I grew up in an America very different from the one Bill Kauffman tells me about in Look Homeward America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front Porch Anarchists.

The America of my public school education celebrates the presidents who presided over unimaginable numbers of deaths in wars (wars Kauffman argues were largely unnecessary and tragically altered our republic), who subverted the values of our founders and usurped our most cherished ideals.

My school system ignored the presidents Kauffman finds most fascinating, such Grover Cleveland and Millard Fillmore, while celebrating those who suspended habeas corpus, enforced anti-sedition acts and imprisoned American citizens because they were Japanese.  When these strange acts of anti-liberty were reviewed in school, our teachers never questioned – nor were we encouraged to question – our heroic presidents on the wisdom of subverting the Constitution.

Kauffman doesn’t care much for Empire, but when I look at U.S. history as presented by my teachers and by our Madison Avenue/Hollywood culture, it never crossed my mind to second-guess the value of America’s full-throated entanglements in foreign lands.  America’s role in the world as policeman, beacon on the hill, and exporter of progress seemed too important and necessary to question. Manifest Destiny, and all that.

But these are the very things Bill Kauffman does question.

The America I’ve known best all of my life is the America of Wal-Mart and factory farms and big oil. It’s an America I’ve largely been at peace with because expanding economies and improved standards of living are good things. If the price is the death of Main Street Hardware, well Home Depot represents freedom of choice and lower prices. The former hardware store owner can just open up a specialty-fixture store or find some other way to compete.  That’s the American way.

Or is it?

Or, if it is, maybe there is a counter-balancing part of the American Way that we’ve lost – which is our obligation to our families, our neighbors and our communities; such a sense of obligation would lead the thinking capitalist to conclude a few extra cents for a hammer is a small price to pay for ensuring our local economies, and, more importantly, our local spirit, remain as vibrant and vital as our GDP.

Last week I sat with Kauffman as his beloved Batavia Muckdogs (it was “Bill Kauffman Night” at Dwyer Stadium) tried vainly to nail down the ball team’s first division title in something like a decade (a feat it would accomplish two nights later), and in between innings I told Bill, “You know, a man of my age should be settled enough in his world view not to be discombobulated by new things he learns, but I’m finding that your writing is really getting inside my head.”

But the only reason Kauffman’s writing resonates with me is that I’ve long valued a sense of place and community.

I have not been a complete sheep in the name of capitalism and progress. I’ve always loved my native state, California, and drenched myself in fascination for its history – from the ignoble rape of the Owens Valley (no relation) by Los Angeles real estate speculators and newspaper publishers (which gave us a moment of great cinema in Chinatown) to the man-made wonder of Imperial Valley agriculture.

I have celebrated California’s reactionary radicals such as Marshall South (tyrannical father and depression-era hippie who forced his wife and children to live as primitives on a desert mountain in order to escape modernity) and its drunken poets, such as Charles Bukowski, and it’s most authentic regional music (no, not the Beach Boys, but Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and more recently, Dave Alvin).

So when Kauffman takes a stand against far-flung conflicts because fighting tears communities apart, causing a dispersion of workers to war-created boom towns (like my home town, El Cajon, Calif.), and the death and maiming of its sons and daughters, and the increased concentration of power in the federal government – it makes me stop and think, “War, what is it good for?” (A favorite Kauffman refrain).

For Kauffman, being a localist (or a placist) is a conservative value, the ultimate family value, which is inseparable from being anti-war. You cannot support war and say you cherish family or community, according to Kauffman.

In Look Homeward, America, Kauffman profiles an array of anti-war localists, from progressive icon Mother Jones, and religious reformer Dorothy Day to regional creative figures writer Wendell Berry and painter Grant Wood.

These are reactionary radicals and front-porch anarchist who defy easy political labels, who often went against the main currents of their times and therefore fell short of getting their faces poster-hung in America’s home room classes.

Jones, for example, is held up by today’s progressives as some sort of liberal saint, but while Jones championed the working class, her family values run counter to feminist orthodoxy.

Mother Jones detested middle class reformers who sought to transfer household functions to the market or the state. She suspected capitalists were scheming to force women into the paid labor force and children into daycare (Kauffman points out in the next paragraph that her conspiracy theory had some foundation in fact), and the prospect did not please her: “The human being is the only animal which is neglected in its babyhood.  The brute mother suckles and preserves her young at the cost of her own life, if need be. The human mother hires another, poorer woman for the job.”

Another reason the legacies of Day, Wood and Jones are obscured or forgotten is they stood as singular bulwarks against America’s quest for Empire and Progress, not because they took up big causes and rallied supporters, but because they cared more about fitting their lives into small communities and caring more about the people who lived near rather than abstract ideals such as “making the world safe for democracy.”

