From the Highlighter
Look Homeward, America. Bill Kauffman. ISI Books, 2006
Strong, deep, readable, desperate, fun. All those adjectives—even those that trip over one another—fit this book. It’s such a good book, it made me want to quit writing. “If someone like Kauffman, with his erudition and talent, isn’t a household name, what makes me think I can scratch together enough publishable words to cover my underwear budget?”
I’m not saying it’s the best book ever. It’s not even the best book of the past five years (that honor belongs to Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason . . . snicker). Indeed, when I went back through it for this Highlighter piece, I almost put it back on the shelf: it simply doesn’t have my throng of drunken-monkey markings like the other books I feature here.
Still, Kauffman’s is a real message. Partially Quixotic, partially crucial . . . and there’s considerable overlap between those parts. I don’t know if the passages reproduced here will convey the deep current under Kauffman’s light-skipping prose, but I hope they do. If not, click the link above and buy the book. You won’t be disappointed. Kauffman’s display of his prodigious vocabulary alone is worth the price.
Unique words found in Look Homeward, America:
mottle
pavid
bumptious
martinet
scarify
nonce
terrene
descant
manque
phiz
clochard
The Passages:
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a pithy and fun biography. It’s packed with entertaining facts that paint a vivid picture:
| “The guru of the libertarian paleos, the combative economist and joyful iconoclast Murray Rothbard, was a gnomic 5’3” nonbelieving Jew who adored cathedrals; championed the Black Panthers while also boasting that he had been founder, president, and pretty much the only member of Columbia University Students for Strom Thurmond in the 1948 presidential election; and once woke his wife JoAnn out of a sound sleep to declare, in his gleeful squawk, ‘That bastard Eli Whitney didn’t invent the cotton gin!’” p. xvi. |
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A rumination from the fifties:
| “So what, you ask, should the civil libertarian do about communists in government jobs? ‘Abolish the jobs,; replied anarchist Frank Chodorov. But who listens to anarchists?” p. 5. |
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Perhaps the most bizarre quote I’ve ever seen, and it’s an oldie (surprised I’d never seen it before):
| “The Virgin and St. Thomas are my vehicles of anarchism. Nobody knows enough to see what they mean, so the Judges will probably not be able to burn me.” Henry Adams. p. 35. |
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Mother Theresa was similarly confusing for many of the Great and Worldly:
| “Dorothy Day, and humane anarchists in general, befuddle ideologues.” p. 37. |
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Wouldn’t have guessed this ten years ago from my reading back then:
| “An anarchistic distrust of the state, even in its putatively benevolent role as giver of alms, pervaded the Catholic Workers.” p. 42. |
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Speaking 23 years before November 4, 2008 . . . or February 14, 2009:
| “The greatest enemy of the church today is the state.” Dorothy Day, 1975. p. 47. |
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Interesting:
| “Peter Maurin’s anarchism was on one level based on this principle of subsidiarity, and on a higher level on that scene at the Last Supper where Christ washed the feet of his apostles. He came to serve, to show the new Way, the way of the powerless.” Dorothy Day, p. 49. |
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| Regionalism is “’a revolt against cultural nationalism—that is, the tendency of artists to ignore or deny the fact that there are important differences, psychologically and otherwise, between the various regions of America’ . . . When the different regions develop characteristics of their own, they will come into competition with each other; and out of this competition a rich American culture will grow.” p. 55-56, quoting (in part) Grant Wood. |
I used to read a lot of Richard Weaver and the Southern Agrarians. They were big fans of regionalism (along with Flannery O’Connor), but their analysis focused on the South. Kauffman, drawing on Grant Woods and his love for Iowa (Iowa!), got me thinking about it again, but this time with a realization that it’s not mostly a Southern things with a few regionally-strong outposts in New England, Indiana, Fargo, and Michigan’s upper peninsula. I thought so much about regionalism that I dedicated one of my National Catholic Register blogging columns to it, writing in one spot:
Passionate Catholic convert Orestes Brownson is considered one of the greatest thinkers of nineteenth-century America. In his greatest work, The American Republic, Brownson preached the necessity of territorial democracy: politics and issues tied to particular soil.
