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."

The Benedict Option

The Benedict Option
© 2017 Rob Dreher
269 pages

  Christendom has fallen; long live Christendom.   In The Benedict Option, Rob Dreher argues that the Christian church in the United States is at a crisis point and must now think seriously and act deliberately if it is to avoid the fate of European Christianity. The vestiges of America’s Christian past have evaporated away,  and what has replaced them?  A vague feel-good sentiment that is applied like lipstick on the pig that is self-worship.  One of Dreher’s earlier books, Crunchy Conservatives, introduced readers to the idea of a conservative ‘counterculture’ to resist the worst aspects of American consumerism.  With the Benedict Option, Dreher maintain that such a counterculture is no longer an option: it is a necessity if Christianity in America is to survive a culture now defined by corrosive materialism, violent and pornographic entertainment, and the disintegration of the family.

 Dreher begins with a visit to the cradle of western monasticism, the abbey of Nursia where St. Benedict began.  Benedict, too, lived in an age of decline – in the dusk of the western Roman empire, an age of corruption and decay. Born into privilege , he could have had a reasonably comfortable life, yet devoted himself instead to creating a monastery for the purposes of work and prayer.  Dreher uses the Benedictine rule – its  requirements for  being rooted in a place, living communally,  studying, praying, and physically laboring – to explore ways that people today are creating an authentic Christian counterculture; one which is vibrant  and self-contained, existing within but separately from the  mass culture. (Judaism is the stellar example, having sustained itself for thousands of years despite chronic marginalization and outright persecution –  and possibly because of that persecution, if Natan Sharansky’s case is typical:  his embrace of Judaism increased every time he was targeted because of it.)

 Up until the present day,  Christians in America have been able to combine their loyalties;  America was a place formed by Christian ideals,   from the Puritan townships of New England to the Catholic parishes of Louisiana. For most of its history it has been populated almost wholly by Christians, resulting in a culture where even non-Christians tended to conform to Christian norms of behavior by default.  The American devotion to individualism was thus moderated by some sense of religions conviction  The zeitgeist  has changed, however, and the prevailing religious attitude of most Americans (including its Christians) is what Dreher and others call “moralistic therapeutic deism”. Its  tenets are all mild and comfortable: God exists  and wants you to be happy, you should be nice, and if you  die without having murdered someone, you’ll probably go to heaven because God is nice, too.  It is the kind of religiosity that lends itself well to a consumer culture:  the idea of God is there when you need it, a quick prayer during distress, but doesn't intrude on one's life otherwise.   But this sort of vague belief is the useless security blanket that the anti-religious hold all religions to be. It  does not form the character, or steel it for real crises;  it does not compel people to work to create things good and beautiful, let alone prompt them to sacrifice themselves for someone else’s good.   The American polity is likewise bereft of virtue: the national government is marked by routine assassination, excessive surveillance, and casual coercion of the powerless.   If serious Christians wish to  preserve their faith, they  must realize that they are Christians first and foremost..   “Our citizenship is in heaven,” wrote Paul, and centuries later St. Augustine would repeat that in his City of God.  To be born into America is an accident of geography; to preserve oneself as a Christian in a materialistic,  selfish, and scorning society will require grace,  sheer will, and the support of other Christians.

To live inspired by the Benedictines, to preserve a culture amid collective chaos,  suggests a degree of asceticism.  A certain level of withdrawal is required from outside society. By no means does Dreher advocate Christians withdrawing into survival cells in the mountains,  but he does urge readers to reflect on the degree to which their characters and minds are being fragmented and disordered by popular television,  too-frequent use of wireless devices, etc.  It also means rethinking engagement with State politics, for beyond a few critical areas there is not much that can be done. Protecting basic liberties is possible within the cultural mainstream, sure, but to be most effective,  Christians should focus on local politics. A Benedictine works the soil he is given; he does not attempt to be a one-man agricultural lobby.

Education is crucial for renewing Christian civilization, for state schools are where children’s souls go to die.   A child raised in a morally-inclined home will, at school, be exposed to children who were raised in sewers – children who believe that violence and verbal abuse are normal, and that watching naked ladies on their cellphones is harmless fun.  Dreher encourages Christians to consider  the growing movement of classical Christian education, which grounds the cultivation of children in a tradition with deep roots.  Homeschooling is another option,  though it requires immense patience and more sacrifice on the part of the parents.

