Speaking of local, Batavia resident Bill Kauffman wrote a great little piece over at Front Porch Republic.  Excerpts:

Beyond its hometown of Nebraska City, Nebraska, Arbor Day has faded into obscurity; its historic date, April 22, will be given over this year to that dreary shower of corporate agit-prop known as Earth Day. The difference between Arbor Day and Earth Day is the difference between planting a tree in your backyard and e-mailing a machine-written plea for a global warming treaty to your UN representative. [...]

Earth Day has become a bloodless holiday for pallid urbanites, the sort of technology-dependent yuppies whose rare encounters with the unregulated outdoors usually end in paralyzing fears of Lyme disease. Earth Day is about as green as a $100 bill.

Read To Hell with Earth Day; Long Live Arbor Day!

Daniel McCarthy reports:

Highlight of the day for me so far has been Bill Kauffman’s talk, which was also a big hit with the audience. He lamented the near extinction of antiwar conservatism–”locating the antiwar wing of today’s Republican Party is like looking for the Juice Newton wing in the rock and roll hall of fame”–but Kauffman is optimistic. “Liberal, conservative, left, right–the old labels are more like prison cells,” he said, suggesting that an “alternative America is reasserting itself: in farmer’s markets, in home schools, in book clubs, in the buy local and eat local and homebrew movements [this received huge applause], even in the polling places where over one million Americans voted for Ron Paul for president of these United States.” This is genuine post-partisanship: a stemwinder populist antiwar conservative speech that ended by recalling George McGovern’s 1972 slogan: “Come Home, America.”

I met Bill a few months ago at a local gathering here in Rochester.  He lives in Batavia, and he’s a great localist, libertarian-minded thinker.

I’ll be there.  Here are the details, copied straight from Bill Chellis at De Regno Christi:

If you live in or near Rochester allow me to invite you to the Old Toad this Thursday at 5:00 p.m. Bill Kauffman will be joining us to discussion his recent books. Bill is a Western New York legend and has a great following among the Presby-Cons (a term coined by Kauffman to describe us).

Bill will be speaking to The Club, a circle of friends and associates that gathers quarterly at the Old Toad for finely crafted beverages, excellent food (the bangers and mash are amazing), and civilized company. Talks cover a range of topics, political, literary, philosophical, and theological. Conversation follows and it is always stimulating. If you come you will enjoy it.

If you cannot come, buy Bill’s new book Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. It will be good for you and it will help stimulate rural Western New York’s stagnant economy.

Bill Kauffman lives about an hour from me, in Batavia, NY, where I spent my first two years of undergrad (good ol’ GCC).  Politically, he’s a conservative/libertarian and a localist, and he’s written a few books that are on my reading list.  I’ll be able to meet him in a few weeks, as he’ll be speaking at a regular pub gathering that I attend (I was the speaker at the last one…I’m going to start referring to myself as “having opened for Bill Kauffman” now).

Yesterday in CounterPunch, his article “Politicians Without Roots” made the following claim, and I think it’s right on the money:

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 a 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 creepily totalitarian phrase that, pre-Bush, was not 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, has wasted astronomical sums and thousands of lives in a campaign whose ostensible purpose is to democratize the Middle East and “rid the world of evil.” The costs of such grandiose schemes may be measured in billions of dollars and acres of corpses. In addition, political power is centralized, citizens are uprooted, and the economy undergoes wartime distortions. These are reckoned acceptable prices to pay for the achievement of mighty (if ultimately unachievable) abstractions. 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.