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Y'know I think I understand Garrison Keillor and many, many similiar "liberals" as of you post this AM. I think the pieces have come together. They are afraid, completely resistance to change. The "liberal" media has fed them, for over two generations now, a steady diet of fantasy -- a potent and sweet mix of spin, scripting, and smiling-Katies-Rosies-Toms-and-Peters--who-tell-us-exactly-what-we-should-be-thinking. These folks are swept up in in -- they believe its fantasies are the pillars of the world's construction. They are deathly afraid to give it up. They are screaming, squeeling, sqawking and generally running about in sky-is-falling panic because they see *reality*, and the changes in society that reality has necessitated, as a plane crash in progress, and they are the passengers.

The regular comfort of the unchanging reliable menu TV news, that PBS, that the NY Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc. served up had become a great comfort to them. Like Santa's Decemeber 25th visit is a comfort to kids.

There are kids who take the pleasant fantasy in so deeply, are so wrapped up in it, that when at seven or eight years they are told the truth -- it's like you knocked them over with a two-by-four, they scream, they pout, they resist -- just like the behaviour we are seeing.

I'll tell you why I think that applies more than most to Mr. Keillor. Because he writes, he develops his Lake Wobegon and other fictional stories so deeply. In that gift he has, in its coining, there are two sides. One the side we all like that makes him a great storyteller, clearly loving and caring about the personalities in his stories. But that ability to be so wrapped into his own tale, has made him all the more adamant in holding onto what the external worldview that is supplied to him day after day by the media. The energies -- the magnificent energies he puts into his works -- are spent on those works, and he NEEDS (perceives he needs) the solid comfort of a well-constructed steady world-view created for him.

Sort of a "Motel Six" liberal bent. By that I mean, he is liberal beacuse that is the intellectual motel that he checked into every night, exhausted from his own work, it was a comfort to him. Now Motel Six has been shown not to be but a poor and false substitute for a real home -- a home, btw, with all the burdens and aggravations a home comes with, and not the daily crisply made sheets and maid-cleaned room one gets at a motel. A house that takes energy to keep, where no one makes your bed for you.

Casa Reality.