i like nostalgia. In measured doses with some good archival photos, it's a way to BANAL CLICHE HERE honor the past. For about five seconds. Before you decide whether to go to Bread & Co. or Dishes for lunch. I'm sad that CBGB closed. I wish we hadn't torn down the old Penn Station. SoHo WAS better before the megastores moved in. But Garrison Keillor's grumpy Salon article stereotyping gay parents really just cemented my feeling about him as beyond recovery. I bet I'm like a lot of people in that I used to love him but now I'm just so disappointed. I have nostalgia for him.
There's already been gajillions of annoyed responses to him (Dan Savage went postal, others more measured. The thing that drives me batshit about his nostalgia is that it doesn't acknowledge any bad in the Beautiful, Golden-hued, All-White, Gas-Guzzling Past. It was all safe and warm and smelled like puppies and freshly-baked cookies! Yeah, if you were WHITE and STRAIGHT. And being MALE doesn't hurt.
It would help a lot if he acknowledged that he was gilding like a mofo. One little "I'm hardly the one to point fingers, I've been married three times," or a "granted, the era that I'm romanticizing was also the era of Selma, homophobia, the Korean War, the Cold War" would go a long way to making him less patronizing.
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After reading gazillions of responses on Salon, and on Dan Savage's blog, I think that this was poorly written satire, rather than reflective of GK's actual point-of-view.
That so many really smart and funny people didn't see this reinforces, for me, that the writing was bad.
I tried to listen to PHC this weekend to see if he was going to address it, but didn't get to. On Sunday though I heard some of Ira Glass's special This American Life live show, which included Dan Savage. I imagined that on some NPR stations, the pieces ran consecutively. Dere you go.
I located a response from GK, which will not satisfy a lot of people, but should at least be made part of the record:
GK responds.
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