Garrison Keillor... clueless in Lake Woebegon.

[Armorer's note - this post is even more ironic in light of the post above it.]

So, Mr. Keillor was inconvenienced in DC this Memorial Day by an annual protest ride by some bikers, who were interested in the POW/MIA issue... One wonders if he would have felt as inconvenienced had it been the "Million Man March" the "Million Mom March" or something like the protest SWWBO and I attended in DC last year... One suspects rather he would have been waxing rhapsodic.

The roar of hollow patriotism Garrison Keillor E-mail: oldscout@prairiehome.us

Three hundred thousand bikers spent Memorial Day weekend roaring around Washington in tribute to our war dead, and I stood on Constitution Avenue Sunday afternoon watching a river of them go by, waiting for a gap in the procession so I could cross over to the Mall and look at pictures. The street had been closed off for them and they motored on by, some flying the Stars and Stripes and the black MIA-POW flag, honking, revving their engines, an endless celebration of internal combustion.

A patriotic bike rally is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or patriotic graffiti--the patriotism somehow gets lost in the sheer irritation of the thing. Somehow a person associates Memorial Day with long moments of silence when you summon up mental images of men huddled together on amphibious assault vehicles and pilots revving up B-24s and infantrymen crouched behind piles of rubble steeling themselves for the next push.

...or pilots turning in on a target in al-Anbar, or infantrymen steeling themselves to clear that building in Fallujah. Or perhaps clearing the Palace in Hue, or clawing their way up the mud of Hamburger Hill, or holding the perimeter at Pusan, or hoofing it back from the Chosin Reservoir with his buddy on his back. Storming ashore on Koh-tang Island to free the crew of the Mayaguez. Not to mention 'forting up' in Mogadishu waiting for the relief force. But no, it would appear for Mr. Keillor, military history ended in 1945. Of course, unlike, I believe, Mr. Keillor, I know some people laying under the turf at Arlington with graves dated in *this* century.

You don't quite see the connection between that and these fat men with ponytails on Harleys. After hearing a few thousand bikes go by, you think maybe we could airlift these gentlemen to Baghdad to show their support of the troops in a more tangible way...

Heh. Shows what you know, Mr. Keillor. Perhaps (and very likely) many if not most of these men on those bikes strolled the dikes in Vietnam, patrolled in Bosnia and Kosovo, walked the streets in Somalia, and not a few may well have wandered streets and valleys in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some may have trod the brown, treeless hills of Korea. And not a few may well wear bracelets with names of people they knew personally. I love the assumption that they're mostly chickenhawks.

...It took 20 minutes until a gap appeared and then a mob of us pedestrians flooded across the street and the parade of bikes had to stop for us, and on we went to show our patriotism by looking at exhibits at the Smithsonian or, in my case, hiking around the National Gallery, which, after you've watched a few thousand Harleys pass, seems like an outpost of civilization.

There stood Renoir's ballerina in pale blue chiffon and Monet's children in the garden of sunflowers. And Mary Cassatt's "The Boating Party," which I stood and stared at for a long time. A lady in a white bonnet sits in a green sailboat, holding a contented baby in pink, as a man rows the boat toward a distant shore. (Perhaps the boat is becalmed.) The man wears a navy blue shirt, he is preoccupied with his rowing, and the lady looks wan and mildly anxious, as well a mother should be. The baby is looking dreamily over the gunwales. Is the man a hired hand or is he the husband and father?

A work of art can lift you up from the mishmash of life, the weight of the unintelligible world, and the situations where vulgarity squats on you like an enormous toad and won't get off. You stroll down past the World War II Memorial, which looks like something ordered out of a catalog, a bland insult to the memory of all who served, and thousands of motorcycles roar by disturbing the Sabbath, and it depresses you for hours.

Sorry, the WWII memorial doesn't affect me that way. My grump with it is that it took so long to get done. So now your Sabbath has been marred by motorcycles? You poor man. How much churchly stuff did you partake of that day? Did you attend a Memorial Day event that was to your liking? Since you don't say, we don't know, but I have my suspicions, at least regarding Memorial Day events.

If anyone cared about the war dead, they could go read David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" or Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945," or any of a hundred other books, and they would get a vision of what it was like to face death for your country, but the bikers riding in formation are more interested in being seen than in learning anything. They are grown men playing soldier, making a great hullabaloo without exposing themselves to danger, other than getting drunk and falling off a bike.

What breathtaking arrogance. From personal knowledge, several of the people on that ride *lived* the books you so blithely drop in here. Those books are on my bookshelf, too, Mr. Keillor. With dog ears and other evidence of having been read. It's good to know you've read them too. Of course we could add... House to House, by David Bellavia, or No True Glory and The March Up, by Bing West, or One Bullet Away by Nate Fick, and My War by Colby Buzzell, or perhaps my fellow Scorpion and compadre Marty Stanton's Somalia on $5.00 a Day and Road to Baghdad: Behind Enemy Lines: The Adventures of an American Soldier in the Gulf War or Blackhawk Down by Mark Bowden. Heck, what about The Four Days of Mayaguez by Roy Rowan.... but I'm betting those aren't on your bookshelves, because those are somehow inauthentic and unworthy experiences or something. But, perhaps I'm just projecting, as you do. But again, you can't get past that chickenhawk meme. Those bikers are fellows who can read books, and many have probably read those and more... *and* they choose to do something active to keep the POW/MIA issue alive. So that the Missing are not forgotten. Strikes me, sir, that is an entirely active and appropriate way to mark the day we Remember - by not allowing some to be forgotten. Just as your staring at art and contemplating it in relative peace is... well, you know, something you can do apropos of a cliche I won't bore you with.

Update: In the comments, Bill says it better:

"Keillor's world view obviously doesn't permit the existence of living veterans -- in it, our deeds and lives are limited to the dimensions of books, so he may safely close the pages and escape us as soon as reading about that which we did (and still do) becomes

wearisome."

Wearisome, indeed.

No wonder the Current Occupant welcomed them with open arms at the White House, put on a black leather vest, and gave a manly speech about how he'd just "choppered in" and saw the horde "cranking up their machines," and he thanked them for being so patriotic. They are his kind of guys, full of bluster, giving off noxious fumes, and when they leave town, nobody misses them.

Heh. So he talks to them in their vernacular, and that's too vulgar for you. Guess what, I'm thinking people aren't missing the Million Men and Million Moms that much, either. [deleted Rule-breaking personal attack formerly located here. See? I make myself delete my own rule infractions. Mebbe not always... ]

Meanwhile, the man pulls at the oars, the lady wonders if this trip was a good idea or if some disaster is at hand, and the child lolls on her lap, dazed by the sun. They started this trip in 1894 and haven't advanced an inch, meanwhile half the people who ever stood and watched them have reached that distant shore and the rest of us are getting closer every day.

I am the boatman and maybe you are too--it is quiet on the water, we lean on the oars, and we are suspended in time, united with every other man, woman and child who ever voyaged afar.

Heh. You did a better job of reading the minds of dollops of paint than you did ponytailed men on bikes. And told us more about yourself than anything else.

Last word on the subject from a long time reader of this space:

Not all fat guys rode Harleys.......and some no longer have enough hair left for a pony tail.

Mr. Keillor just wouldn't understand that though.

Heh. They weren't even all 'Muricans. Or riding bikes.

For a stronger view of Mr. Keillor's musings, see Jim Linesberry below, in the Flash Traffic/Extended Entry