My America vs. the Empire

[arisbe]

"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, of wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and drunkards who made their places live.
...

"War kills the provinces. It drains them of cultural life as surely as it takes the lives of 18-year-old boys. Almost every healthy, vigorous cultural current of the 1930s, from the flowering of Iowa poetry to North Dakota cornhusking tournaments to the renaissance of Upstate New York fiction, was terminated by U.S. entry into the Second World War. Vietnam, like any drawn-out war or occupation, disrupted normal courtship patterns on the homefront: the difference between republic and empire might be restated as the difference between taking the girl next door to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and paying a Saigon whore in chocolate bars and the Yankee dollar.

"Empire focuses our attention on matters distant and remote, affairs to which we are mere spectators. You can care about your backyard or Baghdad; you can't tend to both..."

-- Bill Kaufmann, Why I'm Not Ashamed to be an American

Comments

questions, questions.

[canonfire.livejournal.com]

I ask out of sheer curiosity and far from being antagonistic, would you consider yourself a populist?

and also, now that I know what/where Arisbe is, why did you pick that Peircean name?

Not really

[arisbe.livejournal.com]

I think of populists as nationalists of sorts rather than localists, very much in the Evangelical millenarian tradition, hostile to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and the other more traditional forms of Christianity, and to European high civilization.

I will devote a whole post to Charlie P. as soon as I find the time, so I will answer your second question then. (He was the subject of my dissertation...)

Re: Not really

[caitlin2.livejournal.com]

How would you consider Pat Buchanan? He is usually referred to as a "populist", but is a nationalist and is well known for being Catholic. What about Father Charles Coughlin?

As far as I was aware "populism" merely involves some form of conservative rule rising from the commoners as opposed to the rich.