Word: wobegon
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...Prairie Home Companion is a very long monologue, or out-of-body experience, in which Keillor, his low, breathy voice achieving sonorities like those of a train whistle in the distance at midnight, gives the news from a tiny, some say imaginary, Minnesota farm hamlet called Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve." The same sturdy but hard-to-find settlement is the subject of Keillor's new book, Lake Wobegon Days (Viking; $17.95), a pack of beguiling lies that has been on the New York Times best-seller list for ten weeks...
Keillor always starts out his radio monologue by apologizing: "Well, it's been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown." He always ends on a diminuendo, with the formula "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong and all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average." In between, for 20 minutes or so, he discourses wonderingly, without notes, on a place where a dog lying asleep in the middle of Main Street will live out his days. In eleven years of talking about Lake Wobegon on A Prairie Home...
Beneath the ferocious jostling there is the brutal fact that outside of Lake Wobegon, not all children are above average. Teachers must choose their words carefully. They can't just say, "I'm sorry your child's not as smart as X," and no parent wants to hear that there are five other kids in the class who are a lot smarter than his or hers. Younger teachers especially can be overwhelmed by parents who announce on the first day of school that their child is going to be the smartest in the class and on the second day that...
...Idolettes break from Idol--with its nasty barbs from judge Simon Cowell--through an assertive positivity. They insist, sometimes despite heavy evidence to the contrary, that the contestants are good and gifted enough and that, doggone it, people like them. In this new, post-mean reality, America is Lake Wobegon, and all its residents are above average...
...they are my people. I was raised among them, though I fled their phlegmish company decades ago to join the chattering classes. Once in a while I read something that evokes them--Evan S. Connell's lovely novels about Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Garrison Keillor's sweet-savage Lake Wobegon comedies--but an air of reminiscence touches those works. I guessed that television, the Internet, the jet planes that could whisk these characters to Europe overnight, had long since thawed their taciturnity, granted them full citizenship in the culture of complaint...