Localism in the Mass Age

A Front Porch Republic Manifesto

Mitchell, Peters

• Publisher: Front Porch Republic Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532614446
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

In the United States the conventional left/right distinction has become increasingly irrelevant, if not harmful. The reigning political, cultural, and economic visions of both the Democrats and the Republicans have reached obvious dead ends. Liberalism, with its hostility to any limits, is collapsing. So-called Conservatism has abandoned all pretense of conserving anything at all. Both dominant parties seem fundamentally incapable of offering coherent solutions for the problems that beset us. In light of this intellectual, cultural, and political stalemate, there is a need for a new vision. Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto assembles thirty-one essays by a variety of scholars and practitioners--associated with Front Porch Republic--seeking to articulate a new vision for a better future. The writers are convinced that human apprehension of the true, the good, and the beautiful is best realized within a dense web of meaningful family, neighborhood, and community relationships. These writers seek to advance human flourishing through the promotion of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism. In short, Front Porch Republic is dedicated to renewing American culture by fostering the ideals necessary for strong communities.

Part One

Departure and Return

To its fugitive children, Grand Republic will forgive almost anything if they will but come back home.

—Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane

Look Homeward, Angels (and Others)

Bill Kauffman

There are few things more presumptuous or annoying than strangers bearing advice. But I’ll do it anyway. Well, perhaps this is not advice, exactly; I have an aversion to telling people how to live their lives. But I will suggest an option that runs counter to every popular notion of “success” in America. And that is: look homeward. Stay put. Or, in Booker T. Washington’s marvelous phrase, cast down your bucket where you are.

That is a warning shot across the bow that I intend to wax, if not wane, autobiographical, but then, if I don’t mythicize myself, who will? This is much easier to do when far from home. I live in Genesee County, New York, the rural county in which I was born and raised, in which my ancestors were born and lived and died, and there is a kind of “truth squad” effect of living in one’s homeplace. You can’t play the fey aesthete or the otherworldy artist when everyone remembers you as a snot-nosed kid misplaying a grounder in the Little League playoffs (it was a bad hop) or as Count No-Account, as his neighbors in Oxford, Mississippi called William Faulkner.

About ten years ago, I wrote a book titled Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, which is, megalomaniacally, a memoir about my repatriation to my hometown of Batavia. But it’s also about the way that Batavia—and by extension all the Batavias from sea to dimming sea—have struggled to maintain a distinct identity, a character, rather than just becoming another washed-out blur in the great American nowhere.

This book reads as an angry love letter from a native son who desperately loves his hometown, who returned to live in, or just outside, that hometown, but who hates what has been done to it in his lifetime. Imagine watching, as a boy, as the center of your town is just knocked down, destroyed by the wrecking ball of federally sponsored urban renewal and a misguided faith in “progress,” which is the one religion Americans are never permitted to mock. Batavia’s city fathers were like the character in the poem by Robert Frost:

To him the love of country means

blowing it all to smithereens

and starting all over again.

I am not from what you’d call a book-reading family, but I was blessed in that I grew up with a sense that my place, Batavia, had a history, a culture, an accent all its own. It was ravaged, it had often been mistreated, outsiders might think it a flavorless dump, but to me it had pith and soul and was a source of endless fascination. My dad used to tell us the stories, many of them libelous, behind the houses: we’d go around town and he’d say that’s where the town whore lived (the fact that it was a distant relation complicated matters); that’s where Father Kelly’s fife and drum corps practiced; that’s where Vinny the bookie set up, a guy who never did a day’s work in his life. Parenthetically, there’s a friend of mine who’s a musician, also a repatriated native son. He and I say that’s our ambition: that when we’re old men we’ll be walking down the street and fathers will point us out to their sons and say, “those two guys never did a day’s work in their lives.”

Ah, dare to dream.

Anyway, I grew up with the knowledge that Batavia contained the stuff of myth and drama and tragedy and farce—every story you could ever hope to tell. I knew that where I was from mattered, even if the corporate media relentlessly pound into the skulls of every kid who doesn’t live in LA or Manhattan or DC the message that your life is a joke, it’s trivial, why even bother to live if you’re not smoking dope with Lindsay Lohan or talking Dianetics with Tom Cruise? In the warble of Belinda Carlisle, “This town is our town/It is so glamorous/Bet you’d live here if you could and be one of us.”

Bet not.

I had always felt an intense homesickness no matter where I was. So in 1988, I persuaded my wife Lucine, a Los Angelena, that we should come home for what I said would be a one-year experiment. That year, it turns out, is measured in Old Testament terms, à la Methuselah. We’re up to about March 4th.

I had worked prior to that as a legislative assistant to the legendary Senator Pat Moynihan and as a magazine editor in DC and Southern California before a vague suspicion that I had nursed since college concretized into a massive and unshakeable conviction: that a life lived anywhere but in my natal place would be insubstantial, evanescent, meaningless. So we went back.

(I should mention parenthetically that my Moynihan daze coincided for a couple of years with those of a recently canonized saint, Tim Russert. Oscar Levant said that he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin, and I knew Saint Timothy when he was a genial, backslapping, good-hearted but deadly serious political operative who picked off Moynihan’s hapless Republican challengers like he was shooting aliens in a video game. He played hard and, if necessary, he played dirty. No one would have thought to fit him for a halo. It calls to mind Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a saint as a dead sinner revised and edited.)

