The usual UU excuses for listening to Garrison Keillor

For years I've been saying that Garrison Keillor sucks and we shouldn't listen to him. I now expand that to say we shouldn't read him either.

The factual issues in his recent piece Don't Mess with Christmas speak for themselves. I'm sure plenty of other UU bloggers with better religious educations will cover them better that I could. And there are bloggers far more suited than I am to deconstruct Keillor's comments about Jewish guys and how their music makes the shopping mall impure. (What the fuck?)

When he misunderstands Emerson's comment "To be great is to be misunderstood," it's hard to take it as a compliment to Emerson. Mostly, it just makes me think that Keillor's a dumbass.

Let's review the usual UU excuses for listening to this clown:

He likes us! He says UU women are sexy
I'm pretty sure he means "UUs will do the freaky stuff the Lutheran girls won't."


But he's FUNNY
You mean when he parodies songs? Because he sure can't take it when people parody him, or change the words to Christmas carols he likes.


The piece in Salon was satirical. He doesn't MEAN it...
Have you read the piece? It was not satirical in tone at all and pretty much no one has taken it that way.


He uses gentle satire to make fun of self-important people.
Not really. He trades on his ignorant hominess the way Ann Coulter trades on her sharp-tongued conservatism, and I don't think the effects are any better. You may smile and laugh along, but keep in mind when Garrison says bigoted things like:"I favor marriage between people whose body parts are not similar. I’m sorry, but same-sex marriage seems timid, an attempt to save on wardrobe and accessories," or "The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control," everyone else is still laughing.

And that's not funny. Even if he apologizes and claims that all his friends are Unitarians and Jews and he didn't realize that outside of Hollywood, Unitarians and Jews are given a rough time (which is what he said about gay people), I won't believe it and you shouldn't either.


At heart he's a liberal...he's just being funny.
No, he's a man who writes "I grew up the child of a mixed-gender marriage that lasted until death parted them, and I could tell you about how good that is for children, and you could pay me whatever you think it's worth." in a column that trashes "serial monogamy"

Meanwhile, he's had three wives himself. He's just a plain old hypocrite in the exact mold of conservatives who blather on about defending marriage without addressing which of their multiple marriages they wish to defend. And I don't mind hypocrites when they actally have something to say. He doesn't.

I've heard much more bigoted humor. Keillor's is pretty mild.
I got this excuse multiple times last time I wrote about him and I don't understand it in light of having examined Keillor's actual words. Ignore the folksy "I'm kidding" tone and look at what Keillor actually says. It is NOT Wanda-Sykes-style "Black people drive like this, white people drive like that" cultural observation. He is straight up saying gay people shouldn't be parents because the sort of monogamy he can't handle himself is better for kids and that UUs shouldn't be allowed to celebrate Christmas our own way becase his way is better. That is not funny. Don't let the homey tone fool you. The underlying messages are nasty stuff and a LOT of people are nodding along.

Quit nodding.

Quit listening.

Quit reading.

CC

Oh, and for the record

You can add calling Michelle Malkin a "mashed up meatbag with lipstick" to the ongoing list of reasons why Keith Olbermann creeps me out.

Thank you, Calvin

Lots of people snark on Roman Polanski and his defenders, but only Calvin Trillin does it in such witty verse.

Good article on Roman Polanski

Answering the many "defenses" people have come up with for him.

The amount of sympathy Polanski gets blows my mind. There are lots of sex-related criminal cases out there with a lot of gray areas. This is not one of them.

CC

My last John Edwards post for awhile (Work safe, but barely)

I might have been looking at all of this the wrong way.

I've been running under the assumption that there would be a mass outpouring of sympathy for Elizabeth Edwards after the nation found out that John Edwards had cheated on her cancer-stricken self.

Last night a friend of mine pointed me to This story, which is that Rush Limbaugh's comment on the matter was "What could have John Edwards' motivations been to have the affair with Rielle Hunter, given his wife is smarter than he is and probably nagging him a lot about doing this, and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk."

Now, I think this is an understandable confusion on Rush's part. Can I see a show of hands from the Chalicesseur ladies? How many of you have given head to Rush Limbaugh?

