Garrison Keillor

I get a lot of messages from people who like what I do, asking — sometimes politely, sometimes not — that I stick to my speciality: climbing. This tug of war has gone on for a long time. On one side is what’s good for my career. On the other is what I feel is something higher than that — morality (as I see it), honesty, and guts.

I started out as a Marxist, a Labour supporter. I thought I was oppressed by power. Slowly, though, I began to feel I was just a stooge for something worse — that the real enemy wasn’t a class or a party, but the power of an idea lodged in your head.

Yesterday, after the usual barrage of messages on Facebook and email, I thought — as I have many times before — “fuck it, I’ll just stick to climbing.”

As soon as I decided that, I felt a strange peace. I blocked The Guardian on my Mac (via Terminal — a useful trick), that children’s newspaper, and, as I’ve tried to do for the past six months, stopped watching the news altogether. I would close the curtains and hope that when I next peeked outside, the world wouldn’t be as bad as I feared.

But then I made the mistake of Googling Garrison Keillor — someone I’d long admired. I discovered he had effectively been disappeared after a fifty-year career for what was described as “touching a woman’s naked back.” He had not been arrested, charged, tried, or convicted. Yet he was fired from NPR, and his entire back catalogue was pulled from broadcast.

Reading that felt like both a shock and a wake-up call.

Many people believe Donald Trump is the devil walking the earth. I don’t. I see him as a manifestation — not of “white flyover racists” — but of a wider cultural moment that produces such outcomes.

Maybe it’s time to leave my childish ramblings behind and focus only on what’s safe and uncontroversial. But if that’s true, perhaps it’s not politics that’s the distraction — perhaps it’s climbing. The scrolling, the posts, the endless feed of images and grades — maybe that’s the escape from facing what feels larger and more important.

Perhaps it’s time to stop kneeling and decide what my speciality really is.

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