Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette

Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive
© 2003 Bill Kauffman
206 pages

Bill Kauffman, as a kid, went places. Starting from a little town in upstate New York, he journeyed as far afield as Los Angeles and D.C., for a time serving on the staff of a Democratic senator. Then, disillusioned,  he returned home and  started lobbing colorful grenades at those very places,  becoming an ardent champion of local cultures and places over homogeneity and the politics of Big.  Although much  of his writing has concerned localism within America in general -- celebrating regional literature, for instance, or chronicling with joy the history of self-rule movements in the US - he often makes allusions to the place he has called his home, and in Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette he looks at it fully.

Batavia, NY, is not Mayberry. From Kauffman's writings both here and elsewhere, it's a place whose downtown was gutted by "Urban Renewal",   whose businesses were shuttered after the big box stores arrived in the periphery, and it's had its share of ethnic conflict between Italians, English-types, and a few black immigrants.  But when Kauffman looks at Batavia,  he looks at through eyes of love: "It ain't much, but it's better than nothin.'"  "Nothing" is what prevails today -- in rootless politicians and tycoons  whose detachment makes it much easier for them to  act like brutes in power. Distanced from the consequences of their actions, they deal in ideas and abstractions. Consequences, whether they be blown-up weddings in Yemen or dead towns in Ohio, are a far-off notion. Within these Dispatches, Kauffman celebrates local figures,  some of whom are known abroad, like John Gardener. Kauffman also recounts the decline of Batavia's downtown, shares quirky stores from its past like a sudden rush of anti-Mason hatred,   and hails its locally-owned ballclub. All this is not just flavor or local color,  because mixed within the recollection is reflection.  Kauffman values his local team not for some sentimental attachment to baseball (though there is that),  but for the fact that his town owns that team. When so much of Batavia has been lost to the bulldozers of progress ("progress" is always a four-letter in a Kauffman book), the ball club is a locus for continuity, tying generations together.  Young attendees become older players and then -- in their maturity -- may sit on the board that manages the team. Kauffman himself served as a president. Likewise, in the chapter on a few local politicians, Kauffman ruminates on the vast gulf between local voting and national voting. Politics matters at the local level, and elections can swing on a single vote, and the people put into office are close enough to keep accountable. ("Close enough to kick", as GK Chesterton put it).

Although a book like this only seems to be of interest to those who live in Batavia, or at leas Gennessee County, I don't think that's the case.  Batavia's is an American story; I've never found a town yet whose downtown wasn't riddled with shuttered buildings or proud buildings reduced to yet another parking lot,  and cookie-cutter sprawl  camped  nearby.  All Americans are affected by the distance of DC, even those with the misfortune of living near the Virginia-Maryland border, and estrangement and frustration with  the system seem to increase every year.    Even if we can't fix the system -- and I know of no polity in history  which has passed into empire and then restored itself -- we can still within the span of our lives re-turn our attention to what matters -- our places, our families, our quirks and histories.  It may not be much, but it's better than nothing.

Poetry Night at the Ballpark

Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America

© 2015 Bill Kauffman

442 pages

 “Lift up your hearts, friends – America ain’t dead yet.”  For thirty years, Bill Kauffman has been blowing raspberries at or haranguing the politics of empire – mocking and condemning all things swollen and centralized, and cheering on the local and small.  This interestingly-titled volume collects a diverse amount of Kauffman’s writings, from  biographical sketches of eccentric American figures to literary reviews, with all manner of opinion pieces in between. It is an anthology that celebrates the little America outside of New York and Los Angeles, the America that breathes when the television is turned off.  If you have read any Kauffman before, or even read a review of Kauffman – or for that matter, the first two sentences of this review –  the general temper won’t  be a surprise. But Poetry Night at the Ballpark, while consistent with Kauffman’s usual spirit,  collects so many different kinds of writing that even his fans will find surprises here, and delivered with his usual fondness for amusing or provocative titles. Some of the sectional collections are definitely unexpected, like a series written about holidays (in which he champions Arbor Day over Earth Day, for instance)  and…some space-themed writing.   The sections called “Pols”, “Home Sweet Home”, and “The America That Lost” are more of his usual fare.  I’ve been reading Kauffman’s columns at the Front Porch Republic and other sources to have seen  and remembered a few of these – a favorite is 2012’s “Who Needs a President?” in which he revisits the antifederalist arguments against an executive office.