What we must realize, says Dreher, is that the Christian way must become part of every aspect of life:  the home and Christian school should be ordered like a monastery, towards God.    At home, Dreher recommends regular family prayer regimens, and suggests that single people living alone might do well to look for fellow Christians to live with --  relying on them not just as roommates but as spiritual brothers-in-arms who provide sources of accountability and advice for one another, as well as  opportunities for helping one another in charity.   Fellowship is crucial:  the essential horror of the modern post-west is that people are so atomized and separated from one another.  The iPhone, promising connectivity to others but in reality allowing people to live more and more inside their heads, is a fitting icon of the age.    Not only does  Christian fellowship help people grow in their faith and flourish emotionally, but if the State becomes overtly hostile towards its new minority, Christians will need to rely on networks to find employment and resources. The time to build those networks is now.  Benedictine Christians can create a counter polis,  creating anew civic structures that will attract the materially and spiritually destitute.

While the Benedict Option addresses itself to the Christian future, I do not believe the advice is merely applicable towards surviving and thriving in the future. Even learning a little of the classical tradition is edifying and eye-opening, whether one is reading the moral philosophy of the Stoics or contemplating the beauteous order in medieval architecture.  There is no shortage of books written today about the effects of television and constant computer usage on the brain -- I personally haven't watched television since 2009,  after I realized it was addictive, distracting, and idiotic.    Much of the problem with American politics today is that the polis is gone:  we feel its absence, we desire its order and meaning, but the national State is too large, too distant, too complicated to be the polis. This is why Dreher advocated localist politics, but if we created in his words a counter polis,  a membership within society,  we would be aiding contemporary life immeasurably.   Not only materially, of course, but socially.  Membership is one of the most fundamental cravings of the human soul.   Christianity has always been a social religion, an other-oriented religion: it exists, G.K. Chesterton maintained, for the purpose of people who are not its members.  To create a vibrant, stable, and humane society within the absurd chaos of modernity would establish sanctuaries for those outside Christendom, who feel the alienation and look for answers.   Thus, the Benedict option is not simply one of self-survival, but one which serves as a witness and a stronghold of charity.

Related

• Out of the Ashes, Anthony Esolen.  Similar, but not focused on spirituality to the degree of Dreher. 
• Blue Like Jazz/Through Painted Deserts. In one of these books, the author lives in a Christian commune for a while. They may have been linked with The New Monasticism, which was an Emergent Christianity movement I read into a little back in 2009 when I was reading about simple living in the Buddhist, Gandhian, and Christian traditions.  Dreher writes about New Monasticism and its possible connection to the Benedict option here. 
• Dreher's corpus of work at The American Conservative, where he's been discussing the "BenOp" with readers for at least two years now. 
• Crunchy Cons, Rob Dreher.  One of the first 'conservative' books I ever read, back when the only conservatives I knew of were Republican warhawks.  Imagine my delight to find in Dreher a man who writes about new urbanism, public transit,  locavorism, a non-imperial foreign policy, etc!  It's fun to read this review in part because I've changed over the years, and now share Dreher's "sinister" contempt for the state  and media. 

Out of the Ashes

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture
© 2017 Anthony Esolen
256 pages

Some things, like a Roman bridge, can last for millennia through the virtue of their design, the simplicity of their use, and the inherent strength of their materials. Other things, like the Golden Gate Bridge,  or a house, require more steady attention. It isn't that they're built in an inferior fashion, but they are far more complicated and ambitious.  A culture is a thing that requires attention; it must be renewed generation to generation. In Out of the Ashes,  Anthony Esolen calls attention of Americans to the fact that western culture  is past need for attention: it has sat too long exposed to the elements without refreshing layers of paint, the termites and mice of base creation have withered away its walls and support posts, and the foundation has sunk and cracked. What is needed is rebuilding and restoration. No one can do everything, but everyone must do something, and here Esolen offers hearty arguments for resurrecting education, play, a society based on marriage, family, and the home, politics reoriented towards the local, and the veneration of beauty and virtue. In short, he bids us deny the unholy trinity of Self, Sex, and the State, and  to become participants in our own lives once more.

