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Poetry Night at the Ballpark
and Other Scenes from an Alternative America
writings, 1986–2014
Bill Kauffman
POETRY NIGHT AT THE BALLPARK AND OTHER SCENES FROM AN ALTERNATIVE AMERICA
Writings 1986–2014
Copyright © 2015 Bill Kauffman. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Front Porch Republic
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-842-6
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7066-3
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Kauffman, Bill, 1959–.
Poetry night at the ballpark and other scenes from an alternative America : writings 1986–2014 / Bill Kauffman.
xvi + 426 p.; 23 cm.
ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-842-6
1. Conservatism—United States. 2. Populism—United States. 3. Social problems—United States. I. Title.
JC573.2 U6 K38 2015
Manufactured in the USA
also by bill kauffman
Every Man a King
Country Towns of New York
America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics
With Good Intentions? Reflections on the Myth of Progress in America
Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town’s Fight to Survive
Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists
Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism
Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin
Bye Bye Miss American Empire: Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map
Copperhead (A Screenplay)
For anyone who ever gave me a hand, a wink, a word of encouragement, or just cut me a break
“No person ever died that had a family.”
—Ray Bradbury
Introduction
Twenty-six years ago I came home via the potholed, weed-choked road less traveled. (Don’t worry: I mythicized myself in Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette so you’re safe here.) I fled Babylon on the Potomac for Batavia on the Tonawanda—my lorn and lonely little hometown in Western New York, land of disenchantment. I announced to my befuddled friends in DC that I was going home to become “the Hamlin Garland of the Burned-Over District,” an ambition unlikely to draw competition.
We’re still here. Okay, we’re five miles north of Batavia in Elba, our Napoleonic hermitage. In the post-American culture of endless war and chronic detachment, immobility is the best revenge.
The essays and articles and reviews herein represent a fairly small fraction of my published work over the past quarter century. Prolificness is not next to godliness, but it’ll do in a pinch.
Why these selections and not others: Caprice?
Nah. More like stubborn whimsy. Diffident pride.
I’ve included two items written in my mid-twenties: a Reason profile of Andre Marrou (who went on to run as the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 1992) and a Beat-inflected manifesto from Ed and Jennifer Dunbar Dorn’s Black Mountain-ish Rolling Stock. I winced once or twice while retyping them all these years later, but as with every piece included in this volume, while today I might change a word here or there or revise a judgment, I regret nothing. This is how the world looked to me.
Throughout, I have pruned recurrent material and I have tried to excise dictional repetitions, for nothing is quite so boring as a writer playing his forty-seventh variation on a theme. Contra Jacqueline Susann and Deborah Raffin, once is enough. Well, maybe twice. I have restored some lines that had been removed in editing, but I’ve resisted the emendation temptation.
What’s not here? Dozens of book reviews, mostly for the Wall Street Journal; political observations that would not become unstuck in time; articles I cannibalized for other books; sheaves of early writing that adumbrated later (and maybe, or maybe not, better) writing; op-eds and other ephemera; and the many lengthy Q&As I’ve conducted with a motley, sometimes voluble, elsetimes prickly, and often insightful crew ranging from Eldridge Cleaver and Shelby Foote to Joe Paterno and Charlton Heston (who, at my prompting, exclaimed his “Goddam you all to hell!” coda from Planet of the Apes).
What is here adds up to—beyond the usual mess of contradictions that is the human lot—you tell me.
Reading over the better part of a lifetime’s work is an experience tristful. I am in many respects a delirious optimist, but no trip down memory lane is without its melancholy shunpikes. Brooding and wonderment are inevitable when one goes on a remembering jag. The first piece for which I was ever paid was a 1984 review of that bassetty hound of sanctimony Mario Cuomo’s diaries for Reason. A year later, Bob Poole and Marty Zupan hired me as the magazine’s assistant editor. That they took a chance on me—a twenty-five-year-old kid whose influences were a gallimaufry of the Beats, the local colorists of the nineteenth century, late ’70s and early ’80s punk rock, and a Loco Foco/Sons of the Wild Jackass/Huey Long–soaked populism inherited from my grandfather: tendencies quite foreign to Reason’s techno-libertarian gestalt—has ever been a source of amazement. The ways of Reason, thank God, are not always rational. I met Lucine, my wife, at Reason; our daughter, Gretel, is thus a sweet child of Reason. Landing that job—being paid to write—altered my life in the most profound ways. I don’t think I’ve ever thanked Bob & Marty properly. I can’t really, except to say: I’m grateful that you gave me a shot.
I also tip my fading Muckdogs cap to the editors of the other publications represented in this volume: Bill and Martha Treichler, Wendell Tripp, Ed Dorn, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Tom Fleming, Scott Richert, Karl Zinsmeister, Scott Walter, Erich Eichman, Kenneth Turan, Scott McConnell, Kara Hopkins, Dan McCarthy, Stuart Reid, Catherine Pepinster, Andrew Blechman, Bill Bradford, Jesse Walker, Jed Donahue, Matt Chominski, Jeffrey St. Clair, Ronald Hamowy, Jason Kuznicki, Jeremy Beer, and Mark Mitchell. I beam gratitude
