There is racism still, but not so implacable, it can be worked around, teased, poked, prodded. Most Americans feel there is something screwy about a person who can’t relate to his fellow humans of any color. This is in the American tradition of tolerance going back to 1654, when the Dutch of New Amsterdam forbade public worship except in the Dutch Reformed Church, but when a shipload of Jews arrived from Brazil and held the first Rosh Hashanah service, the authorities said, Well, all right. Go ahead. It’s no skin off my nose. Whatever. It’s a big country. Who am I to judge? That’s the American spirit. Republicans don’t seem to understand that.
These changes toward a civil society were aided and abetted by government—government big enough to have impact, with a capable bureaucracy to work patiently through cumbersome due process and accomplish incremental change—all done, not out of anger but for the love of liberty. Tidal changes in the North and South, among Republicans and Democrats alike. Most Americans pay very little attention to public policy—we gave it up in favor of loud music and video games and barbecue and lying on the grass and looking up at the stars, the pursuit of happiness—but nonetheless we live in a social compact and expect our representatives to protect and conserve it. If they play fast and loose with it, there will come a day of reckoning.
The gaping hole in the compact is health care—42 million Americans have no health insurance and must jump through hoops in order to get treatment. I know, I used to be one of them, when I was writing fiction for The New Yorker and scraping along and had to take my wife twice to General Hospital in Minneapolis for treatment. Exquisite humiliation. Go to any inner-city emergency room and see suffering people filling out forms about their finances and waiting hour after hour after hour, an imperial caste system of medicine in a Christian country. National health insurance would simplify the system. The sick will be treated eventually—they won’t be left to die in the streets—so why not do it in a humane fashion with a modicum of dignity? We’ve left the dark fatalistic age of medicine when the doc was a kindly old coot who held your hand as you expired. Penicillin came in and other antibiotics to fight infection and surgery took great leaps forward and now if interesting problems show up on the CAT scan we do not faint and fall over, we set out to fight the disease—and in this nation where tax-supported research propelled these great advances, our denial of the benefits to so many is downright stone-hearted. There is health care for Republican dogs and cats superior to what people get in the charity ward. Health care is a fundamental right: you go flying heedless through your youth on waxen wings, immune to illness, immortal, but then you fall to earth and need to be cared for and not lie broken on the gurney waiting for the accountants upstairs to decide if you’re entitled to attention.
Mortality is the ultimate democracy. The tramp and the Trump are susceptible to the same bad news at the doctor’s office, each prostate is as vulnerable as any other. You go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and sit in a beige waiting room among women in Armani suits, dairy farmers and assorted geezers and geezerettes of Olmsted County, pooh-bahs and nabobs chatting on cell phones, here and there an oil sheikh, and all of us praying the same continuous silent prayer: O Great Internist, let the tests come out clean and please no colonoscopy today. You imagine some pea-sized tumor in your innards that has sprouted and sent its tendrils shooting through the lymph nodes and now dense jungle growths have a grip on your vitals and in a few months people will sit in an Episcopal church and softly weep for you and plant your ashes in the ground and go have a nice lunch. We all brood over this. We are all equal in our dread of the end to this delightful life and our disbelief in our own mortality. It will be a great day in America when we finally see that everybody is cared for.
Chapter 8
AT THE CAFÉ
A liberal lady of DC
By day was tasteful and p.c.
And then after ten
She went out with men
Who were rednecks, vulgar and greasy.
“When it comes to the masculine specie,”
She said, “Believe me, I’m easy,
But liberal guys
Tend to theologize
And I’m not St. Clare of Assisi.”