Me neither. So he may just be overapplying his own experience and assuming that no other guys are getting any either.

Now, in all fairness to Elizabeth, I should point out that even if she was, umm, doing her marital duty in this sense, I find it very unlikely that John Edwards was doing his. I mean, guys who are overly concerned about their hair don't tend to be very good at it, when they try at all.

OK, I'm done.

CC

Gah. John Edwards.

I should clarify that, again, I'm not that interested in the "cheating on his wife" aspect, except as it relates to the election. I am not completely without sympathy to either the Edwardses having had "an arrangement" (which I doubt) or John Edwards just plain wanting to fuck somebody who wasn't dying, and indeed, in doing so affirm life (seems more likely), I really think the American people wouldn't sit for cheating on the cancer patient and it would have cost the Democrats the election had he become the nominee, particularly as he was running as a values candidate and a (snort) "women's candidate" in a way that Clinton didn't.

I can see wanting to run for president and getting people to believe in you. I can see wanting some pleasure when looking at your wife just depresses you. I just think you need to pick one because if you try to do both, you're asking the people who support you to risk a lot on your ability to keep things hidden and you really have no business doing that.

I've noticed that whenever a politician has an affair, I'm never pissed about the affair itself. Indeed, Clinton pretty much got a pass from me because the Starr report makes it so very clear that Monica came on to him over and over and that he really seemed to do his best to try to be responsible about it, all things considered. (Having read the Starr report makes so many of the assumptions people make about how L'affaire Lewinsky actually happened fascinating. My favorite is when people call him a "sex addict." Lewinsky freely admits that Clinton only got like something like four orgasms out of the whole affair. Know any alcoholics who only have four drinks a year?)

But Clinton aside, whenever a politician has an affair, there seems to be some extra kick of selfish asshole behavior that always gets me. Spitzer doesn't want his hooker to wear condoms*, Giuliani steals from the poor to fund getaways with his mistress, and yes, now Edwards has to do it right before he runs for president, having to know that his wife's cancer means that if the information ever gets out he's screwing over the people who believed in him.

But THIS just plain sucks if it's true. (If I find out it isn't true, I will retract this post or at least put up a correction.)

I'm trying not to make too much of this, despite the fact that I to some degree feel like I saw it coming because I got such a self-serving shmuck vibe from Edwards.

It's pretty difficult to truly disgust me, yet I feel disgusted by the whole thing.

CC


*Yes, I know that pretty much no man wants to wear condoms. But this is a HOOKER we're talking about! And your wife is awesome!

Oh, what the hell, one more Wal*Mart story

Even I am tiring of this topic, FWIW. But sometimes an example of what I'm talking about comes along and proves so good as to be irresistable.

Accroding to this newspaper editorial, John Edwards righteously refused to give a reading of his new book at evil ol' Wal*Mart that treats its employees so badly, choosing instead to read at a nearby middle-class-approved Barnes & Noble.

Why do I care?

Because that Barnes & Noble starts it's employees at $7.00 per hour.

The Wal*Mart starts at $7.50.

Could somebody tell me again about how dislike of Walmart is based on concern for the underpaid workers?

I'm sorry, it is all about pandering for the votes of middle class people who think Wal*Mart is tacky and, consciously or not, use "The poor don't know what's best for them, we do" as an excuse to keep that big ugly store out of their backyards.

CC
who doesn't want a big ugly Wal*Mart in her backyard either, of course, but is at least honest with herself about why.

John Edward's Kid: Living Proof that there are Two Americas

You know, I was about to just let this go. A few days ago, I got my hands on a copy of the world’s most sanctimonious press release from Wal*Mart, trumpeting that for all John Edwards’ crap about the evils of Wal*Mart, one of Edwards’ staffers tried to jump in line to get the Senator a Playstation 3 from Wal*Mart.

Yeah, it was pretty blogworthy, but again, this was the most sanctimonious press release ever and my tolerance for such things is low.