In interviews and lectures Esolen maintains that what  we must realize about American culture is that there isn't a culture there at all, merely memories and leftover habits. It is as we are walking through a dry creekbed; the impression of the creek is still there upon the land, even as the water itself is a far-distant trickle.  The role of culture in Esolen's sense isn't the mere transmission of music and games from generation to generation, with improvisation and growth along the way. Instead, culture is more broadly applied to civil institutions supporting a common appreciation of man and the cosmos, supporting human life -- the cultivation of man as it were, the garden in which we are watered, thrive, and  create anew the next generation.  Society formerly relied on the  subtle, consistent, and constant pressure of civil society -- of places like the home, the church, and the school. These were all institutions which people not only participated in, they were in complete control of them.   These institutions not only shared a common architectural language, in that schoolhouses, homes, and village churches might look like, but they shared a common mission in promoting human welfare.  That mission was also shared by social organization (the organization of dances to allow young people to meet one another, for instance) and ordinary habit, like allowing children to run outside and play unattended.   In 2001, Robert Putnam decried the decline of civil institutions -- churches, civic groups, bowling clubs, local political moments -- and attempted to figure out what caused their decline. Now the fall is complete:  state schools are such failures that colleges must teach remedial English (prior to their English Literature courses on Twilight and Fifty Shades, Dickens and Stoker having been dumped);   young adults raised in the hookup miasma have no socialization in creating a bonafide  soul-speaks-to-soul relationship,  and every romantic encounter must be  carefully navigated lest someone be sued because the old culture what ensured everyone knew what was appropriate and what was not is lost.

There is no use complaining; we can only rebuild, and the place to start is the family.  Esolen emphatically rejects the modern primacy of the individual, maintaining the family is the foundation of every human society. The home and family are where children are created, nurtured, and taught to become authentic members of their society, their polis.   Speaking of the polis, it too needs awakening:   the State has taken away every prerogative of local communities, leaving them a few pittances like garbage pickup. This is wrong in that it takes away from people the ability to be effective citizens of their community.  Citizenship in the national government means nothing; the individual is grist in the mill.  Yet there is little point in running for something like the school board nowadays, because the decisions have already been decided by far-distant strangers who know better than people what and how to teach their children.   Esolen thus encourages people to create alternative institutions, to  homeschool their children and work together to create private colleges in response to the past-pathetic state of university education today, a place that provides safe spaces and coloring books to its wards instead of teaching them to grapple, body and soul, with adversity and ignorance.   Yet helping to participate in the restoration of society isn't as formidable as creating new and virile sources of education like St. John's and Christendom College;   it can be as simple as learning to appreciate the poetic beauty of traditional hymns,  so much more potent than the happy-clappy praisesongs favored by megachurches -- or leaving the television behind to use one's leisure time to build something with their hands.   Fight ugliness with beauty, lies with truth, decay with work. Participation is the thing -- walking one's neighborhood and picking up litter is more effective than parading about D.C. dressed up as a vagina.

Esolen's concerns are not necessarily exclusive to Christians;  the Swedish eudaimonic philosopher Alain de Botton, for instance,  has written extensively on the role of art, literature, and architecture in human flourishing,  seeing them as important as philosophy in allowing human beings to grow to fulness.  Wendell Berry and Bill Kauffman are both emphatic voices for subsidiarity,  but rarely refer to religion.  Robert Putnam also delivered the essential book on civil culture's decline in his Bowling Alone, which was not religious in the least.  Nevertheless, Esolen is indisputably writing primarily to Christians,  because the west’s civil culture has been Christian, and he is  inspired and rooted by the Catholic social doctrine, referring to papal encyclical at times. At the end Esolen doubles down that he is writing a defense of Christian civilization.   As he urges readers to devote themselves once more to truth and beauty amid the constant babble-babble of lies coming from politicians, the news, and , the amazon of banality that is social media, he bids them to realize that truth remains treason in the empire of lies, and that  ultimately, we pursue the good and true because it is Good, not to create a heaven on Earth. That can never be, for all Christians are ultimately pilgrims on a journey to another world.

