Left-liberals’ deceits of late, such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and books with "lies" or "liar" in their titles, rankle conservatives. Many believe, as I do, the "liberal" need for illusions to fool the electorate runs deep this election year.  Is coherent argument, let alone rational and civil discourse, now impossible?

Such melancholy I bring to fellow Minnesotan Garrison Keillor’s just-out book, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America (Viking Books). If Keillor reflects the soul of America, as he says he does, and if Senator John Kerry portrays the Hollywood liberal class, God help us all.

Keillor’s book embraces wacky, ill-premised beliefs. It oozes with scorn for all Republicans, and puts down truth itself. In her best-selling book Libel, Ann Coulter writes sweepingly, "a liberal will deny even incontrovertible facts." Keillor’s latest is evidence of this in spades.

Homegrown Democrat reflects a dark side of a pretty good humorist.  He tags Republicans as "hairy-backed swamp developers, corporate shills, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, hobby cops, misanthropic frat boys, lizardskin cigar monkeys, jerktown romeos, ninja dittoheads. . ."

(Note: A touché to his "freelance racists" tag: Thomas Sowell defines racists as conservatives who win arguments with braying liberals.)

Hard-ass Keillor goes on: ". . .tax cheats, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, grab-ass executives, gun fetishists, genteel pornographers" and (gulp!) "nihilists in golf pants." Egad! All this juvenile hyperbole on page 14 of a 256-page screech job his Prairie Home Companion (PHC) website calls "a love letter to liberalism." Come again?

Hate letter from the left is more like it. True to the hypocrisy that often marks even logical liberals’ thinking, Keillor claims this book lays out "the politics of kindness." Does all irony escape this man? Is he finally one of T.S. Eliot’s "hollow men," hopelessly "between idea and reality?"

In 1994, in a hissy fit about the hated GOP sweeping to majorities in Congress, Keillor wrote: ". . . dim figures emerged from the mist; lo and behold, the same old gang of frat boys, geezers in golf pants, cheese merchants, cat stranglers, corporate shills, Bible beaters, swamp developers." Sound familiar? At least the apostle of Democrats’ current wave of hate is consistent in his cute malicious libels -- except it was "geezers" then, "nihilists" now, but still in golf pants. 

Not classy, certainly not pretty, he has become "a horrid left-liberal scold, dripping with contempt for nearly everything Middle American," writes Jay Nordlinger, dead-on, in National Review.

Religion, often the butt of Keillor’s deadpan humor, does get his respect. That befits the one-time fundamentalist (Plymouth Brethren) Christian. All who listen to his PHC "News from Lake Wobegon"  about Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility and the abundant Norwegian Lutherans, know he brings a grudging respect to things eternal.

Yet a putrid, ugly religion rears up in his polemical diatribes. Republicans, he says, are "criminal" and worse, "evil, deeply evil." With malice toward all "Rs" (and a spot in Hades for libertarians, too), Keillor says, "They do not do what Jesus called us here to do." Oh, really? "Full of passionate intensity," as Yeats put it, Keillor excoriates all who disagree with his God-awful blend of politics and religion. *

"Republicans might be heathens out to destroy all we [sic] hold dear," he told The Guardian (London) in 1999, "but that doesn’t mean we take them seriously. Or be bitter because they are swine."  Infidels? Pigs? Reads more like a Fatwa from a witless radical fundamentalist Islamic cleric, than ruminations of a revered  American humorist.

Preacher of Hate Keillor rebukes "religious people" who "sign on" with the GOP. These Faustian pacts are "betrayals of their faith," he says, occupying high moral ground once staked out by, say, the Rev. Jim Jones in Guyana. (Will it be spiked Kool Aid, or venom, for the "evil" Republicans?)

Such neurotic knee-jerk hatred of anything conservative is designed, likely, to delight the smirking elites -- e.g., leftist Academia and Big Media. But Keillor’s animus, staged or not, goes beyond bemused satire for elitists, into unintelligible guff of the Theater of the Absurd. For example, urban-based First Responder (EMTs) are exclusively "Ds," he asserts in Homegrown. They're compassionate good Samaritans all, rushing to save people, as indeed they do. Republicans, well, they let people die in the ditches in their "wealthy" far-flung suburbs. Get the drift? Hate is the subtext, class warfare his game. Clever.

In the novel Me, his smug send-up of then-Governor Jesse Ventura, whom he despised nearly as much as Republicans, Keillor exposed his spots as a left-wing crybaby and boorish crank. In Homegrown Democrat, billed as non-fiction, he expands on his Me theme, reciting every old liberal shibboleth imaginable, adding his own screwy left-wing biases. Bottom line: Dastardly Republicans are cruel, heartless, selfish, etc., worthy only of being cast forever into the nether regions. (How charitable is that?  Salvation only for ardent Dems? What about that Mansion with all those rooms, anyhow?)

Keillor seems consumed now by partisan hatred, tilting at illusory devils among the windmills of his aging mind. Martin Luther on losing it, merely tossed an inkwell at his devils, not a whole exorcising book.

In Keillor’s brave new world, shared by fellow GOP demonizer, "comedian" Al Franken (also a Minnesotan), there’s room in the Inn of America for only one political party. Theirs. No one else needs register. Pluralism is passé. All that’s right and PC proper is on the Left. Is it something in the Twin Cities’ water supply?

H.L. Mencken famously wrote, "The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true."  Keillor is all of passionate reciting the palpably not true. His sources of information appear to be liberal mainstream news, with all that implies. Pity him.

Haters casually twist truths, bend facts, to fit their biases. Moore’s film proves it.  Criticism of a "liberal" is viewed as a GOP plot or a Nixonian trick. Paranoia reigns on the Left. Even the brave in liberal classes run as if scared from logical argument, which they’d likely lose anyway, but not always. (Shhhh.)

In the humorist’s hometown paper, the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press, Professor Chuck Chalstrom nails it:  "Keillor is temporarily blinded by a lethal combination of raw hatred and left-wing paranoia." Dr. Chalstrom’s optimism that the blindness is temporary is hopeful, albeit a long shot at boxcar odds. But one never really knows about late life Epiphanies. Like hitting a megabuck Lotto, it COULD happen!

"Lethal" is a stretch, unless fatal afflictions are triggered by unhinged rage. Still, branding all you disagree with as (gasp!) "criminals" and/or "evil, very evil," if even metaphorically, bodes not well for the gentle soul, or the bleeding heart. Let’s hope the gifted humorist recovers soon because, well, life is too dang short, as those above-average folks in Lake Woebegon would say, for sure.  Skoal to that.  

* Lines from William Butler Yeats’s "The Second Coming:"

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Homegrown Democrat is available on Amazon.com.

Gary Larson is a retired non-profit association CEO and former magazine editor. He is not the retired cartoonist. Larson is a graduate of the University of Minnesota School of Journalism, where he shared classes in the counterculture Sixties with Gary Edward Keillor, then a shy lanky kid from Anoka, MN. A summer resident now of northern Minnesota, Larson admits to being a geezer, but no longer in golf pants. "Gave up the sport years ago," he says.

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