Then I read a little bit more on the incident. Jeff Taylor at Reason writes what I’d like to think I would have about Edwards the Wal*Mart shopper in the context of Edwards’ previous statements on the company.

That got me curious, so I started hunting around for other commentary on Edward’s statements

From the AP story:

“Edwards, the Democrats' vice presidential candidate in 2004, spoke Wednesday to supporters of union-backed WakeUpWalMart.com on a conference call launching the group's holiday season campaign to pressure Wal-Mart for better labor standards.

In the call, he repeated a story about his son Jack disapproving of a classmate buying sneakers at Wal-Mart. "If a 6-year-old can figure it out, America can definitely figure this out," Edwards said.

For the record, John Edwards, six year old kids do not buy sneakers at Walmart.

Their parents do.

I, for one, wouldn’t buy my theoretical kid’s clothes at Wal*mart because the clothes at Wal*mart are, on the whole, fugly.

My guess is two kinds of parents buy their kids sneakers from Wal*mart:

1. Poor parents who can’t afford to do otherwise.
2. Stingy parents who (one hopes) don’t realize that little kids are brutal to each other over such things.

When I was in elementary school there was a kid whom the other kids called “K-mart Kid” because her single mom bought her cheap clothes.

Kmart Kid is now 30 and doing cool stuff in the Physics department at a University in Colorado.

But I doubt she has forgotten what she went through.

Linguist Friend has written before about his gay son, and I think mentioned that when his son was six, a friend of LF’s predicted that the son was going to grow up to be gay.

My early prediction? This Edwards kid is going to grow up to be an asshole. And even if we believe everything the Edwards campaign has said about how the Edwards had no idea the staffer buying his Christmas presents was going to use Walmart, Daddy’s pride in his son's self-righteousness leaves little question where kiddo gets it from.

CC

Admit it: It's sort of hilarious when bad things happen to Thomas Kinkade

Thomas Kinkade, creator of much "art" that would look most at home on the walls of a room at the Motel 6, is SO busted.

Apparently he was pressuring people into opening galleries of his work, then screwing them over. And now the FBI is involved.

Joan Didion snarks on Kinkade nicely in her book Where I was from in which she writes:

""A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire."

Ha!

Take that, kitsch boy...

Garrison Keillor: The Rant Continues

PB mentioned in the comments of my last Garrison Keillor post that GK had written a nice essay on Unitarian Women saying we were the hottest in the world*. Trying to keep an open mind, but mostly hoping that the logic was more interesting than "they'll do the freaky stuff the Lutheran girls won't," I googled around for it, but couldn't find it.

I did, however, find this, another blog complaining about Keillor. My issues with Keillor are primarily that he is litigious and not funny.
The other blog cites concerns that he has little respect for atheists, which isn't unusual among people with Keillor's sort of outlook and doesn't bother me much. The blog, however, quotes Keillor as follows on the issue of gay marriage:

I favor marriage between people whose body parts are not similar. I’m sorry, but same-sex marriage seems timid, an attempt to save on wardrobe and accessories. Marrying somebody from your team. Still, it’s probably good for them to have to fight for the right to marry. My parents eloped against strong opposition from both families and they were in love for the rest of their lives and held hands and were tender on into their 80s. Of course they always had fresh strawberries.

Yeah, that's it, Garrison. Gay marriage is all about the wardrobe and accessories. Men and women are different "teams."

Oh, and searching for articles by Keillor on sexiness also brought me to this gem from Salon.

Women get broody sometimes and want to sit in front of a fire with a glass of merlot and discuss The Relationship, which is never a good idea. You know this. If you were captured by Unitarian terrorists and sat on by a fat lady and told that you absolutely must discuss your relationship, you should say no, no, no.

Awhile ago, Linguist Friend told me about something his ex-wife had once said, and I recall responding that it was a measure of her rhetorical skill that she could say something so brief that was irritating on so many levels. She may have competition in Keillor.

Again, as I wrote in the comments on my last GK post there's something about his very-scripted-sounding style of humor that makes me imagine him delivering one of his treasured bon mots that he'd stayed up late the night before planning, then leaning back, grinning slightly and nodding his head as he waits for my appreciative chuckle.