Esolen -- whom I've heard described as a "fun Jeremiah" --  is a joy to listen to and to read, a man of passion with a deep bench of literary references. In a lecture on the decline of culture, for instance,  he once used an obscure play by Ben Johnson to make his point. In an interview, someone off-handedly mentions a hymn -- "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" -- and Esolen recognizes it, seizes on it with joy, and at once begins lovingly reciting it.  He is capable of slinging barbs as his foes, but animosity is largely absent here. Instead he writes here in a mood of intense concern, driven on by hope in redemption.   For those who  look at the American landscape -- all the lonely people, the dehumanizing stretches of asphalt and smoke, the constant presence of the foul beast of Jabba the State, who forever demands attention and obedience -- this is a handbook to what went wrong, and a bracing cup to cheer to begin the work of restoring a more humane culture.

Related:
Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam

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!

Big Box Swindle

Big Box Swindle:  The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America's Independent Businesses
© 2006 Stacy Mitchell
336 pages

What happened? Where did America go? ..everything's Wal-Mart all the time, no more mom & pop five and dime..

(Merle Haggard, "Where did America Go?)

Growing up in Selma, I was aware of two different 'cities':  one was a coherent downtown core that consisted of attractive if decaying and inactive buildings; the other was a twelve-mile stretch of parking lots, boxes, and neon signs running north of the city proper. We went downtown for the library and courthouse; we went down Highland Avenue for everything else.  Millions of towns across the United States, but especially in the Southeast, have a similar brokenness. They were broken by shining lights, promises of jobs and prosperity, and the lie that this kind of 'progress' is inevitable. Big-Box Swindle exposes the seeming triumph of corporate colonialism not as an inevitable result of market economics, but a  product of tax and  zoning policies pitted against widespread public apathy.  In Swindle, Stacy Mitchell argues that accepting and promoting big-box development is economically self-defeating, and shares the stories of citizens who have taken action to push back.   While unashamedly hostile toward the chain stores, it invites political interest from across the spectrum -- whether from progressives, who fear depressed wages, libertarians who object to the public's money being handed over to private corporations, and conservatives who see  the big-box bulldozers as a threat to community life.

Although the first chain stores appeared in the late 19th century, it wasn't until the federal government began taking a heavy interest in playing with development and transportation that they really took off. From the very beginning, big boxes were supported by big government -- and not just in expected ways. To be sure, when Uncle Sam built interstates out into the country and fixed mortgage practices so that loans inside cities were depressed, and loans outside the city proper encouraged, they benefited -- but that's been covered by all kinds of books, especially Suburban Nation.  Another practice that Mitchell shares is that of the government allowing developers to  write off forty years of building depreciation in only seven to ten years. This urged developers to throw up sites, and abandon them once the tax write-off was no longer available. (This is presumably one reason why Wal-Mart stores have a planned life cycle of sixteen years.) Developers enjoyed (and enjoy) a banquet of political favor: cities buy land for them and sell it to them on the cheap, or better yet seize it under eminent domain and turn it over to development;  most states allow large companies to play tax games with subsidiaries and holding companies, the kind that mean annual tax bills under $300.  And for all that help, these boxes are still propped up by public tax subsidies and  infrastructure  --  roads, power, and water  -- that stress city budgets to the point of bankruptcy, especially when the chains move on and leave a vast parking lot whose wastewater still has to be corralled and treated.

Why did cities do this to themselves? Mitchell argues that most of the reasons offered rarely stand up to scrutiny. The chains' prices aren't particularly lower than their competition, at least not after they've established themselves. At the outset prices are low, mostly to build a customer base.  What is lower are wages, because these stores experience high employee turnover and have zero interest in investing in them.  Because independent stores operate on a margin, even losing 10% of their business is enough to send them reeling into bankruptcy. What's worse, because the chains are part of a national network, they don't bother integrating themselves into the local economy. They're not buying products from local factories,  using local ad agencies,  law firms, and banks. Home Office handles that.  They don't even provide jobs, so much as claim existing ones -- just as they claim the existing demand for their wares.    People's communities become nothing more than dots on a map to be conquered by a national strategy: Wal-Mart, for instance, likes to saturate an area with stores and then close redundant ones once it has become the apex.

