This month, however, he came across like an old grouch accidentally tuning into "American Idol" on his way to Lawrence Welk. His current piece is about life as a prodigal parent responsible for the rearing of his own young daughter.
Keillor calls himself "an indulgent parent who wants to make her happy, but instead of taking her to swim class, I wonder if I shouldn't send her to hoeing school."
He says, "I learned to hoe when I was her age and soon thereafter to pick potatoes. How will she find happiness if she doesn't learn about work? [My grandfather] … may not have hugged you or encouraged your fantasy life, but he taught you to buckle down and attend to business and to thrive on it."
Keillor's angst about the work ethic of his daughter's generation is both typical and misplaced. Every generation has its legion of old-timers who remember a world that never really existed as superior to the one of contemporary times. They fret that today's youth have been failed by their parents and therefore they lack a strong moral foundation.
The complaint of the curmudgeon is a stock feature of the human condition. Each generation is subject to a different historical context. Each is blessed by the successes that came before and burdened by all the failures that they've inherited. Every generation responds to the opportunities and challenges of their own time, and they do it in their own way.
It makes as much sense to lament that today's children will not benefit from life on a farm as it does to condemn the farmers of old for not sending robots to Mars or not stopping to fix the problem of racism.
A curmudgeon no less famous than Cicero looked around and famously declared to the Roman senate, "O tempora, O mores!" ("Oh what times, oh what morals!") He did this even as the Rome of his own time stood on the threshold of the Pax Augusta.
The next 300 years would be characterized by a level of peace and prosperity unrivaled before, and perhaps never duplicated again.
But by the time of Ammianus Marcellinus (b. 330 AD), things had changed. This last of the great classical historians chronicled Roman decline and decried the rise of Christianity. He harkened to a past when hard work, patriotism and martial spirit were the bed rock of Roman values.
Ammianus disdained those who looked for easy answers that were not of this world, and he warned that without a return to pagan values the world could fall into an abyss of ignorance and anarchy.
Twenty years after his death, the Goths invaded, Rome fell, and the Dark Ages were under way.
Was Cicero right? Was Ammianus right? Or were they both just crotchety old-timers suffering from an overdose of conventional wisdom? People like this are with us always, and like a broken clock they occasionally are right -- if only briefly and for reasons that may have little to do with objective truth.
Most often, it is not the larger culture that is in decline. For grouchy social critics it is usually their own better days that have expired. What they yearn for are not the advantages of a golden past, but the fading memories of bygone youth.
It may be only human to feel that first twinge of arthritis and blame it on the world. But what hurts me deeply is hearing that tired mantra from a progressive voice of my own generation.
Suddenly I feel quite old.
George Pence III lives in Whispering Pines.
