Prairie Home Companion, Off the Air at Last

I'm in the minority of folk offended by Garrison Keillor's "The Prairie Home Companion" on public radio, and not only because it was feeble humor and 40 years of it, but because I'm a northerner (from Wisconsin) and the people there are not at all like those cracker-barrel types he made fun of.

I will even go so far as to say that Wisconsin's next-door-neighbors, Minnesotans, although of lesser distinction than Wisconsinites who ALWAYS return their shopping carts to the cart corral, are not the bumpkins Keillor portrayed. The more I listened, the more annoying it was. Keillor's humor was for urban people: Their idea of country life.

Some listeners, not very smart, believed the show was serious and that a Lake Wobegon and its "above average" populace were real. As Keillor's career progressed he read poems on the air and somehow became an authority on which poems were "good poems," editing poetry anthologies titled Good Poems and Good Poems for Hard Times.

Missouri, too, gets the "back country" treatment especially by East Coast newspapers which run photos of aged Missourians with their thumbs in the straps of their overalls. All that's missing is the stalk of hay between their teeth.

Bye, Garrison, whose real name is Gary, one of the three bad-luck first names (the bad-luck female name is Jean; the other bad-luck male name is Gene). Keillor said that in retirement he is going to "rediscover lunch" and "rediscover weekends." Have fun, man. Stay off my radio! It'll take us years to undo the Midwestern-stereotyping damage you've done. And Keillor is not Mark Twain; not by a long shot.