According to the pop-culture definition of success, going home is the act of a loser. Home may be where the heart is, but the body is usually long gone. In the typical American success story, the heart is the only organ that is not transplanted. These poisonous assumptions are even embedded in our language. Consider a pair of colloquialisms: “he’ll go far,” approving elders say of promising youngsters, the assumption being that success can be measured in terms of the distance one has travelled from home. If, on the other hand, we say of a boy, “he’s not going anywhere,” we are not praising him for his steadfast loyalty but damning him as an ambition-less sluggard. To stay loyal to one’s little postage stamp of ground—there’s no percentage in that. To abandon it, to trash it, to forget it—that’s the freeway to American success. We are expected to look away, to prize the distant over the near-at-hand, to care more about Hollywood and Vine than Oak Street.

Well, absence may make the heart grow fonder, but love’s truest, greatest expression, I have come to believe, is immobility. Fixity. Staying, not straying.

Yet the mobile rule.

The men and women who run the corporations, who tax and bomb from their Washington offices, who finance and make the films and TV shows and CDs from which so many of our children learn what is expected of them—they’re the most hypermobile class there is. They haven’t any ties to a particular place. Our ruling class is thoroughly deracinated—and there are consequences. Boy, are there consequences.

Our former president, lauded in 2008 as the “world candidate,” was born in Hawaii, a state that is only in the union because of its military significance. (Hawaii’s annexation, I’m proud to say, was vigorously opposed by that greatest of post-Civil War presidents, the corpulent Grover Cleveland of Western New York. Grover Cleveland: just another alcoholic Buffalo lardass sitting on a barstool cursing the Bills? I don’t think so.) To my knowledge, when asked for favorite books, bands, etc., President Obama has never mentioned a Hawaiian writer or artist. Raised also in Indonesia and at various times resident in Los Angeles, New York City, and finally Chicago, Barack Obama is a “cosmopolitan,” which by some lights means a sophisticate but which a character in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady defined as “a little of everything and not much of any. I must say I think patriotism is like charity—it begins at home.” (The man Obama defeated in 2008, John McCain, is if anything even more placeless: a virtual poster boy for the manifold pathologies of the military brat.)

Why does this matter? What’s wrong with electing competent but rootless people to public office? Because just as one cannot love the “human race” before one loves particular human beings, neither can one love “the world” unless he first achieves a deep understanding of his own little piece of that world. America is not, as the neoconservatives like to say, an idea: it is a place, or rather the sum of ten thousand and one little individuated places, each with its own history and accent and stories. A politician who understands this will act in ways that protect and preserve these real places. A rootless politico will babble on about “the homeland”—a creepy totalitarian phrase that, pre-Bush, was never applied to our country.

People lacking strong identifications with specific places—a block, a village, a city, a state, a region—will transfer their loyalties to abstractions. Woodrow Wilson, a displaced Southern minister’s kid, renounced the traditional American practice of neutrality and tossed the First Amendment in the scrap heap in his crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” George W. Bush, the Texan-cum-Yankee prep-school cheerleader, wasted astronomical sums and thousands of lives in a campaign whose ostensible purpose was to “rid the world of evil.” The costs of such grandiose schemes may be measured in trillions of dollars and acres of corpses. In addition, political power is centralized, citizens are uprooted, and the economy undergoes wartime distortions. But democracy was no safer despite the First World War, and I daresay evil will exist long after U.S. troops come home from Iraq and Afghanistan. If they ever come home.

People with local attachments, by contrast, will ask the question that never gets injected into national debates over war and peace: What are the domestic costs of this crusade? Loving their block, they will not wish to bomb Iraq. Loyal to a neighborhood, they will not send its young men and women across the sea to kill and die for causes wholly unrelated to local life.

But don’t mind me: I’m just an isolationist. I have no place in a national political discussion whose limits are defined by Arthur Schlesinger’s ghost and Bill Bennett’s ghostwriter.

Lincoln Colcord, the Maine novelist, saw his country losing itself as it took its place on the world stage. If America was everywhere, then it would be nowhere. To Colcord, home was Searsport, Maine, and his encomium upon it might stand as the creed of the whole Little American tradition: “It’s not a bad place, much like many others, but the secret of our love for it lies in...[this]—we know it intimately. This is the lesson I get from Thoreau. Love your own pond. All are beautiful. Be contented where you are. Content!—a lost word in our America. This restless ambition—I cannot feel the truth of it. I cannot follow there.”

Lacking “restless ambition.” Loving your own pond. Being content. What a loser.

I’m not saying that one must stay in his or her hometown, though ’twould be nice if more stayed put. But I am saying that for a country or a place to be healthy, citizens need to have some attachment to it. Take some responsibility for it. If enough folks think that one place is pretty much the same as the next, and no place has any special value, then eventually you get a world in which that comes true—in which all places look alike, and streetscapes and idiosyncrasies and even sins descend to the same drab level of uniformity.

I seem to have strayed from autobiography and into sermonizing, but perhaps it is just as well. False memory syndrome is the occupational hazard of the memoirist. When I was writing Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette, I seemed to recall my high-school days as a blur of four-touchdown games and passionate couplings with the head cheerleader. But I think I was remembering someone else’s past.

We now live five miles north of Batavia in Elba, apt address for an ex...