Which isn't coming.

I do want to see the essay where he actually mentions Unitarians without being rude about us, but I don't think hearing that he thinks we're sexy can save my opinion of him.

CC

*Personally, I'm partial to the explanation offered by British Novelist Jilly Cooper for why upper-middle class intellectual types have the most fun in bed--because when they are curious about something, they read up on it and learn a lot about it and because they tend to be tall and can reach the dirty books the librarians put on high shelves.

Two quick reminders that Garrison Keillor sucks.

I've never liked the man and the peice that Clyde posted didn't help.

Yes, the UUA does sometimes claim some people as UUs who weren't really. Even religious liberals are not immune to overzealous PR.* We shouldn't do that. No argument there.

But as an excuse to make fun of UUs for decades, that's pretty thin.

If he can make fun of UUs forever solely for that reason, surely I can dislike him forever because of the time he found out somebody was making "Prarie Ho Companion" t-shirts and sued the t-shirt maker. (This is particularly annoying given that parody is quite clearly fair use, so the lawsuit was likely designed to scare and/or bankrupt the people making the shirts rather than actually have justice done. My understanding is that the law is totally against Keillor. The only way that would not be the case would be if people didn't understand that "Prairie Ho Companion" was not a product of Garrison Keillor's media empire, a point that was made clear on the page where the shirts were sold.)

More of my commentary on that here.

CC

*Though not as overzealous as an old friend's grandmother who was convinced that John-the-Baptist was a southern Baptist like herself. If you think I'm making that up, you've never met a South Carolina grandmother.

Yes, I've seen the big Nora Ephron article in Salon

So you can stop emailing me. Thank you to the Chalicesseurs who recalled that Nora Ephron is the hated enemy of the Chaliceblog and let me know. (Item: Google "Nora Ephron sucks." Guess who comes in first?)

For those of you who have something better to do than read this article, I'll summarize.

Nora Ephron has made a bunch of crappy movies. But she doesn't think they suck.

Nora Ephron writes relentlessly and unapologetically about her ex-husbands, which, I'm sorry, is tacky as hell.

She doesn't read negative reviews of her movies because she doesn't want her feelings to be hurt. (Unlike the feelings of her ex-husbands, Nora Ephron's feelings matter.)

And she as a crappy column on the Huffington Post. I snark about one of her columns here.

And then the writer of the article pointed out the "realism" in movies like "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Bewitched."

That's when I stopped reading.

CC

Ps. My previous Anti-Ephron rant can be found here.

Pps. Other people on the Chaliceblog enemies list include:

Anne Lamott
Anne Rice

and an honorable mention to David Sedaris

Nora Ephron with fangs 2: CC really doesn't like Anne Rice

Ugh.

Just ugh. So you don't have to follow the link, it is what appears to be Anne Rice herself and certainly sounds like her, arguing with the regular folks who reviewed her book. She says things like "You are projecting your own limitations on it. And you are giving a whole new meaning to the words "wide readership." And you have strained my Dickensean principles to the max." Could that combination of snottiness, big words used in a questionable way and bad eighties slang be anyone else?

There are many things I hate about Anne Rice actually arguing with the Amazon reviewers of her book. Not the least of these things is that Rice's address is apparently now California. After all the crap she put the people of New Orleans through (while I lived there, she staged a Jazz Funeral with herself as the corpse to promote one of her books. Tacky.) the least she could have done was stay and rebuild. (According to this link, she sold her beautiful historic house to a condo developer.)

Again, ugh.

I need a shower.

CC

Ps. For new Chalicesseurs, Nora Ephron is the hated enemy of the Chaliceblog.
Because she stole the plot from Shadow of the Vampire to make that stupid Bewitched movie,

Because she managed to sound like she's name dropping even when talking about her own ex-husband.

And, well, she sucks.

One more question for Psyton re: Anne Lamott

Toy situation:

Duke hires you do admissions work. You've got a bunch of applications that are right on the line. You google the names. You Google "Sam Lamott from Marin County California" and it turns up this essay. Would you be as likely to admit him?