Mitchell's concern isn't merely with the local economy and the private use of public money; she has a passionate interest in the communal welfare of people, of the ties that bind us to our neighbors and enrich our lives. Independently owned businesses and their employees are invested in the local community; their taxes support the services, and if their parking lot poisons the water, their owner's kids are drinking it.  At times, she borders on the romantic, bringing to mind You've Got Mail: the small business owners love their customers and carefully choose what they might offer, and have long heartfelt conversations with everyone. The box stores leave you to read labels by yourself, and if you're not buying then get out already.   Mitchell's overt hostility toward the chains means they can do nothing right: at one point, she scolds Wal-Mart for being discriminatory about its stock, choosing not to carry gangsta rap cds;  several pages later she gripes against Blockbuster for not discriminating, and carrying dozens of copies of the latest Hollywood production regardless of its quality, while offering only a few copies of an independent film. Well, dear author, should they be picky about what they stock, or shouldn't they?

Big Box Swindle offers a lot of room for thought, and I approached it with caution. I knew I would be predisposed to agree with the author on some points, being a locally-oriented person, but that same small-is-beautiful stance also made me wary what she might declare as the solution:  federal legislation.  They're the ones who helped create the problem, so my suspicion is that corporations will happily co-opt whatever legislation comes down the pike.  D.C. is their city, not the people's. Happily, however, she doesn't. Oh, she mentions D.C. as a redoubt against the worst of corporate abuses, but the 'solutions' third of her book is almost wholly citizen-politics. There she recounts people organizing to protect their communities against outside colonization, either by changing zoning and tax laws to discourage big-box development, or by banding together in business cooperatives to compete with the boxes' economy of scale.  The closest she comes to urging for national legislation is calling for the states to work together to close off certain tax loopholes.  The focus on local activism means a true empowerment of local communities -- of people becoming the primary actors within their own lives, and not just content to let some bull-in-a-china-shop federal agency try to do it for them.



Related:

• The Strong Towns organization, the founder of which (Chuck Marohn) has illustrated that low-density auto-oriented development, the home field of big boxes, is a tax sinkhole. 
• The Small-Mart Revolution, Michael Shuman
• The Wal-Mart Effect, Chates Fishman
• Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Shell

Now the stores are lined up in a concrete strip

You can buy the whole world in just one trip

Save a penny cause it's jumbo size

They don't even realize

They're killin' the little man

Oh, the little man...

(Alan Jackson, "The Little Man")

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

The Small Mart Revolution

The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition
© 2007 Michael Shuman
285 pages

Independence has long ceased to be the American credo, supplanted by another: efficiency. Throughout the 20th century, small businesses supporting towns and families were devoured by larger firms, big businesses who gave little back to the communities they colonized other than an infrastructure burden and a handful of jobs. But Michael Shuman holds that it ain't over yet, and in The Small-Mart Revolution this entrepreneur argues that the titans have achilles' heels and citizens still have a choice.  A combination of economic study and political jeremiad, Revolution is concise and feisty.

Shuman establishes a dichotomy early on; this is a story of TINA versus LOIS.  TINA is the there-is-no-alternative mentality, the approach the United States has taken on in the modern age; it is the path of chasing and relying on big businesses for jobs, of sublimating the local economy to the globe. LOIS is the alternative, the locally-owned, import-substituting approach. Shuman begins with arguments for LOIS against TINA;  not only do big firms invariably disappoint those who hunt them,  accepting tax breaks and infrastructure put in on their behalf, only to skip town when another city offers an even better deal -- but the money they produce is lost to the host community. A Wal-Mart store forwards its take to Bentonville, Arkansas;  it doesn't invest it in local banks, and most of the wealth is spent elsewhere. Money spent at a local firm, however, owed and staffed by locals, is subject to a multiplier effect.  There are other considerations, like the folly of depending on fragile systems for vital resources. Why should a town rely on food shipped in from California when its own fields can produce enough to support the population?  Shuman is not blind to David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage -- that given communities and places are better at doing some things than others, so towns that have fields and mineral deposits might be better off plopping down a mineral-using factory on those fields and having the food shipped in from a place that only has food to specialize in. This makes perfect sense when thinking about people who want oranges in Michigan; the cost of growing them in greenhouses would be prohibitively expensive when they can buy from Florida and California.  But why should people in Alabama buy pork from the Carolinas when only a generation ago, farms that incorporated livestock and agriculture were the norm?  There are factors other than cost to consider, writes Shuman;  shipping food from one side of the continent to the other is a waste of resources and an abusive of the environment, but the chief fact remains that we can't rely on the world's perpetual stability. Sooner or later a  wrench is going to be thrown into the global economy; it may be a financial crisis or peak oil,  but disruptions are inevitable. Centralization can be efficient up to a point,  but decentralization is the option for health and safety.  Reinvigorating local economies will not only restore vitality to our communities, but is prudent for national security as well.