In Poetry Night at the Ballpark, Kuaffman introduces a multitude of forgotten individuals, all with their quirks, and recounts stories from American history which have been largely forgotten.  Take those arrogant Roosevelts – T.R.  tried to inflict a new kind of spelling on the entire nation, in one of the first examples of the Oval Office obviously unhinging whoever sat in it.  (Actually, considering the west wing was constructed during Teddyboy’s reign, maybe he was already unhinged and imbued it with his spirit.)    Franklin Roosevelt also moved Thanksgiving hither and yon hoping to create more shopping days for Christmas,  beginning the occasion’s slow  but total conquest by Christmas.  As varied as the essays are, they’re reliably grounded in Kauffman’s love for the small, local, and particular, be it movies or baseball. He begins  in and titles his  book   at the local ballpark , cheering on his hometown’s boys,  but has no use whatsoever for the major leagues, whose local connections are abstract, and who are oriented  towards money than  love of the game;   sports and home intersect in  his section on movies, where he calls for films that tell local stories with a local flavor, and comments at length on Hoosiers as a small-town classic.

I make no secret of liking Kauffman, and for me this book was like encountering him  at a bar and sticking around to  hear some salty stories of odd characters and fun stories, as well as some good old-fashioned belly-aching about the soulless suits in power.  It’s not as focused as his other work, so it’s best read by people who have already encountered Kauffman before – unless a first-timer opens the book in the store, finds themselves drawn in by his playful pen, and has to sit down to experience a bit more.

If you'd like a taste of Kauffman, one of my favorite speeches by him is called "Love is the Answer to Empire" That title links to a written version.

" [Walt Whitman] understood that any healthy political or social movement has to begin, has to have its heart and soul, at the grass roots. In Kansas, not on K Street.

"And it has to be based in love. Love not of some remote abstraction, some phantasm that exists only on the television screen—Ford Truck commercials and Lee Greenwood songs—but love of near things, things you can really know and experience. The love of a place and its people: their food, their games, their literature, their music, their smiles.

"I am a localist, a regionalist. To me, the glory of America comes not from its weaponry or wars or a mass culture that is equal parts stupidity, vulgarity, and cynical cupidity—one part 'The View,' one part Miley Cyrus, and a dollop of Rush Limbaugh—rather, it is in the flowering of our regions, our local  cultures. Our vitality is in the little places—city neighborhoods, town squares—the places that mean nothing to those who run this country but that give us our pith, our meaning."

Every Man a King

Every Man a King
© 1989 Bill Kauffman
277 pages

Every Man is a King follows the self-destruction and resurrection of one John Huey Long, a rising star in DC’s intellectual establishment who disgraced himself in a heated television interview. Fired and friendless, Ketchum slunk back to the rathole hometown he thought he’d escaped, planning to die – but instead, he found a new life. One part DC satire, one part homage to crappy hometowns, Every Man a King makes for an odd novel. Its mocking of politicians, the media, and pseudo-intellectuals has easy appeal, of course, and one of the characters is winsomely weird. (Imagine Phillip Seymour Hoffman as an obese fop who wears 1940s suits, carries a cane as a transparent affectation, and who is incapable of not sounding like a 19th century dandy.) I liked the general arc of the novel, the tale of a pretentious jerk being taken and realizing there’s more to life than DC power plays, that real people still live in places that don't matter to those in government. And Kauffman should be praised for not making this localist defense sentimental in the least: the town Ketchum returns to has been left behind by everyone else, and most of the people are poor, drunk, and angry instead of poor-but-happy farmers enjoying their simple lives far from the big city blues. Most of the action happens in Ketchum’s heart and mind, though, as he slowly realizes what a empty charade life in DC had been anyway, and what a boob he'd become -- a man corrupting the memory of his populist grandfather, turning the elder into a fount of folksy proverbs just to add a little flavor to his columns.  Life in Batavia is ridiculous, too, but at least it’s real. Even so, a story of largely internal musing doesn’t have a great deal of activity: Ketchum even manages to avoid barfights despite spending most of his time post DC sitting in one. On the whole the novel was too vulgar and too sedentary for my taste.

Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet

Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin
© 2008 Bill Kauffman
227 pages

There isn't enough whitewash in the world to create a Luther Martin hagiography, Bill Kauffman admits, but in the spirit of lost causes he does his best. Billed as a biography, Drunken Prophet is truly more about Martin's role in the Constitutional debates, in which he warned the assembly that the Constitution they were debating would destroy the States altogether  Few realize today that the Constitution - -regarded as a guardian of our liberties, however much a token now -- was rightfully feared in its day as a tool of big-government enterprise.  In this biography of Martin, Bill Kauffman gives voice to one of the Constitution's chief opponents, a man who refused service in the government it created.

When the delegates invited to reform the Articles of Confederation chose instead to create an entirely new government, Luther Martin took a stand against it. He could do no other.  He wasn't alone in being suspicious of the Constitution; Patrick Henry wouldn't even attend the convention, claiming to smell a rat. The convention contained radicals who wanted to do away with the States themselves, men like Hamilton, and Martin was their steady opponent.  He promoted the New Jersey plan against the Virginia plan, arguing that Virginia's bicameral legislature was beyond the scope of what was necessary. A government that need so many checks and balances was oversized to begin with.

