More on Keillor - Lordy,

More on Keillor - Lordy, I hope this sticks to the old stuffed shirt.

Agendabender comments on the story, especially Keillor's sly hint at Coleman's family situation:

Garrison K is indulging in a rhetorical device that even the lowest gossips disdain as louche. What you have here is a mute item. The more typical and honorable device is the blind item, a morsel of gossip in which the discreditable actions are detailed but the actors remain unnamed though hints are given to their identity. Hints of such specificity that you can usually narrow the suspects down to a hot hundred or so. In the mute item the actor is named but the actions go unspoken. It's a kind of paranormal slander.

That's one point about Keillor's piece that I'd neglected - his assumption that everyone would be in on "the secret" about Coleman's family life. Keillor insinuates that he knows something the rest of us don't.

He doesn't. Norm Coleman's family situation is the worst-kept secret in Minnesota politics. The Colemans would seem to have an unconventional marriage. Mrs. Coleman's acting ambitions take her to California rather a lot. It would seem nothing is hidden or on the sly between the two of them - certainly not in the Clintonian sense of the term. Oh, yeah - and he isn't a predator.

And you don't have to hang around the St. Paul Grill (a tony lounge and restaurant in the St. Paul Hotel, a former haunt of Al Capone's) to know that! Keillor acts as if he's privy to something deep and dark and...unknown

Of course Garrison doesn't mean "everyone" when he says "everyone knows", anymore than he means "knows". He's just doing the turn known as noblesse oblique beloved of mediacrats with delusions of omniscience. Which would be all of them.

True. And with the added wrinkle of doing it badly, and just for the benefit of the out-of-towners, sort of like the village con-man plying his trade as the locals shake their heads and walk past.

The truth is out there. Keillor won't be the one to tell it to you!

Posted by Mitch at November 8, 2002 04:27 PM