All that is easy enough to say, but how is it to be done? Sure, a city in Alabama can buy local food --but local shoes? Local computers?   For Shuman, the purely-local economy is a hopeless ideal;  he doesn't wholly condemn big businesses, either,  but regards dependence on them as folly. If lessons can be taken from their business practices, so much the better, but his mission is to restore vitality to local communities, an impossible task without restoring the local economy. After making his initial case, Shuman offers advice on how citizens, small businesses, public officials, national leaders, and even globally-minded persons can rely on and expand local economies.. Chapters are committed to each, and end with a list of actions each kind of activist can pursue.  Individual steps are obvious; visit farmers markets, use local hardware stores, invest money in credit unions -- but business owners can ally together in cooperatives to gain some of the advantages of the Goliaths without compromising themselves or their places. Shuman also explores territory outside the usual advice by urging people to invest locally,  something not easy given legal structures that favor the New York exchange.  Dismantling the obstacles to helping big business flourish, from zoning laws to financial support for corporations that are wealthy enough to pay for their own parking lots, is also key.

This is in short quite an interesting book, of considerable interest to those concerned about the wellbeing of their communities, especially their economies.  While no community will ever stop participating in the global economy so long there is wind to fill the sails of ships,  providing more needs locally is a surer course to  curbing high unemployment and staying adaptable than TINA. Prudence is demanded, but Shuman offers ways we can restore communities without falling too much afoul of economic reality.

Related:
Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn. His blog has commented on growing local jobs rather than
Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale
The work of Wendell Berry, especially Home Economics
Suburban Nation,  Andres Duany et. al
Eaarth, Bill McKibben

Human Scale

Human Scale
© 1980 Kirkpatrick Sale
500 pages      

      Human Scale is an ambitious assault on big business, big government -- the very concept of Bigness. Opening with biology, Kirkpatrick Sale first establishes his basic operating principle:  for everything, there is a limit to its size beyond which it cannot grow without being compromised. In its opening third, Human Scale addresses the problems inherent in large, complex systems, then follows that with sections on how society, economy, and politics might function more effectively if scaled down.  On the hefty side itself, Human Scale impresses with its thoroughness; a kindred spirit to E.F. Schumacher's small is beautiful,  the book has largely stood the test of time in putting forth a case for decentralized politics, appropriate technology,  organic locally grown agriculture, and cities and buildings built to the human scale.  Sale creates a synthesis from topics as varying as demographics and aesthetics.. It is at times dated, at least in its optimistic projections for solar energy efficiency.  On the whole, however, it offers insight into government dysfunction and widespread social problems, along with ways people can work to effect change themselves. It is almost an anarchist how-to, a review of ways people can reclaim their lives against the power of centralization, and its enduring relevance is proven in the multitude of authors still advancing its ideas, a number that includes Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry.

I'll Take My Stand

I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition

© 1930 various authors.

410 pages

 "There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called The Old South...Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow...Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their ladies fair, of Master and of Slave.Look for it only in books for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind.

For most the Roaring Twenties were a celebration of the triumph of progress. The Great War in Europe was over, and its conclusion saw many of the old empires and forces of conservatism defeated by the liberal-democratic allies (or in Russia’s case, by soviet revolutionaries). In America, business was booming; the cities were swelling with people streaming in from the impoverished countryside, going to work in factories and celebrating American triumphs in war and peace by purchasing as many of the new gadgets that filled the stores as they could, and using credit to acquire those they couldn’t afford. But in the late 1920s, on the precipice of the Great Depression, twelve men of letters looked to the future and saw a vision of despair: the Old South’s final defeat by the forces of modernity, and with it the loss of genuine civilization.  I’ll Take My Stand collects essays defending both the South as an entity apart from the rest of the American nation, and the agrarian system of life that for so long was its defining characteristic. Nearly 85 years after its release, their  fears have been realized. Southrons are just as removed from farming as any other Americans, and the interstates  and cookie-cutter subdivisions have reduced the southern aesthetic into the same bland sprawl that plagues the rest of the nation.  Their call to arms urges a defense for a way of life that is now passed. I'll Take My Stand remains of value to modern readers, however, in offering  both an appreciation of the Old South's culture beyond stereotypes and a critique of the automatic cheering-on of anything called progress.

