Basic, Needful Things

National Public Radio's "Prairie Home Companion" storyteller Garrison Keillor has an op-ed column, a recent installment of which was "What really makes our nation strong" in The (Baltimore) Sun. Keillor is a Minnesota liberal, which means his ideological urges are directed toward enabling "just folks" like you and me. It is an approach which resonates strongly indeed with oldstyleliberal.

This particular piece is a scathing characterization of he whom Keillor often calls, euphemistically, the Current Occupant, with all his minions. These people don't understand Americans at all. They don't get it that:

We really are one people at heart. We all believe that when thousands of people are trapped in the Superdome without food or water, it is the duty of government, the federal government if necessary, to come to their rescue and to restore them to the civil mean and not abandon them to fate. Right there is the basis of liberalism.

The People Now In Charge fail to grasp, for example, Americans' workaday "sagas of ferocious parental love vs. stonewall bureaucracy in the quest for basic, needful things," such as a decent education for their children. Some frustrated parents have "uprooted their families and moved to Minnesota so their children could attend better schools. You couldn't tell if those parents were Republicans or Democrats. They simply were prepared to move mountains so their kids could have a chance. So are we all."


Much as these things needed to be said, and however much Keillor should be applauded for saying them, oldstyleliberal feels the Minnesotan ought to have noticed something else about "basic, needful things." Liberals and conservatives agree that they're what politics is all about, after all. As Keillor says, "that's the mission of politics: to give our kids as good a chance as we had."

The difference is that for liberals, "our kids" is a global, inclusive category; no one's children are excluded. For conservatives, "our kids" means the kids of my family, in this particular community of like-minded individuals who have made similar life choices.

This is because conservatives see "basic, needful things" as not being abundant enough to go around. They need a marketplace to ration access to them. Those who cannot outbid — because they have made "bad life choices" — will simply have to do without.

Keillor's way of putting the same thing, with reference to varied responses to hurricane Katrina: "Conservatives tried to introduce a new idea — it's your fault if you get caught in a storm — and this idea was rejected by nine out of 10 people once they saw the pictures. The issue is whether we care about people who don't get on television."

But maybe the real issue is whether we even care enough about people whose misery does get shown on TV.

At any rate, Garrison Keillor has a tin ear for all "bad life choices" arguments, in whatever guise the may come in. More power to him!