Longing for Home:
A Review of Bill Kauffman’s Assorted Works
Cathal Liam McFee
Black Oak Presents
Winter 2009

Kauffman, Bill. Ain't My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. Metropolitan Books, 2008.
 ________. Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists. ISI Books, 2006.
 ________. Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive. Henry Holt and Company, 2003.
 ________. America First!: Its History, Culture, and Politics. Prometheus Books, 1995.

"...I'll
Come home to Illinois on the
Day after tomorrow
It's so hard and its cold here
And I'm tired of taking orders
I miss old Rockford town
Up by the Wisconsin border
What I miss you won't believe
Shoveling snow and raking leaves"
 -Tom Waits, "Day After Tomorrow"

Had he known of this song, Bill Kauffman could well have used these words in Ain't My America, his paean to the values of home and hearth and his jeremiad against the greatest threats to those values, war and empire. The unnamed soldier in this song does not merely wish to escape the unidentified war, he wishes to return home, to a specific place, Rockford, Illinois, to live in peace and—of all things!—shovel snow and rake leaves, the quotidian tasks that mark the passing of the season in a place one calls home. He is, as Kauffman says in Look Homeward, America, "one of the lucky ones… A soldier who has his place to which he can return."1
 
It is this trajectory, toward "the local, the particular, the human scale," and away from "expansion, war, and empire," which Kauffman traces throughout the four books discussed in this review. Whether decrying the "act of paricide" by which his hometown of Batavia, New York "tore out... its five-block heart,"2 or pointing out the painfully obvious, though never honestly discussed, political reality that, in this country, those who have a place—“a place on earth" they can call home, whether it be the place of their birth or a place of their choosing—are ruled by the placeless,3 Kauffman is always inciting his readers to "[r]ediscover the permanent things,"4 the "Little Way,"5 and the "acts of recovery, restoration, and resurrection"6 by which communities and regions devastated by decades of economic and political centralization can be made free and whole again.
 
What sets Kauffman's argument apart, and what will doubtless prove infuriating to both liberals and neo-conservatives, is his opposition to war and imperialism, bigness and centralization, explicitly in the name of that which is described, dismissively, as "provincial, parochial, isolationist." Not only does he not object to being called an isolationist, he embraces the term and proclaims it more American than foreign meddling. He states his position bluntly: "Just because Bush, Rush, and Fox are ignorant of history doesn't mean authentic conservatives have to swallow the profoundly un-American American Empire."7 He is also precise about what he means by "authentic conservatives": "anti-expansion, pro-particularism… cherishing of the verities of home, hearth, and family…"8 and "rooted, home-centered, mindful of the holiness of small things."9 What is at stake, what is to be gained, and what, at great cost, there is to lose, is made clear in a choice with which Kauffman challenges his readers. "You can have your hometown or you can have the empire. You can't have both."10 He then provides numerous examples of people who have had the strength and courage to choose their families, hometowns, states, and regions instead of the empire, and what has become of them and the traditions of which they were a part and for which they spoke.
 
Kauffman's great strength as a writer, and what makes his books both accessible and a joy to read, are the profiles he writes of the often contrary, cantankerous, and contradictory11 progenitors of the tradition he so deftly traces. These "insubordinate Americans," as Robert Frost called them, range from Jack Kerouac to Wendell Berry, John McClaughry to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Dorothy Day to Edward Abbey, Paul Goodman to Russell Kirk, Gore Vidal to Patrick J. Buchanan, and a great many more besides. What, one would be forgiven asking, do all of these people have in common? What could they have in common? The plain truth is many of these people would not be able to stand being in the same room together. As Kauffman says, though, we are talking about a "vigorous, contentious, spirited lot, averse to orthodoxy and witchhunts," but not averse to dust-ups and family squabbles.12 One thing about which he is clear is that "Left" and "Right" are no longer (if they ever were!) useful terms for describing the traditions of Jeffersonian agrarianism, decentralism, individualism, self-reliance, and libertarianism with which Kauffman concerns himself, and offers the following "note... on taxonomy":

“To label is to libel, or at least to divest the subject of individuating contradictions and qualifications. I have found that the most interesting American political figures cannot be squeezed into the constricted and lifeless pens of liberal or conservative. Nor do I accept the simpleminded division of our lovely and variegated country into red and blue, for to paint Colorado, Kansas, and Alabama requires every color in the spectrum. Right and Left have outlived their usefulness as taxonomic distinctions. They're closer to prisons from which no thought can escape.”13

The more fundamental split, the one that defines the commonality of the thinkers and writers listed above, is the question of progress, which is to say, they are against it, considering it fraud or idolatry:

