A Cynic's Home Companion

It pains me to say this, but I no longer think of A Prairie Home Companion, the NPR-distributed radio theater program listened to by erudite midwesterners and elder liberals, as a corny, irrelevant, return to a time that never was.  It turns out that the show's gushing folksyism and quaint sense of self-satisfaction might not actually be a soulless curse upon the airwaves.

I came upon this realization the hard way.  While growing up, my dad would host dinner parties with other families, and as the parents chatted and made jokes about what they saw in the news that day, all the kids would be in another room, forced to listen to the show's standard fare of corny cowboy jokes and hokey detectives.  We would sit there swearing allegiances against all that the Companion stood for while daring each other to try and switch the radio to another station before anybody noticed.  We had taken a bloodless oath that we would do everything we could to fight the powers of shameless, dorkish adulthood.  In the back of my head, I knew that it would be a slippery slope from A Prairie Home Companion to obsessive lawn care, mindless drudgery, a sudden taste for brussel sprouts, and the eventual wholesale elimination of fun and joy from life.  It made me want to do drugs.  

Then, over the last year or so, I came to realize that by intentionally exposing myself to high doses of folksiness, I could get stories of depth, humor, reflection, and some Foley artistry in return.  I've also come to realize that brussel sprouts can be delicious.  Sound investment in your financial future is a good thing.  In short, I've completely abandoned all that I believed in.  I've forsaken the oaths of youth in favor of the same stability and complacency as my parents.  I'm a complete sellout.

But that's the folly of youth.  You set unrealistic standards for yourself, eventually abandon them, and console yourself by saying that at least you tried.  That's why it's so important to start as high up the slippery slope of self-definition as possible and hopefully never slide past the halfway-point.  Just so long as you never completely slip from anarchist all the way to arch-conservative, you can retain a semi-consistent identity. 

So, for instance, let's say at some point you thought, "I will never be caught in such unscrupulous dorkishness as that".  And then at some further point you amended that to, "I might try some of that dorkishness in private, but hopefully nobody will catch me".  Then eventually you catch yourself being soothed by the sounds of the Windham Hill Sampler and recognizing the casual sensibility of fanny packs, and -- at that moment -- you realize you've hit the end of the journey.  The steady degradation of idealistic principles is complete.  You might as well hike your pants up as high as they go and prepare for the slow onset of death. 

Of course, you also realize that it has been a logical progression the whole way down.  Darkness and cynicism may seem curious from a distance, but it's a depressing way to go through life.  Fashion and music preferences are inaccurate shortcuts to understanding someone's personality.  Creating anything of depth or meaning usually takes effort.  And if a majority of being cool is just self-satisfaction, then an infinte supply of hipness can be easily obtained from joyful dorkishness. 

And what better way to obtain that then from creative, socially satirical storytelling?  Bad cowboy jokes and hokey detectives may not be considered "soul", so to speak, but rather a parallel condition akin to "dork soul" with historical connections to Swedish Lutheranism.  That humor is part and parcel of the same ritualistic laughter used to ride out the cabin fever of long Minnesota winters.

Then, right when I was ready and willing to accept the Companion in all of its hokey midwestern quaintness, it turns out that there is a sinister side to Garrison Keillor.  While I was trading in my cynical coping mechanisms and accepting his whimsy, I slowly discovered that Keillor is actually a social conservative zealot yearning to return the country to a 1950's folksy fantasyland where flamboyancy and sarcasm are nonexistent.  There isn't even a Lake Wobegon.  Look it up on Google Maps.  There's only a Lake Wobegon coffee shop, and that was named after the show. The whole premise was predicated on a lie - a giant folksy sham. 

There are no ruddy-cheeked children joyfully frolicking in the snow while maple trees sway sorrowfully in the breeze.  He made it all up.  If there were any children, they were pasty and bored and they hung out behind the 7-11.   The maple trees were chopped down years ago to make way for the Olde Country Buffet off the interstate, which itself is neither old nor country. It's just a lot of low-grade food served in a trough.

Now I don't know where to turn.  I've come to recognize the Companion as just another exploitative medium, like sexploitation or splatter films, but for whimsy.  The show takes advantage of your baser instincts to try and sell you powder milk biscuits and rhubarb pie or whatver conglomerate is funding its coffers that week.  Having traded in youthful idealism for a Thomas Kinkade painting and then having that revealed as a fraud, I might as well go back to smoking cigarettes behind a 7-11.
 

—January 18th, 2010

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