WHEN I AM gloomy about politics, I go sit alone in a crowded café in my neighborhood in St. Paul where the local art students like to hang out, intense young people with no clear prospects in life, and old gaffers and idlers and loafers and tourists from Iowa, genteel bohemians dreaming of the Dead and how it was to be 20 and discover Prévert and Camus. And well-fixed all-rightniks like me. I sit and inhale the smell of coffee amid the murmur of midwestern voices like water lapping on the shore. A true comfort on a cold day in April. I feel attached to this neighborhood, having lived here off and on half my life. Today, the morning paper has left me feeling stranded in a nation more like the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1914 than the sweet land of liberty but a walk around the neighborhood can cure that. The trees are budding, lilac bushes too, girls with bare midriffs stroll past. Summit Hill was Millionaires Row, home of the Upper Fifty, an old Republican bailiwick of lumber and insurance and railroad families of the 1870s that, after a century of graceful decline, was bought up and renovated by Democrats. Liberals have a secret lust for Victoriana. I’ve been in plenty of these old manses with their screen porches and bay windows and turrets and piazzas and arches, attending fund-raisers for losing liberals. And some winners, including Bruce Vento, a modest hard-working guy with enormous eyebrows who represented St. Paul in Congress for twenty-four years and did good things for the homeless and for the American wilderness, fought the good fights and then came home to die of lung cancer. And Senator Paul Wellstone, who once lived around here with his wife, Sheila. A September afternoon and fifty people standing around on a brick backyard terrace at fifty bucks a head (discounts available), a dozen bottles of $10 chardonnay and a tub of Leinenkugels, baskets of chips, chip dip, salsa, and an earnest candidate standing on the back steps, jabbing the air and talking passionately about workers’ compensation, which is all over my head, and I look around and see my people, people who were milling around the St. Paul Auditorium that night in 1984 when Walter Mondale, flushed like a middleweight after a fifteen-rounder, came out to concede to Ronald Reagan. We all remember the miserable defeat of George McGovern, and the Dukakis debacle, the fall of Gore—one godawful moment after another. At present, we are in our usual disarray and widely ridiculed by angry menopausal males who equate dissent with treason, but we Democrats do not faint to hear hecklers. The only shame is to lose heart. Once again we put our money in the bucket and clap for the candidate and if anyone asked us to, we would thrust our arms in the air and spell out D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T-S and cheer. Afterward a tall guy with black hair falling over his eyes says, “Hey, Keillor!” and it’s Barry Halper, my patron saint from University days, now a big man in satellite radio, and we commiserate about turning 60 and rant about the dang Republicans, and pat each other’s shoulders, and two years later meet in another backyard and hear another candidate jab the air and talk about health insurance. He is one of those wonks who use three or four acronyms per sentence and think nothing of it, which is Greek to me, but I’m a Democrat, confusion and ignorance do not discourage me.
This café is owned by locals, which we old bleeding-heart Democrats prefer to patronize, being romantic about small entrepreneurs. We would walk past a Starbucks to see if maybe there was a Stella’s or a Stanley’s on the next block. The little guy who mortgages his house to open the hot dog stand—that hits us where we live. My cousin used to sell vegetables out of a pickup truck at the farmers’ market and grew his truck garden into a big greenhouse operation north of here, a kind and courageous and honest man, the hero of the family. Another cousin launched a software company and a third is a one-man architectural firm, designing fine churches and libraries, and another is a tire dealer, and I am a writer and the founder of A Prairie Home Companion, which is produced by a small independent company. Not unusual for the
descendants of farmers to opt for independence.
It’s a big L-shaped room with exposed brick walls and big arches, a woman-sized copy of the Statue of Liberty. The front window is steamed up; an April cold front has moved in. The coffee menu is on the wall above the cash register, espresso, latte, cappuccino, mocha, Americano in three sizes and all sorts of permutations, 2% or skim or whole, a variety of syrups, chocolate dust, cinnamon. Biscotti, croissants, bagels, and four flavors of muffins in a glass case. Behind the case, a girl in a white apron studies me, a marvelously attitudinous girl. Her cropped dark hair is tinged with neon blue, silver rings dangle in her eyebrows, a stud glitters in her nose, and she gives me a look of offended nobility and waits for my order. Whatever. She is an artist, surely. Who else would need to be so prickly? God gives to the vulnerable a great power of disdain to ward off predators. I smile at her—I’m on your side, babes—but she doesn’t buy it. She grimaces. Come on, Pops, pick your muffin. I choose bran and a tall Americano.
