Garrison Keillor is a Jerk

This is Garrison Keillor "stating the obvious." By obvious, he means grossly offensive and ridonculously hypocritical.

And this is Dan Savage actually stating the obvious, which is that Garrison Keillor is grossly offensive and ridonculously hypocritical. Dan did a spectacular job of sticking it to Keillor's grossly offensive and ridonculously hypocritical ass, so I most highly recommend you read that. I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about The Good Old Days.

From Keillor's article:

Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids. This was before caller ID, before credit cards, before pizza, for crying out loud.

Umm, not everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, and a male dad. Case in point: my maternal grandfather lost both of his parents by the age of 9, was raised by his older brothers, and lived in an apartment in Brooklyn. I'm betting there wasn't a yard or a garage. Ok - but he was the son of immigrants, and you know how we feel about immigrants in this country. Fine, let's look at the other side of the family: my white, English-speaking, Midwestern-American-born grandfather? Yeah, his dad ran out on the family. From the time my grandpa was old enough, he was helping to support himself and his mother. Is that the traditional family to which Keillor is referring?

Keillor's article makes me so mad my head is going to explode. Not just because I support gay rights, gay marriage, gay families, gay people, etc., but because I hate the good old days. I hate Tom Brokaw and his greatest generation cock-sucking. If you really want to ruffle my feathers, start talking about how great life was before the age of pharmaceutical giants and cell phones and drive-thru windows. And the way kids dress today! To talk to these people, you'd think nothing bad ever happened prior to 1975.

For those individuals, a sampling of bad things that happened prior to 1975, just off the top of my head, in no particular order:

1. The Holocaust
   
2. World War I
3. World War II
4. The Kennedy assassination
5. The Spanish Flu
6. The sinking of the Titanic
7. The Great freaking Depression (sigh, bread lines just aren't what they used to be)
   

Not to mention all the "little" bad things that happened on a daily basis pre-1975 - all the rapes, murders, and fraudulent behaviors that weren't big enough news stories to make it into the history books. (Notice I didn't go further back in time than the early 20th century - you know, the good old days. I mean, everybody knows life sucked before then.)

I'm not trying to say life was a living hell back then and it's a wonder anybody made it through. Some really great things happened pre-1975. I don't have to list them for you. The bottom line is that life isn't any worse today than it was before. Despite all the technology and other sundries of modern living that so irk the older generations, life is pretty much the same, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is full of shit.

By validating the warm fuzzy feelings old people get by complaining about "kids today," people like Garrison Keillor are cheapening MY life, which despite the fact that I have a child, is not over (an assertion which, bizarrely, bugs Keillor as well). Both my son and I have a lot of great things to look forward to, but for now, I'm really into 2007.

Besides decrying gay families and fondling the good old days (no, not a typo), Keillor also briefly rails against immigration ("Only about six kids looked anything like the kids I went to school with, and of those, three were Croatian."). This guy gets air time on NPR? WTF? Have I completely misjudged NPR listeners? Do they split their time between All Things Considered and Rush Limbaugh?

I should note that not all old people are Old like Garrison Keillor. My husband's wonderful, beautiful, totally awesome grandma enjoys a trip down memory lane as much as anybody, but I have never once heard her say anything about "kids today" or complain about technology taking over the world. She was an oops baby, so her mother would have been older than her friends' mothers. When I asked her if her mother ever seemed old, Grandma said to me, "No, she wasn't old. She was, you know, she was like me!"

And that's the kind of old person I want to be.