Bill Kauffman’s new book, Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists, looks mighty interesting. From the Introduction:
- Look Homeward, America—and yes, the echoes of Thomas Wolfe and George McGovern are intentional—offers an alternative to the American Empire whose subject no true-hearted American would wish to be. Mine is a Middle American, profoundly un-imperial patriotism based in love of American music, poetry, places, quirks and commonalities, historical crotchets, holy fools and eminent Kansans. It is not the sham patriotism of the couch-sitter who sings “God Bless America” as the bombs light up his television, or the chickenhawk who loves little of his country beyond its military might. …
Now, I do not claim to be the archetypal American. If my ethnic mix is typically mongrel, stretching from Italy to Ireland, so are my politics a blend of Catholic Worker, Old Right libertarian, Yorker transcendentalist, and delirious localist. So my story is singular but also strangely representative. We live in an age in which Americans by the millions have lost faith in a system that seems, at best, alien, and at worst, repressive. I, too, started in the mainstream, but I found it placidly sinister, so I took a trip down the tributaries, left and right and great plunging cataracts, till I found that my faith in the oldest, simplest, most radical America had been renewed. Robert Frost put his faith in the “insubordinate Americans,” throaty dissenters and ornery traditionalists, and this book is for and about them—those Americans who reject Empire; who cherish the better America, the real America; who cannot be broken by the Department of Homeland Security, who will not submit to the PATRIOT Act, and who will make the land acrid and bright with the stench and flame of burnt national ID cards when we—should we—cross that Orwellian pass. This is still our country, you know. Don’t let Big Brother and the imperialists take it from us.
For a great sample of Kauffman’s work, read “Why I’m Not Ashamed to Be an American.”