Bill Kaufman e o seu notável livro

""Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists"

Bill Kauffman is the author of five books, most recently the localist manifesto "Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette", which won the 2003 national “Sense of Place” award from Writers & Books. His other books include a novel, a travel book, and works about American isolationists and critics of progress. He writes for the Wall Street Journal, the American Enterprise, Counterpunch, and the American Conservative, among other publications."

E a sua notável Introdução (aconselho vivamente a ler na íntegra, sente-se um pouco do velho e original espirito americano quase já morto e enterrado a tentar - infelizmente mas provavelmente - um último sopro):

"I am an American patriot. A Jeffersonian decentralist. A fanatical localist. And I am an anarchist. (...)

“Reactionary radicals” are those Americans whose political radicalism (often inspired by the principles of 1776 and the culture of the early America) is combined with—in fact, flows from—a deep-set social “conservatism.” These are not radicals who wish to raze venerable institutions and make them anew: they are, in fact, at antipodes from the warhead-clutching egghead described by (the reactionary radical) Robert Lee Frost:

With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new
Look Homeward, America

These reactionary radicals—a capacious category in which I include Dorothy Day, Carolyn Chute, Grant Wood, Eugene McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and a host of other cultural and political figures—have sought to tear down what is artificial, factitious, imposed by remote and often coercive forces and instead cultivate what is local, organic, natural, and family-centered. In our almost useless political taxonomy, some are labeled “right wing” and others are tucked away on the left, but in fact they are kin: embodiments of an American cultural-political tendency that is wholesome, rooted, and based in love of family, community, local self-rule, and a respect for permanent truths. We find them not at the clichéd “bloody crossroads” but at thrillingly fruitful conjunctions: think Robert Nisbet by way of Christopher Lasch, or Russell Kirk by way of Paul Goodman. Think, always, of things tending homeward.

My favorite America is the America of holy fools and backyard radicals, the America whose eccentric voice is seldom heard anymore in the land of Clear Channel, Disney, and Gannett. It is the America of third parties, of Greenbackers and Libertarians and village atheists and the “conservative Christian anarchist” party whose founder and only member was Henry Adams.(...)

I celebrate, I affirm old-fashioned refractory Americanism, the homeloving rebel spirit that inspires anarchists and reactionaries to save chestnut trees from the highway-wideners and rural schools from the monstrous maw of the consolidators, and leads along the irenic path of a fresh-air patriotism whose opposition to war and empire is based in simple love of country.

(...)

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."

No seu http://www.reactionaryradicals.com/ podem ainda ser consultadas duas listas de música:

REACTIONARY RADICALS TOP 40 (OR SO)
Reactionary Radicals Top 40 B-Sides

Contém (para além da lista em si) alguns comentários curiosos:

"31. Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul “I am a Patriot” and “Undefeated”–the latter a great isolationist anthem (”And there ain’t no peace with honor baby/No matter what you hear/Ain’t no peace with honor baby/Until we disappear”)"

ou

"*I never listened much to Metallica, but I do like this description of the band’s James Hetfield: “An avid hunter, he is a member of the National Rifle Association, as well as of Ducks Unlimited, an organization dedicated to the preservation of wetlands. He admits to being patriotic, but he has never voted. Politically, he’s a defiantly individual mix of right-of-center values with a strong dislike of rules—kind of a conservative anarchist.” Rolling Stone, April 15, 1993"