“Progress was the idol of the cohort that gave us urban renewal and IBM and regarded long hair and pot smoking and Jefferson Airplane as sinful but sending your sons halfway around the globe to die for Robert McNamara as a supreme act of patriotism. It was the whole Baal-game of the generation that gulped down every last ounce of whatever snake oil was on sale, as long as it promised Profit and a More Abundant Future.”14

Empty promises aside, what has been delivered is the destruction of generations and the evisceration of families, homes, and communities. And, lest we fall under the spell of progress and allow ourselves to believe one of its fundamental myths, we must remember that this was not inevitable. This "modern derangement" which we are all experiencing or suffering, was located by Paul Goodman in "TV, mass higher schooling, the complex of cars, roads, and suburbanization, mass air travel, the complex of plantations, chain grocers, and forced urbanization; not to speak of the meteoric rise of the military industries and the Vietnam war and the draft."15
 
This process has only continued, indeed, it has been amplified, and it is necessary that we face it, recognize it, recognize our own culpability in its spread. The American people are now a subject class, the sullen residents of a "conquered province," to paraphrase Goodman, who are "cajoled, flattered, stimulated," but never respected, by those who rule them. When Norman Mailer ran for mayor of New York City in 1969, he saw the problem clearly, and identified it:

“Our authority has been handed over to the federal power. We expect our economic solutions, our habitats, yes, even our entertainments, to derive from that remote abstract power, remote as the other end of a television tube. We are like wards in an orphan asylum. The shaping of the style of our lives is removed from us—we pay for huge military adventures and social experiments so separated from our direct control that we do not even know where to begin to criticize… So our condition is spiritless. We wait for abstract impersonal powers to save us, we despise the abst-ractness of those powers, we loathe ourselves for our own apathy.”16

And is it not interesting how rarely we hear the word "citizen" anymore? No, we are now "consumers" and "taxpayers," first and foremost, economic designations to denote an economic role. Beyond that, we count for little. Wendell Berry said it well:

"When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know."17

In the end, as Kauffman repeatedly asserts, it is love alone that will save us. "I would rather practice an anarchy based on love than preach a sterile liberty."18 But, it must be love that is rooted in the reality of lives shared in the place one calls home. For, how capacious can love be before it loses any sense of proportion and focus, and in doing so, lose its transformative power? Should we not rather strive to love a few people well, than love a great many people poorly? As Wendell Berry has wisely cautioned,

My love must be discriminate or fail to bear its weight.19

We would also do well to recall Emerson's admonishment, "Thy love afar is spite at home."20 Love, like patriotism, to paraphrase Henry James, begins at home.21 The "reach of love," as Kauffman says in his discussion of Wendell Berry in Look Homeward America, must, of necessity, not extend too far from home, but must be rooted in the conviction that "[t]here is no 'better place' than this, not in this world."22 This conviction is the only secure footing for any kind of struggle on behalf of the good, the true, and the beautiful.23 "Like charity, dissent begins at home—with a home."24
 
Not for Kauffman the life of the uprooted, nomadic "activist"—truly just the flipside of the "'upwardly mobile transients' who wage war upon our places"25—who, being from "no place" have no place to love, and therefore to defend. "The life of the professional protester, the chronic placard-carrier and slogan-shouter, is desiccated and desolate," says Kauffman, and then he quotes Berry, "'The political activist sacrifices himself to politics.'"26 Far better to create a healthy life from which a healthy politics might flow, a politics that would be close to home and to the people we love. But, for the professional activist, fighting the state on its own ground and with the tactics it has perfected, is left rootless in a cold and ugly world, and responds with coldness and ugliness:

uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.27

"Behold the anger of the deracinated, who know what they hate but not what they love..." Kauffman sadly, but correctly, observes, and then offers the wise counsel: "To combat nomadism, one must make a home; to combat violence, one must embrace peace, and that peace is more, much more, than the mere absence of war."28

And so, we find ourselves back where we began, with Tom Waits' anonymous soldier, wishing for nothing more than to be home with the people he loves, and knowing full well that he is fighting not for them, or for the high ideals spoken of by politicians:

I'm not fighting for justice
I am not fighting for freedom
I am fighting for my life and
Another day in the world here
I just do what I've been told
We're just the gravel on the road
And only the lucky ones come
Home, on the day after tomorrow

But there is something more, some words of wisdom relevant to everything we have discussed in this review:

And I know we too are made
Of all the things that we have
Lost here…

Kauffman would understand and agree. After all, did he not lay the challenge before us, and tell us that we must choose between our hometowns and the empire, between fighting for what we love and fighting the empire's far-flung wars? For we will be made of all the things we have lost, as the unnamed soldier warns. In the four books discussed in this review, as well as his numerous other writings, Bill Kauffman has made the case for the "Little Way," the way, as Dorothy Day called it, of love.