I first heard of the 'Southern Agrarians', the symposium gathered here, in Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, and the books are of like temperament in promoting an measured conservative response to cultural change.  Both look for inspiration in tradition, both the rich intellectual, moral, and artistic traditions of the west, but are averse of the modern embrace of the conservative label with the forces of big business.  The gentlemen gathered here are most certainly not fans of business;  they are 'men of letters', intellectuals and artists, who share the old gentry's contempt for the naked materialism of business. A farm is a place to grow corn, not make money, one writes. The authors and those who they look to for inspiration, men like John C. Calhoun, believed in a 'graceful' life;  one supported by work, of course, but devoted not to profit but to the pleasures of a good life;  time with family, living out old traditions;  the art of conversation; music,  and art.  Where Kirk and the Agrarians differ is emphasis on farming;  the southerners see the South's agricultural basis as vital to maintaining civilization, which draws wisdom from the seasons to realize there are limits to everything, and a time and place for everything under the sun.  The north, with its towns and factories, long abandoned the settled wisdom of Europe, which then lived on in the South, wrote the authors; they were given way to madness, to pursuing phantasms.

All this sounds rather lovely, but  the appeal of their Southern Civilization is itself limited; although they look with fear and contempt upon the centralization of wealth in the north, they defend it in their own massive plantations. Farms function better at that large scale, one writes. The virtue of economics vanishes, however, when it threatens them, and the fact that a factory can produce goods more efficiently  than a homestead is dismissed as being beside the point.  That's not to say the agrarians are hypocrites; another praises the Gracchus brothers, the classical heroes of the left, who wanted to break up Rome's great plantations and restore the land to the common man. They are twelve individual authors of varying sentiments and approaches; most write conventional essays, but two tell stories that illustrate the points they intend to make. On the whole, however, they lean toward  'elitism'; this is not just implied given their praise of a life of culture and leisure practiced by very few (yeoman farmers given passing mention, but), but in their disdain for the masses.  One dismisses the people as superstitiously religious Anglo-Saxons who need guidance, as if the southern gentry were Norman lord. If they have that level of disdain for the Saxons, woe betide the Scots-Irish working poor! There's also the matter of race and slavery. Slavery is not quite defended, but blows against it are certainly cushioned as the institution is described as obscene more in theory rather in fact.

I'll Take my Stand is a difficult book, not so much for its writing (some pieces lean toward the abstruse, but not most)  or its arguments, but for those old biases. These are not twelve members of the gentry writing, but intellectuals, and even though some of them rose to culture from farming stock,  their vision of the past is more idealistic than an argument for restorative action can be based on. It's intellectual and cultural history with a little too much romance, rather like the opening of Gone with the Wind which is quoted at the lead.That farming has become the province of industrial corporations is a severe loss for the American people; that our cultural links to the past, in the form of tradition, has been shredded is likewise a tragedy;  we live in an age where home skills like sewing and canning are taught not by family elders, but by government bureaucracies. Yet these arguments will not take root in the modern readers' mind, accompanied as they are by noxious weeds like elitism.  It's a shame, too, because many of the ideas expressed here ought to be considered, especially the notion of a simple life versus one of acquisitive materialism. Given that such ideas are argued in other books, by less impeachable authors,  I'll Take My Stand's greatest enduring appeal is in the area of intellectual history, of understanding the southern mind as it attempted to find the best response to industrialism pushing its way under the Mason-Dixon  line.

Related:

• The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk
• Any of Wendell Berry's books on agriculture or economics, including: The Unsettling of America, The Gift of Good Land, What Are People For, and Home Economics. 

 

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?