The genius of the American system, he said, is that it erects barriers between the federal government and the people. This allows democracy to work more effectively because democracy works best in small territories. In townships, the governed and the governors meet in the streets and talk; in counties, the issues are tangible, not abstract. That’s where the battles should be fought whenever possible.
That’s where the discussions ought to take place whenever possible. Unfortunately, we live in an age of an expansive federal government that dashes regionalism. We live in the age of a world wide web that dashes intimate conversation.
At the time, I wasn’t aware of a 1993 essay by Marion Montgomery that touches on the regionalism theme. Montgomery is not easy to read, but he makes a point that totally escaped me all these years: The attack on regionalism in our culture is nothing less than the attack on the Christian understanding of the preciousness of each individual life. Check out the essay in full, but I think this is the most representative paragraph from it:
In discussing the loss of culture, manners, belief—once associated with the American South as stereotypical, in contrast to the North as the “land of industry”—Percy remarks the dissolving of those differences, though in some degree they once obtained in our history. He says, however, that now his grandchildren are “like the kids in Dubuque, Iowa.” That this sea change has occurred, I believe, is an effect of “liberal” sentimentality, by which I mean to suggest at once that the Iowa children suffer as well as the Louisiana Percy children. The “Christian scandal,” Percy says in this interview, is its “emphasis on individual human life.” Without that scandalous emphasis, anything goes, including the gas chambers. The importance of encounter of person with immediate existence, the accommodation to this place and this time, which is so heavy a theme in recent literature of the American South, is exactly the issue, though reduced in its implications whenever frozen in our accounting for it by a reduction to mere history or geography. That is, the concern requires a metaphysical perspective beyond the account of history or naturalistic geography.
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A great snapshot of the condescending attitude of the Coasts toward the rest of our country:
| “[W]hen George Plimpton [through the NEA] paid Aram Saroyan $1,500 for a poem consisting of the single misspelled word ‘lighght,’ an Iowa congressional aide dared ask the dilettantish Plimpton what the poem meant. ‘You are from the Midwest. You are culturally deprived, so you would not understand it anyway,’ replied the New Yorker Plimpton.” p. 58. |
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| “Grant Wood . . . never much liked automobiles, the primary instrument of dislocation.” p. 64. |
Amen to that. I dream of the day my family can have only one car. I don’t see it ever happening, but it would force me to walk more and it’d be a lot cheaper. Of course, the insurance savings wouldn’t be that much. Insurance company actuaries long ago figured out that married people are safer drivers than single people, so they started giving reduced rates to married people. The federal government stepped in and said such rates were discriminatory, so they had to stop. Their way around it: Give two-car household discounts. If there are two cars on the policy, after all, there’s a much better chance that there’s a married couple in the house. Such is life in these United States.
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Miscellaneous:
| “[H]ypermobility . . . is the great undiagnosed sickness of our age.” p. 89. |
| “Today we know Mother Jones primarily as the name of a magazine for consumerist liberals whose idea of a radical act is selling their R.J. Reynolds stock and buying Starbucks. The real Mother Jones—Irish-born Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), the coal miners’ angel and raiser of holy hell who said, ‘I would fight God Almighty himself if he didn’t play square with me’—was to her namesake magazine as Thomas Jefferson is to The Jeffersons.” p. 124. |
| “The most dangerous people—the ones who will kill you for your own good—are those who s ubordinate the individual to abstractions: the class, the master race, the efficient economy.” p. 173. |
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Final word:
Kauffman is full of witty criticism, but does he have a solution? Yup, and though it’s presently quixotic (everything good is quixotic today, if you want to be bluntly honest, except the pursuit of individual virtue), it’s simple:
| “My solution is no more ‘practical’ than a Dorothy Day prayer or Henry Thoreau spade. It is this: No statesman’s coercive power should ever extend over people he does not know.” p. 178. |
One Response to “From the Highlighter”
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February 16th, 2009 at 10:38 am
Great review! Here’s mine: Steal This Book!