We would do well to listen.

Cathal Liam McFee is a Catholic, anarchist, and a science fiction writer
living in Bloomington, Indiana. He dedicates this essay to Lara, who first showed
him some of these words; and to Greg and Carrie, who have always been willing to listen.

Reproduction of material from any original Blackoakmedia.org pages
without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Copyright 2009 Black Oak Media

Notes:

1 Look Homeward, America, 95.
2 Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, 16; further on, Kauffman describes it as an act of "municipal suicide," (19), driven, as always, by the worship of progress and a desire for "modern ideals" (17). Having stated such lofty goals, all opposition could be dismissed as reactionary and nostalgic.
3 Kauffman discusses this issue in the splendidly-titled chapter "Wendell Berry on War and Peace; Or, Port William Versus the Empire," in Look Homeward, America. As is all-too- often the case, this issue receives a perfunctory and typically shallow treatment in the media in the US, with reference to "fly-over country," and the cheap culture war rhetoric of playing the "wholesome" Midwest against the decadent and immoral coasts. But, this is not simply a matter of geography, it is more a matter of geography versus no geography.
4 Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, 14.
5 Look Homeward, America, 39.
6 Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, 34.
7 Ain't My America, 2.
8 Ain't My America, 3.
9 Look Homeward, America, 110.
10 Ain't My America, 10.
11 Contradictory in the Whitmanesque sense:

   Do I contradict myself?
   Very well I contradict myself,
   (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
  -Song of Myself, 48

This is in keeping with the Emersonian dictum that "[a] foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...". Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: Modern Library.

12 America First!, 17. Kauffman, himself, is quite aware of how these family squabbles occur, and is frank about his own "wanderings": "from the populist flank of liberalism to the agrarian wing of Don't Tread on Me libertarianism to the peace-and-love left wing of paleoconservatism..." finally ending up as a "Jeffersonian. An anarchist. A (cheerful!) enemy of the state, a reactionary Friend of the Library...". Look Homeward, America, xvii.
13 Ain't My America, 2. Elsewhere, Kauffman refers to "the compleat anarchist: the perfect harmonizing of the best features of 'left' and 'right.'" Look Homeward, America, 36.
14 Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, 17.
15 Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, (no page #), quoted in Look Homeward, America, 102.
 Coming from a somewhat different tradition---though, perhaps not---is the English poet and critic John Betjeman, who observed:
 
We accept without murmur the poles and wires with which the Ministry of Fuel and Power has strangled every village, because they bring electric light and telephones to those who have been without these inestimable benefits. We put up with the foully hideous concrete lamp-standards for which the Borough Engineer and the Ministry of Transport are jointly responsible--each playing off the other---because the corpse-light they spew over road and pavement makes it safer for kiddies to cross and easier for lorries to overtake one another round dangerous corners. We slice off old buildings, fell healthy trees, replace hedges with concrete posts and chain-link fencing, all in the name of "safety first" which is another phrase for "hurry past." "Love Is Dead," in First and Last Loves, 2.
 
Elsewhere, Betjeman had expressed his frustration with "progress" by calling for "friendly bombs" to "fall on Slough," because "it isn't fit for humans now/There isn't grass to graze a cow." But, lest he, and many of these other thinkers, be mis-understood, he is not calling for the destruction of humanity. He is not a misanthrope. He is calling for the destruction of the false world of air-conditioned rooms, stale conversation, tinned food, and tinned minds.

16 Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, 53-54.
17 "Manifesto: Mad Farmer Liberation Front."
18 Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, 30.
19 Berry, "The Mad Farmer Manifesto: The First Amendment," quoted in Look Homeward, America, 107.
20 Emerson, "Self-Reliance." Emerson was speaking of charity, and the ease with which one could love people who are far away, and donate a sum of money to their care, whilst neither knowing nor caring about the fate of his own neighbors. Emerson's view on charity is central to our larger argument: "I tell thee thou foolish philanthropist that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be..."
21 Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, 60.
22 Berry, A Place On Earth (no page #), quoted in Look Homeward, America, 92.
23 I believe it was Camus who said, after all, we only fight for what we love.
24 Look Homeward, America, 105.
25 Look Homeward, America, 107.
26 Berry, "Some Thoughts on Citizenship and Conscience in Honor of Don Pratt" (no page #), quoted in Look Homeward, America, 104.
27 Berry, "A Standing Ground," quoted in Look Homeward, America, 104.
28 Look Homeward, America, 104.