A good hangout. You come in, you feel you could spend the day. The music today tends toward old blues, bottleneck guitar. Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Arthur Crudup. Artistly people and some writerlies and some law students slumming. Some older laptop people camp here who work at home as I do and maybe miss the office camaraderie. A gaunt beauty with chestnut hair taps away on her laptop, glancing up at the door. White jeans, purple striped stockings, yellow jersey, sunglasses parked on her head. (Not from here. LA maybe, or Minneapolis.) The laptop is the best thing for writers since the opposable thumb, a portable typewriter that doubles as a file cabinet and a spelling editor and a reference room. Students sit in twos and threes, slumped, leaning on each other, talking through their noses, and two UPS drivers on their lunch hour, and a man teaching his little tow-headed boy to play chess. Two old guys are engaged in cribbage who I guess might be between jobs right now, and coming to grips with the fact that the new job will be a big step down. One is a scrawny old dude, balding, bespectacled, beige sweater and tweed jacket and jeans, rubber shoes, maybe an old English teacher about to embark on a new career as a cashier in a parking ramp. A boy in a red T-shirt engrossed in the Norton Anthology of English Literature and his raven-haired girlfriend next to him, a darling such as Yeats would have been crazy about for twenty years. I will arise, and go now, and attend the coffeeshop, And sit next to that astonishment with black hair, And the bees and the voices of Democrats like water lapping, And the purple glow of her beauty there. She has a laptop too and I wish I could read over her shoulder and find out what someone so beautiful sounds like when she is serious. Her long dark lashes and her French mouth, her swan neck, her hair. If I were her college professor, I’d have to teach with my glasses off. She and Mr. Norton clearly are a pair and I believe this is not a good day for their romance. He goes for a refill and doesn’t bother to ask if she’d like anything. When he returns, he doesn’t touch her shoulder and her smile up at him is tentative. On the way home, she will turn to him and say, “I’m thinking maybe I’ll go down to Chicago for a few days and visit Hillary.” And he’ll say, “Fine.” And she’ll come back from Chicago with a clearer view of things, resolved to move out of the apartment. When you’ve broken up a few times yourself, you can recognize the signs of breakage in others. It’s interesting watching people in a café. Everybody has a story and some you’d give anything to be able to hear. Couples in love and couples falling out of love and it tugs at you as nothing on TV ever could. The old English teacher going to work at the parking ramp: this could have happened to me, I think, and a small voice says: It still could, Buster.
One thing I like about this café is the feeling, walking in here, that everyone else in the room has babysat for money, hitchhiked, had a few head-on encounters with liquor, and done hard physical labor. The summer I was 15, I picked potatoes for a month, bending down all day, filling one gunnysack after another, until I couldn’t stand up straight. It’s something that’s useful to remember when you’re older and you spend the day at a desk, and also how, after a day in the potato fields, you’d play touch football until dusk and fall into bed and be back to work at 8 A.M. ready to go. This is an experience you have in common with the others. We all climbed that mountain. No particular virtue in it, but it’s a checkpoint we all passed and maybe those who skipped it lost out on the comradeship. The American Brotherhood of Potato Workers lying on the cool grass under the tree at 5 P.M., straightening their backs. I wouldn’t have missed it. We all were in the same boat. We all were brought up to make something of ourselves and Don’t Be a Noise on Legs. Do Your Part. Don’t Be a Crybaby. Pull Your Weight. Be a Good Worker—in Minnesota, we know what that means: it means to stick with the job though you’re beat and your back aches. You rest and then you get up and go back to work. You don’t let the others carry your load. This simple ethic, learned young, will help save you from becoming an empty suit. You might have some interesting peccadilloes, you might be on shaky ground theologically, but if you can keep that truck under the chute until it’s loaded up with corn and drive it into town and unload at the elevator and come back for more, and do this from dawn to midnight until harvest is done, then we’ll make allowances for you.
The old guys at the cribbage board grew up when I did, in the happy time before there was security. We didn’t always lock our doors, and we often left the keys in the ignition, we thought nothing of lying down in a public park and taking a snooze. There were not hermetic safety seals on things. Back then people might poison a loved one but nobody would poison a perfect stranger. Now even shampoo comes with a little silver foil seal. We knew nothing of hair poisoning back in the happy time. And when you walked into the drugstore, there wasn’t the miserable man in the fake police uniform and the headset standing at the door and glowering at the customers.