Following the conclusion of the convention,  Kauffman's usual energy and the book's point drift. Technically, this is a biography of Martin, but little of import happened in his life  beyond the convention, other than a couple of court cases. Oddly, the staunch anti-Federalist became a defender of Federalist politicians, defending Sam Chase in the first-ever Supreme Court impeachment, and later defending Aaron Burr. (Kauffman notes that Burr's only crime was invading the Southwest too early, and shooting Hamilton too late.)  Kauffman suspects that Martin's defense of Federalists owed principally to his hatred for Thomas Jefferson.  Another case Martin participated in was the famous McCullough v. Maryland, arguing against the expansion of Federal powers.   Martin was evidently regarded well-enough in Maryland that the state imposed a tax on all lawyers just to give the aging attorney fiscal support after stroke and alcohol forced him to retire.

Drunken Prophet is the first Bill Kauffman book I've read that didn't absolutely bowl me over, but those interested in the anti-federalist or republican case against the Constitution will definitely find it of interest.

The Anti-Federalists stood for decentralism, local democracy, antimilitarism, and a deep suspicion of central governments.  And they stood on what they stood for. Local attachments. Local knowledge. While the Pennsylvania Federalist Gouverneur Morris 'flattered himself he came here in some degree as a Representative of the whole human race', Anti-Federalists understood that one cannot love an abstraction such as'the whole human race'. One loves particular flesh-and-blood members of that race. 'My love must be discriminate / or fail to bear its weight,' in the words of a modern anti-Federalist, the Kentucky poet-farmer Wendell Berry. He who loves the whole human race seldom has much time for individual members thereof.

From the introduction, "The People Who Lost".


Previous books in the Forgotten Founders series:
American Cicero: Charles Carroll (Brad Birzer)
The Cost of Liberty: John Dickinson (William Murchinson)

Bye Bye Miss American Empire

Bye Bye Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Underdog Crusades to Redraw America's Political Map
© 2010 Bill Kauffman

You say you want a devolution?

\

Far beyond the city across the river, this country is pregnant with happy auguries, with the delicious foretaste of sweet rebellion.

(Bill Kauffman, "Love is the Answer to Empire")

Americans everywhere are angry, disappointed, and frustrated by their government. Politicians demand much,  voters demand much, and much is attempted -- but nothing virtually positive actually happens.   Little wonder, when the scale of things is taken into account. The average member of the US House of Representatives now stands in for seven hundred thousand people, making him a representative in name only.  Having written many a book hailing the local and particular -- little America -- against the big and abstract, Kauffman now turns his pen to celebrate those who have attempted and are currently laboring to restore truly representative democracy at various levels. They lobby for more autonomy for, or from, their state government -- perhaps even the fission of cumbersome states into smaller, more responsive entities. Beneath the oil-glazed asphalt expanse of the Empire, hope is growing; dandelions are breaking through the crust -- and in chapters dwelling on New York, Vermont, the South, Califorina, and a few other places, Kauffman explores opportunities for resurrection. 

Bill Kauffman consistently refers to his home as Upstate New York, and heretofore I'd heard that as a direction -- rather like central Alabama, or southern Idaho.   But Upstate New York is more distinct than that, closer to "The South" -- a place, not a direction.  The rural folk of this region, particular the western rim of the state,  feel dominated by the beast below: New York City,  which has practically usurped the very name of New York. Who says those two words with the Adirondacks in mind?   The city itself, a fusion of five once-distinct places, has its own internal dissent,  boroughs that want their freedom back.  Upstate New York's resentment is shared by West Kansas, which cries exploitation at eastern Wichitia --and by northern California and 'upper Michigan', both of which feel ignored by their governments. The fault lines are reliably rural-urban splits, but there are special circumstances:  in its Spanish beginnings, California was organized as Alta and Baja California, and might have settled into the Union as two states were it not for the unpleasantness of the 1860s.   Even today ,there are persistent cries to subdivide the continent-sweeping state into more manageable polities.  In every case, the parties that want to create their own city or state feel abused or ignored by those with perpetual power over them: Staten Island is used as a city dump for the other boroughs, while western Kansas bankrolls the rest of the state at the expense of its own needed services. 

Kauffman addresses Hawaii,  Alaska, and Puerto Rico from an altogether different perspective.  He describes himself as an American sentimentalist with a strong attachment to the 48, who would be saddened to part ways with a seceding state like Vermont or Texas.  But Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico have no geographic link to the rest of the United States;  they were seized as objects of empire, and disrupt the contiguous integrity of the rest. If Hawaii -- three thousand miles away from the rest of the country -- can be claimed as a state, why not any place? Why not Corsica,  the Canary Islands -- "all of Creation, U.S.A!" ?   Here Kauffman champions these places' independence movements, something touched on lightly before with Vermont and California but never too much encouraged.  

