. . .they are a'changin'

I'm on his list. Once a week, I get an essay aboard a come-on for whatever books he's hawking with that edition, along with an invite to a reprise of the old show. A week-long tour is coming up through Minnesota in a couple of weeks. If I lived closer, I might just hit one of the stops. Somewhere, I've got a ticket stub from a 1980 Prairie Home Companion right here in Sioux Center's TePaske theater, before he hit the big time. 

His name and an old quote of his remains atop the blog you're reading. I've been a fan for years, never a fanatic--I didn't stop doing whatever I was doing on Saturday night to tune in, but I listened often and well. He was--maybe still is--among our best story-tellers. 

A single accusation of sexual indiscretion--he touched a woman's bare back--he claimed led to his dramatic fall from grace. Minnesota Public Radio begged to differ; there was more and others, and he was dumped. He'd retired a year before the accusations, but MPR took everything away and left him alone, old and alone. Hence, the weekly mailing. It's sad, even pathetic really. 

There's a difference between Harvey Weinstein and Garrison Keillor--or Bill Cosby and Al Franken. And now, what we determine becomes of Virginia's Lieutenant Governor Fairfax must yet be determined. If he goes down, he'll join dozens of others, even hundreds, including Garrison Keillor. If he stays, he won't be alone either, of course; but he'll be tarnished, just as is Judge Kavanaugh and our President. 

By way of a different indiscretion, the candidacy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren is history. Whether or not there's some thin traces of Cherokee blood in her Oklahoma family, her scribbling "Native American" in her Texas Bar application is a death warrant. Her Iowa tour last month was an astounding success, but that hand-written fill-in-the-blank did her in. 

Once upon a time, forty years ago, in a end-of-year skit meant to mock the college administration, I donned a KKK hood, something I must have picked up from the theater arts department costume room. I don't remember a black face--I can't think how a black face would have been funny; but I do remember the hood, remember wearing it myself to get a laugh. And I'm guessing that I remember doing that only because I got into an elevator with a kid who was serving up our dinner that night. He too was dressed in white. But he was black. Honestly, I don't remember if he was horrified or incensed or unaffected. I just remember thinking my white robe was, as I might have said then, "awwwkward."

Honestly, it had never dawned on me that wearing that suit in an end-of-the-year skit was improper--we were all white anyway. I don't have a clue what that skit was about anymore, but I remember the kid in the elevator.

Some believe we suffer horribly from a terminal case of political correctness. What about Ole and Lena jokes? What about the word "Yankees"?--after all, some claim originally it mocked the Dutch of New Amsterdam--"John Cheese!" What about blonde jokes? 

Culturally, we've got a ton of history to sort through. But the signs of the times couldn't be written more clearly on the walls all around. For a long time, white privilege, like male privilege, was deeply embedded in our culture, so deep that white males didn't really know it was there. Some--many?--still don't.

That time is over. As a multi-cultural society, we have yet to determine what to do with the detritus of that by-gone era. I still read Keillor's weekly essays. I still like him. But he's no longer a giant.

Men like Steve King try very hard to hold on, and he'll stay in office as long as his constituency tries hard to hold on too. 

But the times, they are a' changing. About that there can be little doubt.