An Exercise Of The First Amendment

Garrison Keillor

See the Roar Of Hollow Patriotism by Garrisson Keillor at: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/28/opinion/edkeillor.php

Soap Box Ravings would like to bring to your attention an article, The Roar of Hollow Patriotism, written by Garrison Keillor and published on May 28, 2008. In this article, the sometimes funny buffoon is not so funny. Keillor, a BUMF if there ever was one, spends his efforts in deriding a Memorial Day Tribute simply it seems because the "fat men with pony-tails" on Harleys irritated him.

Three-hundred thousand bikers roaring around Washington in a Memorial Day tribute to America's war dead, and he was irritated. Like a Lord from an earlier era when bothered by peasants.

Lord Keillor says a patriotic bike rally is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or patriotic graffiti; the patriotism somehow gets lost in the sheer irritation of the thing. He says people associate Memorial Day with long moments of silence when you summon up mental images of men huddled together on LSTs and pilots revving up B-24s and infantrymen crouched behind piles of rubble steeling themselves for the next push, not motorcycles. He says he does not see the connection between Memorial Day and "fat men with ponytails" on Harleys.

A review of Lord Keillor's career would indicate that he has no idea how any military veteran would react because he never participated. Yet he lets the parade of those who did and their friends bother him because he is inconvenienced and therefore irritated.

By the tone of his article, Lord Keillor cares nothing for the inconvenience military service may have caused those who did serve. Many lost their lives, body parts, their education, or have endured lifelong problems. Yet, Lord Keillor is miffed because he must wait to cross the street.

In 2007 Keillor wrote an article regarding "stereo-typical" gay parents; in responding to criticism Keillor wrote in part "I live in a small world...." Soap Box Ravings says yes, Lord Keillor does live in a small world, one that was made much safer for him by those now "fat men with pony tails" on Harleys.

Lord Keillor also callously said, "If anyone cared about the war dead, they could go read David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" or Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945" or any of a hundred other books, and they would get a vision of what it was like to face death for your country.' If any one cared? these "fat men with pony tails" on Harleys knew many of those war dead as they served together before the battles.

During my naval career and since Soap Box Ravings has always supported the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This includes Lord Keillor's right to write and distribute such drivel, but I don't have to like it.

A pox on you Garrison Keillor.