What is it with religious liberals and Garrison Keillor? So many religious liberals seem to believe he walks on water, even more than they believe that of Mary Oliver. They don’t like him because Keillor is a religious liberal himself, because he obviously isn’t. Is it because so many religious liberals have a strongly ambivalent attitude towards organized religion, and Keillor is notorious for his own ambivalent attitude towards religion? After all, when it comes to religion, Keillor is sometimes mean-spirited, sometimes nostalgic, and sometimes frankly affectionate, just like religious liberals.
Perhaps Keillor’s own ambivalence towards institutional religion makes so many religious liberals like him so much. I don’t know for sure, but I do know that I don’t care for him. Keillor strikes me as misanthropic, he has that weird affected accent, and his Lake Woebegone stories are such shameless rip-offs of Stephen Leacock’s wonderful early twentieth century stories of small-town life in the prairie provinces of Canada,— except Keillor’s stories are not as well-observed, nor as humane, nor are they nearly so funny.
Let me put it this way: the great Groucho Marx admired the comic genius of Stephen Leacock. Groucho Marx did not, however, admire the comic genius of Garrison Keillor. Nothing more need be said.
Someday, we must sit around ranting about Keillor.
And Queen Victoria was not amused by him either.
I’ve not read Garrison Keillor (or listened to him) so I can’t make a judgment. Haven’t read Mary Oliver but she did get recited from the pulpit last week at MemChu (in a sermon I did not agree with).
Sheesh. You’d think Keillor was on par with, oh, Donald Trump. He’s just a middling entertainer. Found a niche, stuck in it, made a “brand” of himself. Oh, and got successful.
I still maintain that it’s the success of Keillor, Oliver, maybe even old Donald T., and any other fill-in-the-blank artist/business person that really rankles people. If Keillor were living in, oh, Indiana, performing at the local community college, teaching I don’t know — accounting? — he’d be famous, locally. And I bet, I just bet, he’d be roundly hated locally too.
I really, really don’t like him. Honestly, I am a little skeptical of people who do. I mean, theoretically a person could enjoy him without having a romanticized view of times and places I don’t see as romantic at all, but I think it would take some mental gymnastics to do so.
Marxist!
Defund him. It’s appalling tax payors have to contribute to his broadcasts.
Groucho Marx was around in Keillor’s day?
I’d like Garrison Keillor more if the show weren’t so centered on him. You hear his voice too much.
And his rant about de-Jesusing Christmas a couple years ago revealed his lack of discernment.
GK is no friend of Unitarians, so the slobbering over him is rather masochistic, unless one believes his jabs are out of love, again, masochistic. See:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/garrison_keillor/2009/12/15/cambridge
He is occasionally humorous, but mostly presents his usual Minnesota dour, depressing, retro-depression era jazz and blue grass wannabe persona, Lutheran guilt ridden angst…perfect for the average NPR listener.
Will @ 1 — Any time!
Jean @ 3 — Ohmigawd, Keillor is on a par with the Donald? Does that mean he’s going to run for president like the Donald? God help us, I can only imagine his weekly radio broadcasts to the nation, were he elected.
Bill @ 6 — Best reason I’ve yet heard for defunding NPR. However, see above. If we defund him, he’s likely to run for president on a ticket with Donald Trump, and then the taxpayers would be paying him even more than they are now, including awesome health insurance (much better than mine) so he’d probably live longer. Looks like we can’t win either way: we’re stuck with him getting government funding.