From Salon
By Garrison Keillor

When you look at the audience numbers for TV and then add up the incarcerated felons, Alzheimer’s patients and confirmed barflies in America, it dawns on you who is watching TV these days — people unable to lead normal productive lives — and yet they give out awards for this stuff and the hosts of shows are driven to and fro in Lincoln Town Cars and they suffer from toxic self-esteem. TV is wallpaper nowadays and those talking heads might as well be talking to the smoked trout in Murray’s Deli or the No Parking signs along Broadway, as people do from time to time, but we allow them their delusions.

And we allow the Current Occupant to leave the Mansion d’Blanc with a big grin in a couple of weeks, his self-esteem apparently fully intact, imagining that his legacy will emerge golden and shining in a hundred years after all of us are deceased. He is one of the cheerfullest idiots you ever saw, a man who could burn down his own house and be happy that the patio was still standing. Had Congress impeached him, his defense would have been that he was not capable of understanding the charges.

Laura got the publishing contract, though the world is not abuzz waiting for her to tell us that he was not as dense as he looked. Sure. Right. But she will write it and then go on TV talk shows to flog it and she will be seen by thousands of people in airport waiting areas who will think, “My, she looks familiar. She reminds me of somebody.”

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