The sensible virtues

You don't have to be so smart to make your way through adult life, but you should know the basic rules
By Garrison Keillor
Salon

Said it before, say it again: It's a great country, and one of its beauties is freedom of expression, freer now than ever before, and another is a general amiability that you find everywhere, the helpfulness of strangers, the pleasure of small talk. Of course it's spring and the air is brisk and this makes for public happiness. And I've just come from Nashville and Seattle, two mightily congenial cities. The young and restless stroll the downtown honky-tonks and a sweet breeze blows, laden with flowers, and it is darned near idyllic.

For all the talk of political polarization and the anger of the right wing, you don't see this in everyday life as you gad about the byways. You're not accosted by irate people demanding that they get their country back. The Internet is full of old growlers, of course, and if you opine on public issues, you'll get anonymous mail calling you a baby-killer, torturer, tool of Satan, cat strangler and babbling idiot, which you accept as your due, like the static electricity you collect walking across a carpet. A slight shock, but it doesn't turn on any light bulbs.

So what else have we learned lately? That the dishonesty of distinguished old Wall Street firms such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns makes the Mafia look pretty straight. That it is dangerous to be a president: People may try too hard to please you and land the plane in thick fog and kill you and everyone aboard. You'd be better off in economy, seat 27E, on the scheduled flight to Smolensk. That it may have been a mistake to cut Greece into the European Union, that its political culture is just too different from that of Northern Europe. That the Republican Party is now united on a strategy of running against our cautious and conciliatory president as a dangerous radical, and it won't fly, especially not if Mrs. Palin becomes the public face of the party.

(More here.)