My plan for the next four years

Garrison Keillor's Podcast

Prairie Home Productions

Society & Culture, Fiction, Comedy Fiction, Improv, Comedy

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Life is good once you master the art of Deletion. Every day my laptop is full of emails asking for money to do worthwhile, even noble, things, which, if I donated to them, I’d soon be living in a cardboard box in a vacant lot, and so I click on “Unsubscribe” and they go away for a while. Instead, I google “What is the prospect of international peace and understanding?” and find that the U.N. thinks it’s inevitable and dalailama.com says it’s based on compassion and foreignpolicy.com thinks the prospects are not good. We didn’t used to have Google, my kiddoes, we used to sit and worry about these things and now at last clear answers are available. Contradictory, but still.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Somebody has to be the worst president in American history.
0:15.0	They can all be number 14, as Joe Biden was in a survey of American historians, or number eight, like Ike, or number 35 like Richard Nixon.
0:29.6	And isn't it only fair that the worst, number 45, should be given the opportunity to improve his ranking.
0:42.3	Of course it is.
0:44.3	Meanwhile, I don't need to follow his second term day by day.
0:49.3	I can better occupy my time with the crossword puzzle and the book reviews and skip the funny pages.
1:00.1	I don't check my IRA every morning or my blood pressure or the WNBA standings or the air quality index.
1:10.5	So why should I upset myself at the thought of
1:16.2	Cash Patel running the FBI, or Tulsi Gabbard as head of national intelligence, or an anti-vaxxer
1:27.3	as Secretary of Health. If I want to study lunacy, why not become a
1:35.3	therapist and get paid for it? So, I am focused on the positive aspects of life.
1:45.3	I've just succeeded at taking a lazy one-week vacation with my family at a resort in California,
1:57.3	at which I slept late and hung out beside a pool under an umbrella and sipped lavender lemonade.
2:07.7	And my work ethic relaxed severely.
2:12.3	I was very agreeable the entire time.
2:16.4	I even started to sort of like myself. Once I sat in a hot tub
2:22.6	with four people who seemed to be employed in the software trade and I listened to their talk
2:31.1	and I didn't understand a single word of it, not even the or a or since. It was very rewarding.
2:43.0	None of them asked me what I do for a living, so I just sat on the bubbling hot water, watching the mountains turn pink in the sunset
2:55.5	and feeling very lucky not to be influential, like Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times,
3:05.7	who returned from a trip to China with a new perspective on world affairs.
3:13.4	Life is good once you master the art of deletion.
	...

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