Homegrown Democrat by Garrison Keillor

Author:Garrison Keillor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 8

AT THE CAFÉ

A liberal lady of DC

By day was tasteful and p.c.

And then after ten

She went out with men

Who were rednecks, vulgar and greasy.

“When it comes to the masculine specie,”

She said, “Believe me, I’m easy,

But liberal guys

Tend to theologize

And I’m not St. Clare of Assisi.”

WHEN I AM gloomy about politics, I go sit alone in a crowded café in my neighborhood in St. Paul where the local art students like to hang out, intense young people with no clear prospects in life, and old gaffers and idlers and loafers and tourists from Iowa, genteel bohemians dreaming of the Dead and how it was to be 20 and discover Prévert and Camus. And well-fixed all-rightniks like me. I sit and inhale the smell of coffee amid the murmur of midwestern voices like water lapping on the shore. A true comfort on a cold day in April. I feel attached to this neighborhood, having lived here off and on half my life. Today, the morning paper has left me feeling stranded in a nation more like the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1914 than the sweet land of liberty but a walk around the neighborhood can cure that. The trees are budding, lilac bushes too, girls with bare midriffs stroll past. Summit Hill was Millionaires Row, home of the Upper Fifty, an old Republican bailiwick of lumber and insurance and railroad families of the 1870s that, after a century of graceful decline, was bought up and renovated by Democrats. Liberals have a secret lust for Victoriana. I’ve been in plenty of these old manses with their screen porches and bay windows and turrets and piazzas and arches, attending fund-raisers for losing liberals. And some winners, including Bruce Vento, a modest hard-working guy with enormous eyebrows who represented St. Paul in Congress for twenty-four years and did good things for the homeless and for the American wilderness, fought the good fights and then came home to die of lung cancer. And Senator Paul Wellstone, who once lived around here with his wife, Sheila. A September afternoon and fifty people standing around on a brick backyard terrace at fifty bucks a head (discounts available), a dozen bottles of $10 chardonnay and a tub of Leinenkugels, baskets of chips, chip dip, salsa, and an earnest candidate standing on the back steps, jabbing the air and talking passionately about workers’ compensation, which is all over my head, and I look around and see my people, people who were milling around the St. Paul Auditorium that night in 1984 when Walter Mondale, flushed like a middleweight after a fifteen-rounder, came out to concede to Ronald Reagan. We all remember the miserable defeat of George McGovern, and the Dukakis debacle, the fall of Gore—one godawful moment after another. At present, we are in our usual disarray and widely ridiculed by angry menopausal males who equate dissent with treason, but we Democrats do not faint to hear hecklers. The only shame is to lose heart. Once again we put our

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