Keep in mind that you have already called him a "jackass" and a "little troll."

Assuming that you are willing to look past this essay and not let it color your perceptions of the kid, do you think that every admissions officer, every job interviewer, every potential date, Sam ever has will be as reasonable as you are?

CC

One more on Anne Lamott

Someone in the comments asked if we know how Sam feels about being written about. In an interview with Powell's Anne Lamott said:

"I've written a few pieces about Sam at Salon, but we've had the discussion and he really doesn't want to be written about. But he also said I could publish all those older pieces; I'll be putting them together in another kind of Traveling Mercies. But I won't be writing about him."

Let's be clear. She admits he doesn't like to be written about. He has been pretty reasonable about what she wrote when he was a kid, more so than he had to be. But he doesn't want to be written about any more.

So I'm guessing getting slapped wasn't enough punishment for not doing a good enough job washing the car.

Sounds like public humiliation of being compared to Jeffrey Dahmer by your own mother in front of a national audience was part of the punishment.

Paraphrasing Calvin Trillan, the teenage years are hard enough without having to be the subject of your parents' humor columns.

But I guess Sam's life wasn't hard enough for Anne.

I'm sorry, this is one nasty woman.

CC

Is it possible that Anne Lamott could suck even more than Nora Ephron does?

This is unbelieveable.

It's not even that she slaps her teenage son.

I got slapped quite a few times as a kid, but my mother never wrote about her difficulties with me in a national magazine. Thank God.

I realize I do write about my family and husband and friends a fair amount and I take great effort to not be self-indulgent and lame about it. (My brothers are kind of an exception. But I figure once one hits the sex offender registry, nothing on the Chaliceblog is going to make one's reputation worse.)

I don't have kids, but the most insulting thing I've written about my mother is that she's kind of distant. And I told her about it. She shrugged.

In the essay, Lamott knowingly or not conveys a freakish, controlling nature and many other unattractive qualities.

If I ever start to sound like this, please tell me.

I can accept that the average person doesn't get how words (especially words spoken in front of other people, or in this case written in a national online magazine) can suck a lot more than being physically attacked.

But Lamott is a writer. She's supposed to know this stuff. Her essay is a lot more troubling than her tendency to slap people.

Nora Ephron sucks. But Anne Lamott may actually be worse.

CC

A new, but irrational, reason to dislike Anne Lamott

Longtime readers know that I'm not a fan of Anne Lamott's. I once detailed my reasons why extensively but Anne herself is now adding to the list.

She wants to have a cheesy hippie revolution on July 14.

This is annoying for at least two reasons that are obvious at 1:30 at night:

1. The last revolution that started on Bastille Day didn't go too well for anyone involved.

2. A hippie revolution in July 14 means everyone in America will be too stoned to remember my birthday the following day, and we all know how bitchy I get when that happens.

That said, I should not allow anyone to believe that Anne Lamott is the true enemy of this blog. After all, Nora Ephron sucks so much harder.

CC

Morgan Spurlock is a chode.

Spurlock has claimed that we're all misinterpreting the frequently repeated story that he made fun of immigrants and retarded people.

He says he said "fuck" a few times and called himself "retarded" but that was the extent of it. And he defended his right to use "retarded" as an insult and swear as "free speech."

Of course, now that his lucrative speaking engagements are in jeopardy, he's all apologies. And he still doesn't get that using "retarded" as an insult is a problem.

I like how he says that when he said "the greatest lesson these kids learned today was free speech" he meant that the school officials hadn't wanted him to talk about McDonalds.

Of course, he didn't tell the kids that, so there's no way they could have learned about free speech from something they didn't know about.

I guess when you get used to manipulating the truth through film, you really start to think that everyone else is stupid.

CC

Nora Ephron with fangs

When CC lived in New Orleans, Anne Rice promoted one of her vampire books by staging an elaborate jazz funeral with herself in a coffin as the corpse.

That was a lame cry for attention.

It's going to take a lot to convince me that this isn't one too.

CC

CC and the discerning Pagans agree...Nora Ephron sucks

So there.