When the birth rate is falling and America is getting old and grumpy, it’s wonderful to walk Central Park on a sunny day and see all the little families running around, all the little kids. Raising boisterous kids in a small apartment in a bumpy economy is brave, and it’s good for Joe Biden that he’s putting some child support in his Restoration Act. We need more of these children or we will become a national historical reenactment.
I don’t want that I want the past to fade into the sunset except for the classics like Central Park. I go for a walk in the park in April and it’s a noble world like the one that Renoir painted in Paris with the ladies wearing umbrellas, and Dvořák went to Prague and whistled a tune that became humoresque, the generations of children for spring evenings, and Shakespeare sat in it and scrawled notes for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – it’s a constant pleasure to be cherished forever, but I want life to go on so the kids grow up and Vietnam as a kitchen and See Trump as Part of the Card Games and “Pandemic” means a college professor getting negative reviews.
The past lives on with Google and that’s fine. In every phone and laptop there is an abundance of little things and answers to all questions – where did Allen Ginsberg write “Howl” (an apartment on Montgomery Street in San Francisco) or which president hit a hole-in-one during his presidency ( Jerry Ford) or the name of George Custer’s horse on the Little Big Horn (Comanche, and he outlived Custer by fifteen years) – are readily available. You used to spend months in the library flipping through dusty books in the reference room to get this information, and now you literally have it at hand. Good enough.
I want life to go on so that the children grow up and see Vietnam as a kitchen and trump card as part of card games. “Pandemic” means that a college professor is receiving negative reviews.
Everything is on the internet, the entire subterranean depth of demons and obsessions. You can read a website that says doctors and nurses who give COVID vaccines should be tried as war criminals. You can visit the world of men who are in love with guns. One man writes: “The AK-47 has lovely features, is easy to manipulate, the visors are sturdy and a reasonably experienced person can do maybe 60 rounds per minute. And they’re fun as hell. “That seems like a crazy fringe to me, but it’s a fringe that runs the Republican Party.
I used Google the other day to find a column by Russell Baker that I vaguely recalled from his years writing for the New York Times. He was a great writer, but it was mostly newsprint, which we know is used to catch spills or as a dog toilet.
Baker was walking down a street in New York and a potato fell out of a tall window, missing an inch and crashing onto the sidewalk. He wrote, “There is an advantage in getting through a raw potato that is almost intact. It is such a rare occurrence that the chances of being involved with two people in one lifetime are overwhelming. That is why it is so close to statistical certainty that falling potatoes will not be the instrument of my parting. “
It was a great column that was admired by a generation of columnists including myself, but if I went to the library and looked for it, I could spend weeks in the newspaper vaults pissed off with Baker and never want to hear his name again, but if you google “Russell Baker Falling Potato” there, it is done immediately. This is as close to immortality as a columnist gets to know that your brilliant potato column is always available to the curious.
Creating a new world of harmony and justice is not on my windshield. I am beyond that age. My goal is to brighten up the corner I find myself in by writing about everything that falls at my feet and telling other people about the lack of diversity in the royal family and the problem of trans participation in women’s sports . The ship got stuck in the Suez because it was overloaded: Duh. Wake up.
People expect leadership from us Minnesotans, but there is only so much we can do. We gave you Bob Dylan who gave you “The Times, They Are A-Changin ‘” – which, except in a few places like Central Park, the gift of the 19th century to us and these children and also to their children, applies.
Garrison Keillor
Prairie Home Productions
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