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.

Washington Irving embedded a comical criticism of the way people in modern society uproot in his classic story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:

There is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for, they have scarcely had time to finish their first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have travelled away from the neighborhood; so that when they turn out at night to walk their rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon.

I submit than when conservatism becomes primarily about a certain ideology and not about unique, longstanding, commitment to a location and its traditions and well-being, it ceases to be conservative and has already passed on into liberalism. There is no metanarrative of conservatism; there are only local expressions.

Stay put, and have a chat with the ghost of great-great grandpa.

(Added: Which is not to say, of course, that all conservatives who move are automatic liberals.  I’m talking about the Limbaugh-trajectory of conservative thought in general which has abandoned family, community, and tradition in favor of anything that makes money or looks like the so-called “American Dream.”)

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.

Apparently the Great Old Ones and the shoggoths are in favor of simple country life:

Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man’s today, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. (from H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness)

Hey, if we could get Cthulhu to buy into localism and to fight against the orcs, we might have a shot at returning to the Shire and getting out of Mordor. (How’s that for the blending of anti-modernist fiction for political purposes?)

Cthulhu ‘08!