The South, of course, receives repeated mention -- in part because it was the South's failed war of independence that gave secession the odor of treason, its ruination used as an example anyone else who would dare break the Union asunder.  The group Kauffman spends time with doesn't champion secession, however, merely claims to defend Southern culture against the homogenizing force from without. That's right up Kauffman's alley, for as usual he's not just writing politics. Kauffman's books brim over with references to forgotten poetry and novels. Kauffman is forever the champion of local cultures, lionizing those who preserve, contribute, and spread their place's literature, its songs, its stories, its beer.   Bad enough that looking to the distant Capitol frustrates and alienates people;  still worse is that local identities are falling away, the citizens of the States becoming nothing but little bricks in the wall, living frustrating lives in a geography of nowhere. (James Howard Kunstler, another upstate New Yorker, makes a cameo here.) 

Kauffman's message here is one of hope, hope that comes through in the tone of his voice during speeches, and his playful wordsmithing here. He is not an ideologue; indeed, he scorns ideology. He does not give any voice to race-separatists, declaring that life is too short to waste words on assholes.   Although a ready fellow traveler of libertarians, Kauffman fires a shot across the bow at the Free State Project, which encourages libertarians to move to New Hampshire en masse so that it might be demographically converted into a haven.  What's important to Kauffman is local control, that people be allowed to live their own lives in peace, flourishing in their distinctiveness: let San Francisco be San Francisco, and Peoria, Peoria.  Kauffman's hope is connected not only to these political movements, moreover, but to other locally-oriented movements like community-supported agriculture and new urbanism.   

In Kauffman is found a passionate defender of humane living -- a man who breaks bread with leftists and reactionaries alike, who would be just at home at a punk rock club as in a bluegrass festival. His affection for little America,  the joy he takes in savoring it and conveying it, are always worth experiencing. 

"The camp guards of contemporary politics will tell you that secession is based in fear or isolation. I say it flows from love and from hopefulness, from the belief that ordinary people, living in cohesive communities, can govern themselves, without the heavy hand of distant experts and tank-and-bomb-wielding statesmen to guide their way. The secession of which I write with (sometimes qualified) admiration is Norman Mailer in love with Brooklyn, native Hawaiians hearing ancestral echoes, Vermonters who think Robert Frost and George Aiken are wiser men than Barack Obama and Joe Biden."

Related:

• "Empire Corrupts",  Kauffman interview about this book
• Saving Congress from Itself, James Buckley. Argues that part of the problem of Congress is centralization, of it assuming too many of the States' burdens and responsibilities. 
• Ain't my America: The Long and Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle Class Antiimperialism, Bill Kauffman
• Look Homeward, America! In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front Porch Anarchists, Bill Kauffman
• Bill Kauffman and James Howard Kunstler yakking about localism and NY literature
• Kauffman articles at TAC and the Front Porch Republic

America First

America First: Its History, Culture, and Politics
© 1995 Bill Kauffman
296 pages

For slightly over a year prior to the attack at Pearl Harbor, there existed a civic organization of nearly a million people called the America First Committee. It dedicated itself to stymieing the attempts of D.C. and Hollywood to embroil the United States in yet another European war  Despite its name, this book isn’t about them, though Kauffman does honor their heritage in the expanse of people it celebrates here. America First hails writers and politicians commenting on not just foreign policy, but the American spirit.   Here collected are the broadsides and literary stabs of men and women from across the political spectrum, from across the country,  from across income brackets -- who have resisted the idea that America needs to be great to be wonderful.  Politically, their concerns are straightforward: they are against foreign wars and against involvement in organizations that jeopardize American sovereignty. This isn’t merely a rehash of Ain’t my America, with added rebukes for NATO;  instead, Kauffman  shares the ardent love of these writers for America in itself via literary reflection. These authors don’t love it for what it could be – a global player, even a global savior – but for what it is, a vast land of beauty and promise, with a healthy individualistic tradition that protects people not only from the state, but the danger of social smothering.

