By Dan Calabrese —— Bio and Archives December 11, 2017
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Garrison Keillor has been disappeared into the Memory Hole. If you look for his biography or the archived shows from a half century of “A Prairie Home Companion” on the website of Minnesota Public Radio since his fall from grace, you’ll now find only this: “Sorry, but there’s no page here.”
Keillor and his entire body of work from “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Writer’s Almanac” have been effectively erased from the archives of MPR, along with the work of all the other storytellers, singers, poets and production staff who made the shows successful. In these tumultuous days of unceasing revelations of sexual scandals in media, politics and business, media enterprises especially face a new ethical challenge with their fallen stars: What do you do with history and art? Keillor allegedly crossed the line for inappropriate sexual behavior, though we actually don’t yet know what that line is since we’ve only heard Keillor’s side of the story. But MPR’s response is also over the line. They eliminated everything associated with Keillor. This evokes Orwell’s “1984” and the Memory Hole where unwanted or inconvenient history, documents and stories are regularly incinerated.When you fire a person from your company or they quit, you take their bio off your web site. That's understandable. To do otherwise would be to mislead others into thinking he still works there. But it's another thing entirely to try to reconstitute your history to make it look like he never worked there in the first place. That's what MPR seems to be attempting with Keillor, which is astonishing when you consider that "A Prairie Home Companion" and "Writer's Almanac" were signature works of MPR. It's like NBC trying to pretend it never aired Seinfeld, or Fox denying any knowledge of The Simpsons. Speaking of Simpsons, consider the example of the Buffalo Bills. Their all-time leading rusher is none other than O.J. Simpson, who is believed by most people to have things far worse than whatever Garrison Keillor is accused of. Yet Simpson's name and number are on the Bills' Wall of Fame and his name is all over the team's record books. How could they not be? The years he played for them happened, and his records stand. Regardless of what he may have done wrong later in life, there's no changing that, and it would be absurd to try to scrub the team's history of all this and pretend it didn't happen.
Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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