I am Matt Thomas.

Translation from Lake-Wobegon-Speak to English of Garrison Keillor’s “Stating the Obvious.”

March 16, 2007

SOURCE: “Stating the Obvious” by Garrison Keillor for Salon.

With apologies to John Gruber, who does this sort of thing much better than me, but isn’t likely to take on this particular topic.

I see in the paper that the U.S. Department of Education laid out $750,000 for a study that shows that going to art museums and looking at art is good for schoolchildren, which I would have been happy to tell them for, say, $500 and a nice lunch. I also have some thoughts about the defecatory habits of bears, if the Forestry Service is interested. If the government is paying large sums of money to have the obvious pointed out, then I am your man. Ask me about this war and I’ll tell you for free.

I am folksy and plain-spoken. Have you heard my radio show?

I grew up the child of a mixed-gender marriage that lasted until death parted them, and I could tell you about how good that is for children, and you could pay me whatever you think it’s worth.

I am cleverly pointing out that I was raised by a heterosexual couple, something that distinguishes me from almost no one.

Back in the day, that was the standard arrangement. Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids. This was before caller ID, before credit cards, before pizza, for crying out loud. You could put me in a glass case at the history center and schoolchildren could press a button and ask me questions.

We were white, and so was everyone else. But seriously, aren’t I folksy?

Monogamy put the parents in the background where they belong and we children were able to hold center stage. We didn’t have to contend with troubled, angry parents demanding that life be richer and more rewarding for them. We blossomed and agonized and fussed over our outfits and learned how to go on a date and order pizza and do the twist and neck in the front seat of a car back before bucket seats when you could slide close together, and we started down the path toward begetting children while Mom and Dad stood like smiling, helpless mannequins in the background.

Even in my old age, I still believe that the world revolved around me as a child. Nostalgia is great.

Nature is about continuation of the species—in other words, children. Nature does not care about the emotional well-being of older people.

Except for me.

Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents—Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck—and need a program to keep track of the actors.

My 9-year-old daughter does not have this problem, obviously, since I sired her at the tender age of 55 (with the help of my third wife).

And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.

Relationships between gay men come and go just like those of straight people, but obviously, gay relationships are  grody.

The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.

I once watched all but the last five minutes of The Birdcage.

Last week I visited a grade school not far from where I grew up, and I strolled into a second-grade classroom and, good Lord, those lovely faces—Somali, Ethiopian, Hmong, Hispanic. Only about six kids looked anything like the kids I went to school with, and of those, three were Croatian. Fifteen different languages and dialects spoken in the school, a teacher told me. In my lifetime, the potato fields had been developed into tract housing for World War II vets and now a landing site for immigrants and their second-graders, most of whom ventured into English only a year ago.

We were white, and so was everyone else. But seriously, aren’t I folksy?

It was I Love Reading Week, and I was there as an Author. So I told them a story about how, back in the day, we were cowboys and rode horses across those flat spaces, rounding up our cattle, even in blizzards. For proof, I sang a cowboy song with a big whoopi-ti-yi-yo at the end of each verse and I got them all to do clip-clops and whinnies.

Kids still like cowboys, right? Even after that Brokeback Mountain stuff?

They seemed to understand it all, at least the clip-clop part, and they are better children for having met me. Pay me a quarter-million dollars and I’ll do a study that proves it.

Children love me for being folksy. Now, take these powdermilk biscuits and please ignore my three marriages, my two affairs, my child raised in a broken home, and my complete lack of irony regarding my spectacular failings to live up to the fictitious ideal that my overdeveloped sense of nostalgia has led me to create.