tell us we cannot cross into oncoming lanes, but we trust that others will not hit us head-on.

I don't mean to be morbid or fatalistic. I'm just saying that that is what it means to live in community. We are affected inevitably and willy-nilly by the actions of others. Most of the time those actions benefit us, as others contribute to building a civilization that enables us to thrive -- and vice versa.

But sometimes others do things that threaten us, which is why we have laws to show them the limits, and teach them manners to sensitize them. Trust is the glue to it all. I suspect that many mentally ill people don't understand parameters of human relations, which is another way of saying trust. I'm not for locking them up, but I put my trust (there's that word again) in others who have thought through how we deal with them humanely.

I think we will get this point once we get past the shock and beyond the media's need to keep its ratings up with this latest hot story. But I hope we don't jump to any conclusions about who's to blame before we get past this phase, which out to be devoted to mourning and remembering.

Jeff

Why I am not (yet) a blogger

This morning I attended a forum on blogging sponsored by my company. The panelists, who advise companies about entering the blogosphere and who blog copiously themselves, expressed disbelief that more of us in the audience do not have our own blogs (only a small smattering of hands, among the more than 600 in attendance, went up when they asked). "As soon as you leave this conference," one of them said, "go back to your office and start your own blog."

So here I am. Yes, it is as easy to establish a blog as the panelists said, but no, I'm not yet sure I really feel like a blogger. At least not yet.

I've been tempted and occasionally encouraged for some time now to plunge in with my own blog. A few colleagues of mine do it, and they've reported a lot of nice consequences from doing so (increased professional exposure, a chance to get things off their chests, new contacts, etc.) Still, I've hesitated until now for a few reasons.

The main reason is that I didn't think I would have anything to say, at least nothing of importance. I have to reveal that I haven't been much of a follower of the blogosphere because what I see in it strikes me as more often tedious and trivial than truly consequential. I don't want to this to become one of those blogs. And a script running in the back of my head has kept asking, "Who would really care what you have to say?"

And those blogs that are consequential tend to come from people who have a specialty, a deep passion for and understanding of a particular issue. I am the consummate generalist. My passion has always been for many things at once, not any one thing. But I can't imagine anyone turning to me on a regular basis for my superficial views on any number of issues.

But, hey, maybe I'm missing something. This is the 21st century, and I better start living in it, right? And, more importantly, maybe it doesn't really matter if anyone else reads this, though I hope some will. Maybe there is something to putting down in print some of the opinions and ideas that scamper through my mind. Maybe it will help me, if no one else, sort out some things. Maybe there are others who will listen and enlighten me, if only because I have prompted them. And maybe this is a way to allow friends and family, with whom I do not have enough time to share what's happening in my life (and vice versa), a window into what's going on with me. Could be good therapy, too. David Mamet once described a collection of short plays he wrote early in his career as ''emotional meal tickets'' that allowed him to "think of myself as a writer'' even when he wasn't working on anything major. Might work for me, too. 

At this writing, I'm not yet sure exactly where this blog will go, but I expect to touch on public policy and politics, music, movies and books, religion and other issues of life and living.

As for the title, I got it, of course, from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," in which, after every death, he writes, "So it goes." Funny, I'm not a big Vonnegut guy, though I like his books, and I share his Hoosier heritage (we have to stick together). And I don't mean to subscribe to the sense of numbness to tragedy that he conveys with that banal phrase in that great book. I'm attracted to the phrase mostly because of the second word -- "It" -- which in this case can stand for almost anything. This blog, wherever it goes, will be about that: almost anything.

Jeff