Thoughts From the Back Row of the Memorial

By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website

21 December 19

learned a new word last week: “anonymized.” It means just what it says, “made anonymous,” and was used in reference to government reports obtained by the Washington Post that contained truthful revelations about our 18-year war in Afghanistan that the government was lying to the American people about while spending a trillion dollars to achieve something that nobody in the Pentagon could quite define.

My uncles, may they rest in peace, would not have been surprised by the Post’s story. Their regard for generals was low, based on their own military service, and their opinion of politicians lower: they associated high office with adultery, alcohol, and bribery, end of discussion.

My generation, on the other hand, got inspired by movements — civil rights, women’s equality, antiwar, environmental — and various attractive speakers back in the days before the twittering began, and so we became idealists. Back in the day, more than once, I myself stood in vast crowds of people singing, “All we are saying is, Give peace a chance.” The words don’t make sense, but we sang with great feeling.

The revelations about the trillion-dollar war briefly gained the front page and then faded. Our government had knowingly sent men to die in a losing cause and refused to admit it. A few thousand voters in Florida in 2000, aided by the Supreme Court, had changed the course of history. President Gore might’ve paid attention to the melting of Greenland and spent the trillion on solar power, but that is mere history, so the adventures of Mr. T resumed domination of the airwaves. The man, clad in leopard-skin tights, now climbs the high tower of impeachment where, to the astonishment of the crowd, he will dive into the water tank of the Senate and emerge triumphant.

So my generation comes to disillusionment late, whereas the uncles settled into it in their twenties, ignored Washington, worked on their houses, raised kids, went fishing, grew excellent tomatoes, listened to ballgames on the radio. Mr. T is a shock to people my age and the shock doesn’t wear off. When you see him in the driveway with the Washington Monument in the background, you can’t help but compare the two men, and it’s a steep decline.

I felt better Sunday when I attended a memorial service for a friend my age who grew up Jewish in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, learned to mind his manners, did well in school, went to Brooklyn College for $15 a semester, got into law school on a scholarship. He got a job in a law firm, hated it, took a government job, thought about going to grad school to study philosophy, and to earn his tuition money he drove cab for a while. “The hardest job I ever had,” he told me, but he loved talking to the passengers in the back seat. Everybody had a story and he buzzed around the city and heard some good ones.

That convinced him to go back to lawyering. He worked for the Legal Aid Society, defending the indigent, many of them too dumb to succeed at larceny. He took a job as secretary to a judge who needed serious assistance. This gave him the confidence to run for a civil court judgeship. He won and embarked on a long judicial career, winding up a state judge in the Bronx with an office on 151^st Street overlooking Yankee Stadium. True to his Brooklyn upbringing, he never passed through its gates, and true to his education, he faithfully served the people of the Bronx and the laws of the state of New York. He loved his wife, Eleanor, Italian food, jazz and blues and classical music, books of history, and he regarded public service as a high calling.

The Founders envisioned the Senate as a high calling to form a body of individuals of independent mind and conscience and at times it has been and at other times it’s held more than its share of seat-warmers, ward heelers, and errand boys. The advance signals from Mr. McConnell and Mr. Graham say clearly that the fix is in. Honest corruption, in full public view, saves a great deal of time. The water tank will be forty feet deep and the leopard-skin tights will contain a parachute.

So be it. But corruption at the top means the national good depends on dedication in the middle. He was a good man. Fifteen million more like him can save the country.