Minnesota Nice

Before some snowflake cancelled him for giving an unwanted back rub (which was a normal sign of affection back in the 1970s...like a lot of the "me too" claims, the story was twisted as a horrific assault, not a simple flirtation that most of us learned to cope with when we were teenagers by replying with a polite remark, or if too gross, a slap, and then forgetabout it.

 But before that hysteria became a way for women to destroy men who they disliked (and get their two minutes of fame), Garrison Keillor was Minnesota nice was Lake Woebegon..

Some of his commentaries can be downloaded from Internet Archives.

  Garrison Kiellor still blogs: and with time his writings have become less bitter and more philosophical, seeing the niceness of ordinary life.

: James Thurber said, “Let us not look back in anger or look forward in fear but let us look around us in awareness.” It’s plain old sensible Midwestern stoicism and they should put it on the dollar bill in place of “In God we trust.” The progressive left looks back in anger and the regressive right looks forward in fear, but the old man walks down the street and is aware of bustling enterprise, delivery e-bikes, little storefronts striving to survive, tight clusters of families, the woman in full stride announcing into her iPhone, “That’s absolutely ridiculous,” the man and woman stopping because their dogs wish to talk to each other.

And today his post is about TIME magazine's man of the year: Taylor Swift. (LOL).

Because, uh, why? I mean, she's popular with young ladies (My granddaughters are TS fans: They even went to her concert in Chicago last year.) But like giving a Nobel prize to a minor songwriter whose last hit was to push peace in the 1970s (ignore the boat people and genocides after that peace was made), excuse me if I don't get excited at a pop icon being man of the year.

Keillor notes that even Harvard is planning a course on her lyrics...

The professor came across Swift about 12 years ago. “I noticed that of all of the songs that one would hear in, you know, drugstores and airports and bus stations and public places, there was one that was better than all the other songs. I wanted to know who wrote it. It was just a more compelling song lyrically and musically, just a perfect piece of construction. It was ‘You Belong With Me.’”

then Keillor notes with his mildly sardonic wit:

Some people may prefer “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wand’ring bark, whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken,” and other people prefer “Why can’t you see you belong with me.”

whatever. 

 

I lived in Minnesota for years, but not really in Minnesota: I was a doctor at a PHS hospital, and it was Objibwe culture, which is a different culture from the locals who were mainly Scandinavian farmers or small business owners, or the yuppies who moved to the woods to live close to the land. 

But people forget that the ancestors of these affluent farmers were dirt poor: but they remember, which is why these open hearted types welcomed refugees: hence the Hmong and Somali communities in Minneapolis.

Before the George Floyd kerfuffle, Minnesota was best known for the movie Fargo:

In Minnesota, people party outside when it is 20 below, because if you bundle up correctly there is no such thing as cold weather.

and Yes, people ice fished on the lakes:

 

 That is from Grumpy old men, which can be downloaded from internet archives LINK