Garrison Keillor's Podcast

A declaration of independence

Podcast 159 - ". I discovered that I could cure my Minnesota accent by sticking a piece of adhesive tape on the underside of my tongue, which makes me sound like a Harvard graduate. "

Transcript

In twenty years, you won’t be able to stand up in front of a crowd and get them to sing the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” because the internet and the cellphone enable everyone to find his or her own private cavern that’s all about coelacanths or arthropods or genderless people who wish to identify as carbon-based life-forms and everyone will have several podcasts of their own and there will be mighty few experiences common to all.

So I’m going around preaching to the choir, reliving the old culture that’s fast disappearing. Every day, in Central Park, in Strawberry Fields, you find people sitting playing guitar and singing “Imagine” or “I Saw Her Standing There” or “Baby You Can Drive My Car” fifty years after those songs were hits. It’s sweet. People go to ball games because it’s the same as always, nobody has suggested changing three strikes to four or eliminating the shortstop to allow more scoring.

I love being on the road, driving through Connecticut and down to Long Island, mixing with the customers. My parents never talked about politics: it was far away and they were focused on family, the immediate, work, play, weather. Let the angry young men and evangelicals who gave us these wackos take responsibility for it, and I intend to enjoy my life in my country. God bless it.