Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Dave Lull alerts us to the fact that the excellent category-busting radical crank Bill Kauffman is blogging for a limited time here. A fun and brainy group of fellow provocateurs (including John Zmirak, Jesse Walker, and Caleb Stegall) is pitching in. Walker's posting about American creativity is a real standout.

Kauffman is promoting a new book that sounds very enticing. Here's a first-rate, short Kauffman introduction to anarchy that begins, "Perhaps no political term is quite so misunderstood as 'anarchy'..." As someone whose brain, such as it is, owes a lot to such anarchists as Peter Kropotkin, Edward Abbey, Paul Goodman, and Colin Ward, I'll second that opinion.

Here's a nice profile of Kauffman by Scott DeSmit. Great passage:

Kauffman, author of Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a Small Town's Fight to Survive, is once again giving us his views of what he calls 'two Americas."

"One is baseball and Johnny Appleseed, poetry and Mark Twain," he said during an interview at his Chapel Street home in Elba. "Then there's the America of Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, the Iraq War and the Patriot Act. I am a patriot of the first America. The other America is the enemy of the first America. I hope this book adds up to a defense of that first America, the little America."

Dave Lull tells me that he finds "category-busting radical crank" reasonably appealing as a political stance and label. I do too.

Best,

Michael