Kauffman begins in the early 20th century, examining the populist and progressive backgrounds of many who later joined America First. They included Amos Pinchot, written out of the Progressive movement for his strident anti-imperialism. (The rough riding-Caesar, Teddy, referred to him as the party's lunatic fringe.)  Teddy's pistol-packing  daughter Alice Roosevelt also appears,  vexed at both Wilson's League of Nations and her cousin's entire administration. After the war, Kauffman pivots again to literary types -- Jack Kerouac and that magnificent son of the desert, Ed Abbey. Another dear fellow, Wendell Berry, is quoted a few times. (One reason I'm so fond of Kauffman, besides his punchy writing filled with words like katzenjammer: we're both fond of men like those two, plus Dorothy Day.)  Kauffman finishes the book with a section on the contemporary of this 'peculiar nationalism', one that wants to celebrate America as America, not as another frustrated and penniless empire. Writing in the early 1990s, he saw in the campaign of Ross Perot great promise. Here at last was a sign that Americans were escaping the bonds of the establishment -- and there were other kooky fellows like Pat Buchanan waiting to do their part, too.  (Buchanan is hailed as convert to the cause; while previously supporting military adventures in Grenada, he's since written numerous books  urging Americans to focus on the home front --  protecting American industry, discouraging immigration, etc.)  Twenty years later, here we are again, faced with the most depressing candidates in American history.

The high point of America First are the long-forgotten authors whom Kauffman exhumes. Hamlin Garland, Amos Pinchot, Harold Frederic -- who knows these names, other than Kauffman and his readers?  On the low end, a fair few of the people chronicled here carry  the faint aroma of xenophobia.  To their wholly-legitimate fear of railroad monopolies (who controlled their only means of getting produce to market) and of banks (to whom they were often in hock), they added the specter of immigrants with strange cultures swelling the ranks of New York  voting machines, or surging into the heartland and taking what few opportunities were there.  "Americanism" had its dark side, manifested most obviously in the Klan -- who, in their 1920s iteration, seduced many by targeting outsiders. Kauffman doesn't mention this, and while he always acknowledges racial tinges to populist criticism, he doesn't dwell on it. He is more interested in the quiet pride and content people can take in simply being home, in taking solace in the simple pleasures like good company and a family recipe for blackberry cobbler.   Kauffman's own embrace of homebodies from across political camps -- he is a localist with an affection for Gene Debs, who always won his conservative hometown's presidential devotes on the merits of his being a good neighbor --  is well reflected in one chapter's closing remarks:

Who should 'run' America? No one. Or 250 million single individuals.[...] As Americans from Emerson to Mencken have known, following leaders is a fool's game. Only when we restore to Americans their birthright -- local self-government in prideful communities that respect the liberties of every dentist and Baptist and socialist and lesbian and hermit and auto parts dealer -- will we remember what it means to be an American, first."

In commenting on the Harold Frederic novel for which he did a screenplay, Copperhead, Kauffman wrote that the essential tragedy of the story was that its characters had lost sight of the human. They contended against one another not as neighbors, but as ideological nemeses.  That is how the Civil War nearly destroyed their town -- not by artillery fire, but by the fire of their self-righteous rage.   While American money and attention is constantly devoted to defending Europe, defending  southeast Asia, managing the middle east,  and policing the seven seas, there's little time or opportunity for tending to each other.

Related:

• Copperhead, Harold Frederics
• Selected Quotations from America First!

Words from little America

"There are many, many Americas -- there's a televised America, one that consists of The View and Katie Couric and Jenner -- there's that America. But then there's the America I experience, the America you never see on television. It's the America of little churches and baseball and backyard gardens and such...it's much more modest, humane, and interconnected. It's produced most of the good things we have in this country -- the most interesting pieces of art, novels, literature, political eruptions..." (Bill Kauffman, interview on Poetry Night at the Ballpark) 

Spring in Town, Grant Wood. Used as the cover for Kauffman's Look Homeward, America!

And now, selections from yet another Kauffman survey of literature:

"American literature, in order to be great, but must be national, and in order to be national must deal with conditions peculiar to our own land and climate. Every sincere writer must write of the life he knows best and for which he cares most." (Hamlin Garland, p. 29)

"The privileged classes will profit by this war. It takes attention of the people off economic issues, and perpetuates the unjust system they have put upon us. Politicians profit by this war. It buries issues they dare not meet. What do the people get out of this war? The fighting, and the taxes. What are we going to get out of this war? Endless trouble, complications, expense. Republics cannot go into the conquering business and remain republics." (Tom Watson speaking of the Spanish-American War, p. 36)

"Liberty is what we're for, That's why we're progressive. We hate the modern increases of governmental powers and functions. We do not want government big. We want it small. That's why we're conservative. A true progressive must at this time often be a conservative."  (William Hard, The Nation, p. 59)

"But for my children, I would have them keep their
distance from the thickening center, corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster's feet there are left the mountains." 

 (Robinson Jeffers, p.73)

"America -- the literary map of it, apparently, shows three cities;  New York, Chicago, and New Orleans; then a stretch inhabited by industrious Swedes who invariably (after an edifying struggle) become college professors or rich farmers; then a noble waste still populated by cowpunchers speaking the purest 1870; finally, a vast domain called Hollywood. But actually, there are portions of the United States not included in this favorite chart." (Sinclair Lewis, p. 122)

"John, it is empire you all want, and it is empire that you have got, and at such a small price when you come to think of it."
"What price is that?" Hay could tell from the glitter in Adams' eye that the reply would be highly unpleasant.
"The American republic. You've finally got rid of it. For good."

