A Christmas Eve Defense of Garrison Keillor -- and Satire

Garrison Keillor wrote a Christmas-related column for Salon that has kicked up unusual sand.

Here are the key paragraphs:

"You can blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He preached at the First Church of Cambridge, a Unitarian outfit where I discovered that "Silent Night" has been cleverly rewritten to make it more about silence and night and not so much about God . . . Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that's their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite "Silent Night." If you don't believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn "Silent Night" and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write "Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah"? No, we didn't.

"Christmas is a Christian holiday -- if you're not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don't mess with the Messiah."

And here are some reactions:

"Hating on Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" is, in a way, the same thing as the American Family Association's boycott of the Gap for its "failure" to use the word Christmas in ads: both actions reject a dilution of Christmas by outsiders, just in slightly different ways. It certainly does not accord with the generous holiday spirit." -- Marissa Brostoff on the Jewish website Tablet.

"So far, Chinese Christmas has not come crashing down, and -- in fact -- it's all but assured that China's churches will be fuller this year than last. That Garrison Keillor's considerable imagination cannot allow for this possibility, but rather recurs to insensitive, narrow-minded bigotry, is a sorry commentary on someone who fashions himself a progressive-minded Minnesota populist. To my mind, at least, he's not, and as a "Jewish guy," born and bred in Minnesota, I'd like to suggest that perhaps, all things considered, he's the one who needs to buzz off." -- Adam Minter on MinnPost.com, who lives in China and took the column as a slam against the way that some Chinese are adapting American cultural Christmas customs.

"I'm the pastor of First Parish in Cambridge, Unitarian Universalist, where we were honored to host Garrison Keillor last week. Many in my congregation attended and enjoyed his talk. So we were hurt and disheartened to read his ill-tempered attack on our church and our faith in his syndicated column in newspapers throughout the country and at Salon.com." -- Fred Small on uuworld.org.

You get the idea. To which I reply: Why don't they get the real idea?

Keillor, the fabulously successful host of the long-running Prairie Home Companion radio show, author, and man of letters, needs no defense from me. But I'll offer one anyway, because the attacks are an indication of a worrisome cultural ignorance.

Have we forgotten what satire is? Because that's what Keillor does. And satire is not and should not be nice.

Neither, by the way, is Keillor nice. Oh, I don't know what he's like at home. But his public persona, as expressed through his writing, almost always has an edge to it. Radio listeners are fooled by his marvelous, mellifluous voice. He could probably read the" Protocols of the Elders of Zion" with that voice and make it sound friendly. (Jon Stewart of the Daily Show has a similar gift. His TV persona is so generally upbeat and friendly that he gets away with stuff that on paper comes across as being much more harsh.)

But go read those Lake Wobegon stories. Keillor frequently has ugly things happen even to the most honorable of his characters. (I remember one tale involving a topnotch public school teacher and a booger...)

But beyond that, satire is supposed to make you wince. Jonathan Swift set the bar very high almost 300 years ago with his "Modest Proposal" for how to deal with so many poor children:

"I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout."

(Which is, by the way, also a swat at the American colonies that, back in 1729, were apparently easy targets for this sort of humor. Akin to "blonde jokes" these days?)

Did Swift really think that eating children would be a good idea? Of course not. And it's not likely that Keillor is really in so much of a snit about the Unitarians or Jewish songwriters. (And intent, by the way, marks one important difference between satire and, say, a racist joke. A racist is intending to denigrate the race of the butt of the joke. A satirist who uses race is likely aiming at the racist.)

As for discerning Keillor's intent, let's look at his record. After all, he's rewritten or written Christmas music several times, including a rejiggering of "He shall feed his Flock" from Handel's Messiah that began, "He shall feed his cats with cans of tuna / And he shall clean their litter boxes every day, every day." As for poaching onto other faiths, there was his "Hanukkah in Santa Monica," featured only a couple of weeks ago.

So what's the joke, here? Taking humor apart is like any other vivisection: It kills what you're looking at. But let's be really obvious and slice this one open.

Keillor is making fun of a couple of real things. First is the willingness of Unitarian Universalists to adapt just about anything to work with their incredibly broad ideas of what their religion should and can be. Nothing is, hm, sacred, in that sense, in that the UU-ers are willing to take things that another flavor of faith would consider inviolate and do a mash-up for their own purposes. Including Silent Night.

As for the other, it is pretty weird that so much of modern mall-friendly Xmas music was written by Jewish composers. After all, the Jewish population of the U.S. has never been much higher than two percent. And yet, here's a list of Christmas songs that have Jewish writers:

Winter Wonderland, White Christmas, Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!, Sleigh Ride, Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer, It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year, l'll Be Home For Christmas, Silver Bells, Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree, A Holly Jolly Christmas, Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane), There's No Place Like Home For The Holidays, Carol Of The Bells, and Do They Know It's Christmas? (Feed the World).

At least they don't have Santa offering a hearty "cho cho cho."

Bottom line? To respond with high-minded, serious objections to Keillor is like doing lit crit of a fart joke. It's more a demonstration that you don't get the point than an effective attack on the author. The best and most appropriate response to a Bronx cheer, after all, is to respond in kind.

Merry Christmas, anyway.