Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Kauffman Bill
Title : America first ! Its history, culture, and politics
Year : 1995

Link download : Kauffman_Bill_-_America_first.zip

Preface. Rereading a book one wrote in his salad days is not exactly like remasticating a twenty-plus-year-old salad, but it is a strange experience nonetheless. One approaches the text with a measure of trepidation. Did I really say that? My, what an intemperate young man! Nah, not really. Like Edward Abbey, I have become more radical as I grow older, but radical in the sense of “cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots,” as Allen Tate said.1 Having roots, being anchored to a place, makes one at once radical and reactionary. I wrote much of this book in the wake of the 1992 presidential election-the most interesting and significant of my lifetime, at least until 2016, and in neither case is a candidate surnamed Clinton or Bush at all germane to that significance. I will expatiate upon this in the epilogue-don’t skip ahead!-and only say now that Donald Trump, in his crude and bombastic and sometimes-offensive but other times refreshingly provocative way, is a twenty-first-century amalgam of that earlier election’s Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, though without the former’s intellectual acuity and the latter’s Boy Scout patriotism. To continue the psephological parallel, Bernie Sanders is Jerry Brown, substituting Judaism for Jesuitism, and theoretical socialism reified in practical Vermont politics for disillusioned post-New Dealism delivered with New Age effervescence. ...