Englewood, FL I’m pretty sure that Bob Dylan was being flippant when he tossed off the lyrics of my title in Subterranean Homesick Blues. Nonetheless, his ironic recommendation to the youth of America still offers a telling observation on the…

The folks at First Things have been kind enough to ignore my lame punning and respond to some of my criticisms, which has resulted in some helpful progress on examining certain features of our identity starved, sanitized, homogenized, and sterile cultural landscape.  This reminds me to say that I think the FDA’s war on raw milk in favor of pasteurization is a fitting allegory of American life writ large—all life must be killed before it kills us!!!  But now I’m gettin…

The conversation between Rusty Reno, Jody Bottum, and Caleb Stegall prompted me to revisit a recent post from “What I Saw In America” in response to a reader reply who had charged localism with insufficient attentiveness to justice. Since, in…

Joe Carter, managing editor of First Things, has been gracious enough to put up with my jokes at his boss’s expense, so forthwith, I offer the following as the more serious (but still less than serious serious) response (which Joe was hoping for) to Jody Bottum’s writing on the alleged racist tendencies of localist visions. 

Bottum had originally written: “My problem with … localism … is the Jews.  But, then, it’s always the Jews, i…

Wichita, KS

In honor of Canada Day, in the fine federation (though these days, in the eyes of a majority of Canadians, less a federation than an Americanized nation, or at best a “multinational” country) to our north, here’s an old…

ROCK ISLAND, IL

“Each generation exercises power over its successors,” said C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man, “and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.”

It is difficult to make the word “environment” in that sentence mean for Lewis what it means for us. Read the sentence however you will, the word is slightly out of tune. By “environment” Lewis did not…

Claremont, CA. Wendell Berry, writer and farmer and hero to the people, might move from the farmhouse to the big house.

Speaking at one of the USDA’s National Identification System (NAIS) “listening sessions,” Berry told the crowd that he would go to…

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY–Here comes the Fourth, and instead of asking why Americans revolted against remote authority in 1776 yet countenance it today, let us now praise picnics and beer and baseball and illegal fireworks. Via First Principles, herewith my review of a choice cut of gustatory patriotism from the Tar Heel State.

(And here’s a link to my latest column in The American Conservative, which considers putative “North Carolinians” as…