(pp. 133-134, Gore Vidal. Quoting Empire.)

"The shameful abandonment of early American political values -- liberty, decentralism, self-rule -- explains, I submit, the strident hostility to Gore Vidal. For Vidal is an authentic champion of a peculiarly American patriotism, vastly nobler than that of the typewriter hawks and blow-dried Republicans of Washington, D.C.

With the countenance of an antebellum aristocrat and a flair for the eloquent savagery once so common in America political writing, Gore Vidal is the avenging wraith of Henry Adams made flesh, merciless in dissecting the Empire-lovers and power-lusting intellectuals. He is the finest writer of our age, [...] a polemicist at least the equal -- probably the superior -- of Mencken and Paine. So let the heathen rage. Vidal's historical novels and fulgurant essays will outlast his carping contemporaries."
(Bill Kauffman, 139-140)

"The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high." (William Fulbright, p. 143)

"Where're your papers?"
"My what?"
"Your I.D. -- draft card, social security, driver's license."
"Don't have none. Don't need none. I already know who I am."

(Edward Abbey, p. 158. Quoting The Brave Cowboy)

"Patriotism is not the love of air conditioning or the interstate highway system or the government or the flag or power or money or munitions. It is the love country." (Wendell Berry, p.  163)

"I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in the world, and there came this rawhide old-timer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into the diner; you could hear his raspy crises clear across the plains, across the whole gray world of that day. Everybody else laughed with him. He didn't have a care in the world and had the hugest regard for everybody. I said to myself, 'Wham, listen to that man laugh. That's the West, here I am in the West....It was the spirit of the West sitting right next to me. I wish I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he'd been doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that. Whooee, I told my soul."  

(Jack Kerouac, p. 170. Quoted from On the Road)

"Our ever loyal press, famously ignorant of history, panicked at the prospect of revolt by the lowing herd of revenue cows, and insisted that this queer [left-right] coalition was a freakish thing, spectacular but brief and (thank God) unstable. It had been whipped up into a frenzy by irresponsible demagogues, and once the dust cleared the kine would revert to kind. A little rebellion now and then isn't such a bad thing, after all, as long as the dissenters know that it's just a game and when the morning dawns they've got to get up and go to work and do their eight-hour stint as cogs in the great wheel of the interdependent global economy."
(Bill Kauffman, pp. 187-188, on press reaction to NAFTA resistance.)


"No construct is more holy to the priests of the establishment than the comfy seesaw of Left and Right, with its utterly predictable motions. Those sit astride the plans can be sure of a pleasant ride; they need never fear being thrown. Bullies who threaten the playground, such as Huey Long, Malcolm X, and George Wallace, are disposed of with impressive dispatch."
(Bill Kauffman, p. 218)

"Who should 'run' America? No one. Or 250 million single individuals. Every man a king, every woman a queen, as the martyr Huey Long once sang. [...] As Americans from Emerson to Mencken have known, following leaders is a fool's game. Only when we restore to Americans their birthright -- local self-government in prideful communities that respect the liberties of every dentist and Baptist and socialist and lesbian and hermit and auto parts dealer -- will we remember what it means to be an American, first."
(Bill Kauffman, p. 231)

All quotations from:

Notable books:
Caesar's Column, Ignatius Donnelly
Crumbling Idols, Hamlin Garland
The Adventures of Wesley Jackson,  William Saroyan
The Brave Cowboy, Edward Abbey

This Just In

During the weekend I said in comments here that I would love to see a book about spontaneous or emergent order that crossed disciplines. Well, by golly, now there is one -- and it's by Matt Ridley, who penned The Red Queen and Genome. Turns out he's a member of the House of Lords, to boot. He appeared on Monday's EconTalk, which has been the source of some of my favorite reads here in the last few years. They talked about language,  morality,  the history of science, and the reversal of American political parties in the late 19th century, in which the 'liberal' party became illiberal.   Their conversation can be enjoyed or read here.

