A Prairie Home Patriot
I don't like Garrison Keillor. At all. To me, he typifies that oh-so-enlightened and taxpayer subsidized liberal that has become the insufferable hallmark of National Public Radio.
But, in this day and age, it's like pure gold to be treated to a liberal who is also a patriot. The Left has become so frothingly anti-American these days that it's sometimes hard to remember an older, more honorable liberal tradition, one that wasn't uncomfortable with sticking up for America against over-intellectual European posing.
Which is why Keillor's review of Bernard-Henri Levy's "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Toqueville" is so remarkably refreshing. For those of you spared the long excerpts of Levy's book published in the Atlantic Monthly this past year, Levy's book is a chronicle of his travels in the U.S., in which the author sees what he wants to see, has every prejudice re-affirmed and generally concludes that it's a very good thing indeed that he is not American. It was insufferable, yet compelling, reading that reminded me of my time in Paris, when I discovered to my horror that the "United States" that exists in the popular French imagination was not any America that I would recognize.
Keillor just takes this guy to the cleaners. Here's a sample:
You can find the whole beautiful review here. Enjoy and merci.
But, in this day and age, it's like pure gold to be treated to a liberal who is also a patriot. The Left has become so frothingly anti-American these days that it's sometimes hard to remember an older, more honorable liberal tradition, one that wasn't uncomfortable with sticking up for America against over-intellectual European posing.
Which is why Keillor's review of Bernard-Henri Levy's "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Toqueville" is so remarkably refreshing. For those of you spared the long excerpts of Levy's book published in the Atlantic Monthly this past year, Levy's book is a chronicle of his travels in the U.S., in which the author sees what he wants to see, has every prejudice re-affirmed and generally concludes that it's a very good thing indeed that he is not American. It was insufferable, yet compelling, reading that reminded me of my time in Paris, when I discovered to my horror that the "United States" that exists in the popular French imagination was not any America that I would recognize.
Keillor just takes this guy to the cleaners. Here's a sample:
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz -you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.
You can find the whole beautiful review here. Enjoy and merci.
