The Old Scout

Garrison Keillor's Sunday Column
by Charlie Leck

I guess they'll have to file a "cease and desist order" against me. Tribune Media Services distributes Garrison Keillor's weekly column and I end up quoting pretty large chunks of it for you, which is just a fraction as good as delighting in the whole thing.

You know, until last July, when Keillor's column began appearing every Sunday morning, I use to dive into the sports section just as soon as the local paper was dropped on the porch, and turn to the column of one of our local jock nuts, Sid Hartman. These days, I go first for the opinion section and right to the Old Scout column. I am very rarely disappointed; for example, a few weeks ago the column didn't appear and that disappointed the hell out of me. Keillor's stuff is just plain good.

Let me quote for you the opening of this week's column and its concluding two paragraphs. In between there's a lot of good stuff that explains the grammatical error in the last sentence. Click here to read the entire column on-line. If you're smart, you'll bookmark this so you can go to it every week for these delights.

"Here we are, ignorant peasants in our mud huts at the base of the volcano of finance, begging the gods to spare us as the ground shakes beneath our feet and economists examine the entrails of pigeons and the shamans of the Federal Reserve fling handfuls of sacred powder into the steaming crater. We live with a system rejiggered by Republicans - freedom from regulation, but when the manure hits the ventilator, the Feds step in with a few hundred billion to rescue the players - and nobody can tell us ignorant savages how rough the upheaval might be. Nobody knows.

"... People accuse us liberals of permissiveness - no no no no no. We liberals are oppressive, not permissive, working day and night to take your guns away and make you apply for a permit every time you spit. In my heart, I belong to the Correctness Party, the party of good spellers, of people who pay attention to details. The Current Occupant is not one of us. He is not a man who puts pen to paper with any confidence. Intellectually he has been a charity case all his life. He is one of those men who are lucky that their fathers were born before they were. 

"I vote to send him up to talk to the volcano. Let him climb up to the crater in his loincloth and crouch in the billowing steam and tell the volcano to stop shaking and stay there until it does. Him and Greenspan could do it together."

They're calling for about 5 inches of snow up here today. Lake Wobegon will look wondrous in the snow. Have a good week.

END