When Smart People Say Stupid Things
I’ve always been fond of Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor’s show on NPR. With the exception of his truly abyssmal singing, and the heinous “Powdermilk Biscuits” ad, the show is a pretty good companion during those weekend housecleaning jags. The “Ketchup Advisory Council” schtick is always good for a chuckle, and the Guy Noir and Lives of the Cowboys sketches are usually mildly funny. Keillor also features a lot of bluegrass and old time music on the show: in fact, on New Year’s Eve, he rented out the Ryman Auditorium and televised an all-star bluegrass event. It was great.
I also like Keillor’s politics. He hates George W. Bush and his war. He’s a free-thinker. He despises Republicans.
However, that doesn’t mean Keillor gets a free ride when he says stupid things, and his latest column for Salon, a meditation on family structure and gay marriage, is about as stupid as you can get.
Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents — Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck — and need a program to keep track of the actors.
On the topic of “the extended family” Keillor doesn’t take into account that extended families are not only good for children, but are a common and valid family structure among blacks and Latinos. Furthermore, it is only in the past 100 years that the model has become less common among whites.
Where I grew up, the closest and largest families were in the Fifth Ward, which had a majority Irish population. My best friend Tim lived within a few blocks of his cousin Michael’s house. In the same neighborhood were Tim’s paternal and maternal grandparents, as well as various other cousins, uncles and aunts. It made the Fifth a fairly safe neighborhood, and not the place you wanted to get caught in any mischief, since everyone knew each other. I kind of envied Tim back then: my own family was a nuclear unit that lived far away from the rest of our relatives. My father and his brother have been estranged for as long as I can remember, as were my one remaining grandmother and my mom. My mom’s relatives were mostly deceased, and those that were alive lived in Nebraska and California: we never visited.
With the birth of our various kids, having an extended list of nearby relatives has saved my brother and me a lot of grief. When Sam visits, my mom watches him from time to time. Ray and Dreya know they can count on me or our parents to watch Elliott when necessary, and vice versa. Among low-income populations, having an extended family to watch your kids is more than a convenience: it can mean the difference between self-sufficiency and welfare dependence. Having a broad variety of involved relatives also gives a child that many more sources of guidance and supervision.
Furthermore, “the old monogamous system” that Keillor rhapsodizes is a product of a time when women didn’t work outside the home, and when the consequences of divorce were so severe for women that they often stayed in violent and abusive relationships. I’m glad Keillor grew up in a happy home: many people did not.
And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.
Keillor steps into the trap of assuming homosexual promiscuity. He does not mention that fully 50% of heterosexual unions end in divorce. Keillor goes for the cheap laugh by jumbling together a mishmash of family members current and past, one on top of the other, as if extened families aren’t valid. Perhaps Keillor thinks people shouldn’t divorce or remarry? An interesting point of view from someone who’s on wife number three (why Keillor doesn’t mention this pertinent fact is beyond me). Clearly Keillor doesn’t know that the only children with worse outcomes than those from low-income families headed by a single mother are those who come from high-conflict two-parent families. [By the way, if you are a single parent like me, reading the literature is a guilt-inducing nightmare of all the ways you're failing your child, from long-term cognitive deficits to future delinquency to poor discipline. Because I've had to spend a good portion of my time on this post looking at statistics, the depression that moved in on Sunday is now worse than ever. Now I have a reason to dislike Keillor.]
The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men — sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.
Keillor confuses “stereotypical gay men” with real gay men. Most of the gay men I know aren’t flamboyant at all, and with regard to those who are, I didn’t know flamboyance was a crime or a sign of personal, moral, or intellectual weakness. Furthermore, Keillor is about as sardonic as they come, has worn the same hairstyle and quirky round glasses since time immemorial, and hosts a radio show given to flights of fancy about pretend cowboys, silly ads, and that godawful “lookit me, Ma, I’m singing, I’m singing!” schtick. If Mr. Keillor is critical of flamboyance, he is at least attacking the topic from a fully informed (if not fully self-aware) point of view.
“[T]he flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.” Actually, parents are supposed to set a good example for their children, transmit values and morals, and help the kid grow up to be a happy and healthy individual. A large part of that is the development of self-esteem and creativity. Children learn by example, and the best example is the parents. When parents are happy, comfortable in their own skin, and have high self-esteem, only good things can follow for their offspring.
And that is why Keillor’s belief that “Nature is about continuation of the species — in other words, children. Nature does not care about the emotional well-being of older people” is untrue. Just ask any abused or neglected child. This isn’t an argument for a domineering parent, but it is certainly an argument that when parents show children its OK to pretend and act silly, that children benefit.
Mr. Keillor, it is a pleasure to hear you trash George Bush on your show. Your goofy and fanciful tales of life in Minnesota are delightful on a rainy weekend. But your amateurish attempt at analyzing and criticizing changing family structures is a bad joke and not very funny.
Stick to story-telling.
3 Responses to “When Smart People Say Stupid Things”
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March 16th, 2007 at 12:22 am
[...] post by Brendan and software by Elliott [...]
March 16th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Great post. Thanks for saying it, and saying it well.
A wee fact I discovered in my readings is that among primates, humans are the only ones where females live past the end of fertility. This has led some of those I read to wonder if grandparents are one of the reasons our branch of the primate family became better at survival than our primate cousins.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
you know…he has made a life, career, and money creating a world that never existed. Not that it makes it right. That is just what he does.