                          

Bill Kauffman recently joined Jim Kunstler on the KunstlerCast to yak about localism, American literature, and a little politics. (Jim's most recent political post: "Between the Obscene and the Unspeakable.")     I had the rotten luck to discover this one yesterday right  before going to work, and so had wait for hours and hours until I could listen to two very colorful small-town partisans enjoying one another's company.  Kunstler, for those who have joined me recently, penned The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency. The first was a godsend for me,  articulating  a lot of unease and longing, and the latter has sharply influenced me over the past few years.  Kauffman, of course, is a barrel of fun. Neither of these guys can be put into a political party:  Kunstler claims to be a Democrat, but he has such visceral contempt for virtually everyone involved on both sides that I think it's a lesser-of-evils decision for him:  more Democrats than Republicans make mouth-sounds about the futility of playing god overseas.  What brings these fellas together, though, is their shared localism. They both believe in the virtue of small-town America over the suburbs and big cities, though in addition to the communal aspects Kunstler holds small towns to be less fragile, economically. Both gentlemen practice what they preach, living in New York  villages...and Kunstler,  patiently awaiting the collapse of globalization,  homesteads. 

So, if you want to listen to some interesting conversations, this week is off to a good start.

Ain't My America

Ain't My America:  The Long and Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle Class Antimperialism
©  2008 Bill Kauffman
304 pages

"You can have your hometown, or you can have the empire. You can't have both."

You don't have to be a punk kid to rage against war. In fact, for most of American history, waging war in foreign quarters was considered radical -- not protesting it. The student war protesters of the 1970s were johnny-come latelys compared to the steady  and historic denunciation of imperial adventures from more established quarters. Bill Kauffman's Ain't My America revisits a score of personalities -- politicians, poets, proles and potentates -- reviewing their stands against expansion, and warmongering from 1812 to the present, and concludes with a few arguments of his own. All the while he argues for a return to a homelier vision of America, a vision shared by this diverse multitude. The resulting narrative is a saucy challenge to today's conservatives, a reminder of a tradition which has been forgotten...and forgotten rather quickly.

The American Republic was a new thing, an experiment, and for its first century of life its citizens well appreciated the fragility of it. They saw in every legislative novelty a peril to what had been created by the transformation of colonies into a Republic, whether that was Jefferson's extralegal acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, or Madison's war and those which followed.   What unites the multitude of men here -- the speech-making politicians, the biting wits and mournful ballads of writers and poets -- is fear for the life of that Republic, imperiled by the prospect of expansion and war.  Campaigns of glory and idealism, so dear to the hearts of presidents like Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson, threatened to corrupt a nation committed to harmony and peaceful discourse with all nations,into yet another state fallen from grace, forever  brawling with its neighbors in the Old World fashion.  America enjoys a providential situation, safeguarded from foreign invasion by ocean, with a continent bounding in resources. What need have we of wandering into other people's wars?  The only fights are those we go abroad and pick.. The greater danger is that the American dream will be destroyed by the demands of war itself, through the centralization of authority, the militarization of society.  The American constitution was written in part to check dreams of militarism, like the precautions against the power of a standing army.

The evidence bears their fears out. What have been the fruits of participating in foreign wars?  A president whose title of Commander in Chief expects to apply to all Americans, not simply those in the armed services;  the wastage of million of lives, and incalculable resources;  the intrusion of the central government into every aspect of American lives.  Many aspects of the Empire in which we live were born during wartime: the income tax, for instance, conscription, and automatic withholding. Some wartime abuses heal over time, like the archfiend Wilson's loyalty campaigns. Imagine the hypocrisy of a man who runs for office on the slogan that he kept us out of the war, who then has war declared and imprisons people for so much as applauding an anti-war speech!  War makes the nation itself a hypocrite, as it did in the late 19th century when the United States stretched its imperial wings over Cuba and the Phillipines, inciting a fight with Spain and pretending to be fighting for another people's liberation, and then waging war against those people when they declined acceptance into the "Empire of Liberty".  War's ravages have been worse diplomatically: a region like the middle east, which once admired the United States as an amicable partner far different than the imperial English and Russians, now boils over with loathing for it.  Every excursion, martial or secretively effected -- seems to lead to more, and the corruption of the military-industrial complex waxes worse and worse.

These are not leftist criticisms; the Democratic party is no less the Party of War than modern Republicans, and indeed presidents like Wilson, Truman, and Johnson have been responsible for as much if not more overseas mischief than their 'rivals'. These are the criticisms of prudent men who had studied history, who absorbed its lessons into their very bones, and knew the United States was not so exceptional that it could defy the rule of human nature.  Most of the criticism Kauffman collects focuses on war as a corrosive force, turning a Republic into an Empire, but in an additional section Kauffman throws his own punches.  The bulwark of conservatism is defense of the family, which the military state destroys -- not merely by keeping young men abroad for months and years at a time, but by constantly shuffling military families around and denying them roots.  The increase of men in uniform went hand in hand with rising divorce and juvenile delinquency, especially during World War 2.   Denied the opportunity to invest in a local community, the only loyalty that can be mustered up by the family is to an abstraction -- the State.   Imperialism bids the flag go where the Constitution cannot follow -- and, "severed from its staff, [waves] in any vagrant breeze".