Back then we all thought of America as one nation where everybody ate turkey with sage stuffing for Thanksgiving and after dinner the kids went outside and played Starlight Moonlight and tore around til they were out of breath and came in and watched the Bell Telephone Hour on TV with Robert Merrill and Patrice Munsel singing Rodgers and Hammerstein and dancers making geometric shapes on the floor and then a hot rod honked and your cousin Betty came downstairs and stood in the hall and primped and spritzed some Evening in Paris behind her ears and the boy in the two-toned Chevy with the fender skirts honked again and you heard his radio playing and it wasn’t the Bell Telephone Orchestra but something with a lot more drums and bass and his cigarette glowed and his hair was sculpted high on his head. He was trying out the Jimmy Dean look, but you knew his family so you didn’t worry. He wasn’t really bad, just young, full of piss and vinegar. You watched the show and went up to bed and left the door unlocked for Betty.
We are stoics in this room and can tolerate considerable misery without comment. Winter is long and Scandinavians can be sour and unreasonable and Minnesota drivers angry and dangerous and you can’t buy wine in a grocery store or pay to see naked people here and the newspapers have gone to pot and our cities sprawl for fifty miles in all directions, and politicians are short-sighted and winter is brutal, and yet, if that’s what it takes to keep out the Texans, then we’re happy.
If I were cheating on my taxes or dumping green gunk in the Mississippi or willfully exposing my employees to mortal danger or drawing enormous subsidies from the public trough or if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t feel at ease in this café, I’d prefer to drink my coffee in a private club with a uniformed doorkeeper lest some old crone walk over and spit in my eye. We café-goers on this cold spring day are united in a civil compact and we know it, even if we don’t mention it. This compact is powerful in the Midwest, thanks to our German and Scandinavian forebears, people of the bund, people who looked out for each other. And when we midwesterners travel to New York or London or Paris, we wonder: if we were struck by a car and lay bleeding in the gutter, would people stop and help?—the answer, surely, is yes, but here in the Midwest, there would be no questi
on.
One morning three years ago, I heard a shriek from upstairs, a long high-pitched primeval wail, and there was my wife on the landing, holding the stiff body of our little girl. I dashed up and took Maia in my arms and Jenny went to call 911. The child was unconscious, her breathing shallow. She went into convulsions in my arms and her body stiffened, her mouth clamped shut. I thought she was dying. Sheer silent terror on a pleasant spring morning: my four-year-old daughter dying. And in about two minutes the St. Paul fire department paramedics arrived at the door. They came in, four of them, and lifted her out of my arms. They laid her on the floor and tended to her, took her temperature (she was running a fever), put an oxygen mask on her face. One of them began explaining to me about febrile convulsions, how common they are in small children, which Jenny knew about but I didn’t, and then I noticed that I was still in my underwear. I pulled on a pair of trousers and we rode off to the hospital and in short order she was okay again.
The rescue squad can get to you anywhere in St. Paul in four minutes or less. That is official policy. These folks came racing up the hill from downtown, about a mile away, but there are EMTs or paramedics at eleven of the sixteen fire stations in the city and they do about eighty runs a day. The EMTs have taken a basic course of 250 class hours, the paramedics a two-year course of more than a thousand, and they know what they’re doing. They work alternate 12-hour days for a week—then take four days off, then alternate 12-hour days for another week, then six days off—for an average workweek of 56 hours. They start at $38,000 a year and after three years become journeymen and jump to $50,000. The shift starts at 8 A.M., but most of them come half an hour early to sit around and drink coffee and get ready. When you call and the dispatcher sends the alarm, the paramedics are in the truck and out the door in thirty seconds. The 911 system went into service in the Twin Cities in December 1982, paid for out of the state’s general fund. But the paramedics and EMTs are St. Paul city employees. And the four-minute-or-less response represents the nature of our civil compact here in St. Paul: if you urgently need help, someone will be there before panic sets in. In the suburbs, thanks to Republicans and their code of personal responsibility, the coronary victim will have time to read the entire Gospel of St. Mark before help arrives. There is a message here: if lower taxes are your priority over human life, then we know what sort of person you are. The response to a cry for help says a lot about us as human beings. You’re at a party late one night and there’s a scream from out on the street, and some people stick their heads out to see if there’s trouble and other people don’t bother. Maybe they’d rather not know.
Homegrown Democrat Page 8