On the Road to Roanoke

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As we watch a white Christian patriarchy exert its influence in Washington, I think back to H.L. Mencken whom I admired back in eighth grade for his sharp tongue. I come from soft-spoken people who shunned mockery and I abandoned Mencken in my twenties when I became a romantic liberal but Project 2025 has made him relevant.

We’re living in Mencken’s world now. He said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

There are worse things than being wrong: one is to be wrong and know it and try to ignore it, like the parade of Republicans insisting that they won the 2020 election. It’s like the man who walks into the doctor’s office with a wiener in his ear and a stalk of celery up his nose and says, “Doctor, what’s wrong with me?” and the doctor says, “You’re not eating properly.”

Pardoning people who attacked cops is not funny. Every one of us was instructed as children to respect the police and to stop when they say stop. You know it and I know it. It’s an outrage, and when Senator John Thune evades the subject by saying, “I’m not looking back,” he insults his own intelligence. He’s from the party of Lincoln and he presents an IQ of four score and seven.

It’s like the man and his wife who crashed into the bridge abutment and died and found themselves in heaven living in a beautiful house next to a golf course with an eternity of sunny days on which to play. The man said, If you hadn’t made me quit smoking, I could’ve been here ten years ago.”

President Crypto issued an executive order that revoked birthright citizenship, which is in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It’s like the Texas hockey team that drowned during spring training. It’s like what do you call the worst president in the history of the United States? You call him “Mister President.”

How did we come to this point, the glowering snowy-haired man with the South African in the West Wing demanding access to Treasury computers? Will the Republican Congress allow the two of them to declare a national emergency and suspend the Constitution for a year? The Supreme Court has no army. This fragile system works by common accord, by honoring tradition. When the chopper hit the jet landing at Reagan, the President was supposed to express grief for all those lives. Did he not look at the photographs of the young figure skaters and their families coming back from Wichita, all those bright faces who blew up just short of runway 33? Where is the humanity? Why did he blame Biden and Obama? We don’t expect the leader of our country to be hopelessly trashy.

There’s a story here to be written by you historians in your thirties. As for me, I love my life, the road life, going to Roanoke last Saturday and a theater full of people who, I discovered in the course of two hours, knew three verses of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” by heart, no coaching, plus “It Is Well With My Soul,” “America” and “America the Beautiful.” They sang a cappella and Heather Masse and I sang harmony to them. We did other things and people laughed a lot but that was the part of the show that fed my soul. Southerners singing in harmony.

They laughed when I said, “Canada can’t be our 51st state! It has no South! You can’t have America without a South. You need bluegrass, the blues, country, gospel. You need music.” When corruption and deceit are in the driver’s seat, a person needs to seek out beauty. I watched a video of a girl dancing with a bird perched on her head. I wrote a limerick for her. I walked around Roanoke’s majestic historic downtown. But good Lord, those shining faces upturned, singing about reading His righteous sentence by the flaring lamps, you knew America is still here in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps.

Garrison Keillor © 03.03.25