Garrison Keillor: It's not about me

[babylonsister]

It's not about me

That's Washington's byword, where public service is all. New York is a different story.

By Garrison Keillor


May 27, 2009 | Memorial Day in Washington, and geese swimming in the great reflecting pool that reflects the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, depending on where you are standing, and busloads of tourists pulled up to the curbs. Heroic architecture everywhere, bas-relief sculptures of heroes, men on pedestals, monuments to Fidelity and Sacrifice and Devotion, and a milling crowd of people, many of whom are Hot and Irritable and Dazed with Tedium.

Signs of museum fatigue everywhere. Stone-faced couples in shorts walk by, cameras dangling from their wrists, who appear to be on the verge of divorce. Small children crouch whining and weeping who do not realize how close they are to being put up for adoption.

The smell of Vienna dogs and sauerkraut wafts around the Vietnam Memorial, and schoolkids in bright blue T-shirts circle around back of Mr. Lincoln under his grand pavilion to see if it is true that the face of Robert E. Lee appears in the whorls of Lincoln's hair (not), and people come into the white marble cave of the National Gallery to cool off and pretend to look at paintings.

I love Washington, a city reviled by the right even when they were in power but which inspires in me a simple patriotism not so different from what I felt in the fifth grade. One does feel elevated in a city that honors public service, which this one does, and not only on Memorial Day. And then I got on the train to New York, where public service is a remote abstraction, a sort of Higher Consciousness that is spoken of but rarely practiced.

In Washington, I watched a woman present awards to 12 students for their good work and stand next to each of them for the ceremonial photograph. The kids were goofy or sheepish or solemn, and the lady was exactly the same graceful smiling person in each picture -- I told her afterward that I admired that and she said, "Well, it's their moment, not mine." Exactly. And there is the byword of public service, whether in the ranks of the uniformed or in a cubicle or at the White House: It's Not About Me. And in New York, it is. All About Me. Or sometimes about You and Me. It's not about you, I'm sorry.

more...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/keillor/2009/05/27/memorial_day/

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. Cynical.

Rightfully so.