Ain't My America rebuts foreign excursion as it champions the local.  Kauffman's America is a republic of front porches, a collection of intimate communities united by a common dream, but loyal firstly to their neighbors.  Kauffman's America is the town, the countryside where we grew up, the places that nurture and support us -- the places that gain our affection and love through time, as do our homes.  In the Republic, men and women are sustained by the connections, finding meaning in the work they do for and with their neighbors. Kauffman's America ain't the Empire. In the Empire, meaning is searched for from without --  embarking on crusades to "fight" terror or "make the world safe for democracy", each person and each community's character subsumed by the collective. It's a criticism not far from Chris Hedges' observation that "war is a force that gives us meaning".

All this history and scathing commentary is rendered in Bill Kauffman's singular style. If Wendell Berry's defense of the local is rendered in a grandfatherly fashion, in tones of warm comfort, Kauffman is more of a slightly rebellious uncle, the kind who is willing to stay up past three a.m. rattling off colorful stories. There is much color to be hand in Kauffman's vocabulary, not necessarily profanity. Kauffman is a colorful character himself, who describes himself as the lovechild of Dorothy Day and Henry David Thoreau, a wild spirit with the blood of Crazy Horse and Zora Neal Hurston in his veins. His expressions are his own, energetic and archaic, like  "fossicking about in tramontane sinkholes". He threatens the reader with his own poetry, and in a section hailing Grover Cleveland as the 19th century's sole classical liberal, begins "let us now praise corpulent men".  The book rebounds with an affectionate wit, often barbed. After recounting the life of a Congressional solon named Hoar, who a contemporary thought would be celebrated in statuary for standing against imperialism, Kauffman notes "Alas, the statues are all dedicated to Har's homonyms."

What a piece of work is Kauffman, and an eye-opening piece of work this is! Kauffman's style and championing of the little way  give him considerable appeal both in what he says and his delivery thereof.  He is funny and rebuking,  a man of no party and wholly genuine.  Ain't my America succeeds as a reminder of what the American experiment was -- is -- at its best, and as a scattering of  birdshot fired at our aviary of warhawks on the Potomac.




Related:

• We Who Dared Say No to War, ed. Murray Polner and Tom Woods. Even more sweeping, this collects anti-war speeches, essays, and songs throughout the Republic's history.  It covers more anti-war motives than Kauffman's  localism. 
• Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialistic Writings,  Mark Twain
• Look Homeward, America: in Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front Porch Anarchists,Bill Kauffman

Look Homeward, America!

Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists
© 2006 Bill Kauffman
250 pages

"The Little Way. That is what we seek. That -- contrary to the ethic of personal parking spaces, of the dollar-sign god -- is the American way. Dorothy Day kept to that little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not beautiful, at least it is always human."  p. 39

           Look Homeward, America collects the stories of eccentric individuals who, in a century marked by the advance of corporate and state power, rebelled against the machine. Planting their flag above small towns and in the countryside, they held on what they regarded as valuable and defied or attempted to resist the march of a more inhumane world. Bill Kauffman is a sympathetic soul, a die-hard "placeist". He calls himself the anarchist love-child of Henry David Thoreau and Dorothy Day, and Look Homeward is his tribute to peaceable troublemakers like his 'parents'. They are farmers and social workers, politicians and miners, men and women whose faith is the family and the local community. They champion self-reliance, local interest, and peace; they scorn war, industrial agriculture, big business, and government bureaucracy.  The expression thereof varies; some are hands-on activists, like Day and Mother Jones,  others very frustrated political candidates, still others authors who sing the song of their places and peoples in novel and verse.No political labels apply here; although most are out to protect traditional expressions of civil society, or are vigorously insisting that the powerful leave them be, these conservatives and libertarians are joined by men like Eugene Debs. A book that can honor the six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist party in the same breath as Wendell Berry (a Kentucky farmer, novelist, and proponent of agrarianism)  is wonderfully eclectic. A strong sense of the meaningful life pervades and is carried forth by both religious personalities (Catholic Dorothy Day, featured prominently) and the irreligious, like Robert Ingersoll.   (The great agnostic only receives a mention, which is too bad; his view of the American republic was quite Jeffersonian.) The expression of this common spirit differs from In essence, Look Homeward is a lively championing of localism, a tribute paid to people whose lives were a great raspberry in the face of war and modern alienation. It's a ball to read, not only because Kaufman is so personable,  but because of his colorful-but-not-obscene vocabulary.

Related:

• The Plain Reader,  assorted authors (including Berry)
• Crunchy Cons; The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rob Dreher.  Like Kauffman, a writer at Front Porch Republic
• Any of Wendell Berry’s works
• Review: "All American Anarchists"

"....this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship."  - G. K. Chesteron, What's Wrong with the World?