For example, Berry, whose books chronicle the price families and towns pay when war comes and takes all the young men away, once said, “a man must be judged by how willingly and meaningfully he can be present where he is, by how fully he can make himself at home in his part of the world.”

Until I met Bill Kauffman, the primary anti-war arguments I ever heard came solely from people I distrusted, either because they opposed the current administration (how many Democrats who opposed Bush in Iraq previously supported Clinton’s militaristic posturing toward Saddam Hussein and his intervention into Kosovo), or seem merely to oppose the very existence of the United States out of socialist ideology. What I heard was not, it seemed, an argument for peace so much as an argument against something else.

“Peace,” Kauffman observes, “is more, much more than the absence of war.”

Until I read Kauffman, the idea that there was a conservative case against war never crossed my mind (I suppose, in hindsight, I paid too little attention to Patrick Buchanan).  Having read Kauffman, being anti-war is much more intellectually consistent with conservativism than warmongering.

War devastates the homefront as surely as it does the killing fields. Soldiers are conscripted, sent hither and yon to kill and maim or to be killed or maimed; their families relocate, following the jobs created by artificial wartime booms. War is the great scatterer, the merciless disperser.

The cost of war might be measured not only in body bags, in returning boys without legs, arms, eyes, faces, but also in divorce, dislocation, novels never written, children not fathered. During the Second World War, the divorce rate more than doubled, normal patters of courtship were disrupted, Daylight Saving Time was imposed nationwide over the objections of rural America, and the subsidized daycare industry was born via the Lanham Act, which sponsored 3,000 daycare centers in incarcerate the neglected children of Rosie the Riveter.

Almost every healthy manifestation of local culture was smothered – terminated – strangled – by U.S. entry into the Second World War.

War nationalizes culture; it exerts a centripetal force that shreds what it does not suck in.

In his final pages, Kauffman reminds us that John Fogerty once realized that Richard Nixon was “not my country. He’s one of those guys – over in Washington. First thing I thought [about] was the Grand Canyon and my friends and neighbors – and the people all across the country. The people in power aren’t my country any more than a bunch of gangsters are my country.”

Kauffman’s passage about Fogerty reminds me of a story Syarcuse-born, but La Mesa-bound Buddy Seigal (aka Buddy Blue), once told me. When he was editor of his college paper, he walked into the newsroom one evening and found his staff – all upper-middle-class white boys (Buddy was from a decidedly lower economic background) — loudly singing “Fortunate Son” as if it were their own anthem. He said he laughed at their inability to see the irony of the moment.

The story, though, has another ironic twist – one that fits our localist theme very well – one of those young men – Barry Jantz – was just starting his political career when I covered the La Mesa City Council. He was a Republican, but even Democrats thought he had a bright future. We all believed “He would go far” (a phrase Kauffman notes elsewhere is a cultural cliché aimed at encouraging young men to leave their home towns to find success).  But my friend hasn’t gone far at all.  He served five terms on the council without ever so much as taking a stab at running for mayor. He concluded his political career recently to spend more time with his daughter.

Not all success is measured by how far you travel; a richer success, a success of the soul, can be found just by hanging around.

Barry Jantz figured that out, so did Buddy Blue (1957-2006). After a brief fling with fame as a member of the Beat Farmers, Buddy settled down in La Mesa and played most of his gigs at Pete’s Place (a dive bar in the heart of the business district). He eschewed big labels for his music and didn’t bother to tour any further away than Orange County. He was a La Mesa loyalist, as was Jantz, and though their politics didn’t mesh, they remained friends.  In a local community, there are things far more important than partisanship.  To me, they were both fortunate ones.

And that is the America of Fogerty and Kauffman. It is not the America, Kauffman notes, of network television and bellicose builders of Empire – the America the rest of the world sees. It is the unseen America.

I am of the other America, the unseen America, the America undreamt of by the foreigners who hate my country without knowing a single thing about it. Ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball played without payment or sanction, of uncut maples and unpasteurized cider.

I continue to be fascinated by this other America. I’ve been in love with it my entire life, all the while, not fully appreciating how separate and distinct it is from the America of Bush, Biden, Obama and McCain.  I want to know more about it, to find more of it, to be a part of it for the rest of my life.  Whether that means I will fully embrace all of Kauffman’s ideas about a less imperialistic and less militaristic United States, I don’t know.  It will take time for me to absorb what I’m learning and see if it’s nothing more than a shiny, new idea that I want to play with, or if it is the world view I should have been awakened to decades ago.

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