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Why Iowa matters to America by Garrison Keillor
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Aggressiveness was not a prime value in my family. Only two of my 15 uncles played football and not one of them was a hunter. They were gardeners, not warriors. Gentle godly men with husky voices who leaned against cars and talked quietly about manly things which, for them, included: 1. Cheap Things That Are Better Than Expensive Ones 2. The Peculiarities of Neighbors 3. The Relative Merits of Makes of Cars 4. Amazing Coincidences in Everyday Life 5. The Art of Raising Strawberries 6. The Absurdities of Urban Life 7. Road Trips, Past and Future Sports and politics didn’t loom large in their world. So when I tune in to talk radio and hear guys ratcheting on and on about the home team betraying them or how much they hate Hillary Clinton, it has an exotic tinge for me, like hearing space alien dialogue in a movie. My male role models didn’t raise their voices.
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The radical feminists of my day did not grow up with men like my uncles, or perhaps they forgot, and other intellectuals who explore maleness do not include the Men Leaning Against The Car Murmuring archetype, but I remember them well, especially on these golden Saturdays in late fall, the gentle voices of the philosophers of the driveway.
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Some of us veered away from their example and galloped into the stone canyons of careerism, which has warped us somewhat. We are expected to give up our lives for work. We have a tendency to obsess and orate and that is something the driveway philosophers didn’t go in for. They were a chorus, not an audience, and they spoke softly and contrapuntally of the wonders of the world, the benefits of pruning and mulching, the qualities of apples, the science of forecasting winter by observing woolly caterpillars, the plans for flooding the backyard to make a hockey rink, the difficulties of growing roses, the trials and tribulations of plumbing.
The driveway philosophers are still with us. Whenever I escape from my stone canyon, I find them here and there, talking uncle talk. They constitute a large invisible bloc that looks at candidates for public office and gets an intuitive sense of who is real and who is not. They know that politicians live in stone canyons and hire smart designers to create their personas, but they check out Hillary and Obama and Giuliani and Romney and they wonder who knows about gas mileage, who has a normal relationship with children, who can truly appreciate a really good apple.
And that’s why Iowa is important. It’s a major state of driveway philosophers.
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