05/07/13 – Bill Kauffman – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show, it's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
More than 2,800 interviews in my archive at scotthorton.org and also you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at scotthortonshow if you're interested in that kind of thing.
All right, so our next guest is Bill Kaufman.
He is the great author of Look Homeward, America, Ain't My America, and Bye Bye, Miss American Empire, and he's the writer of the screenplay of the new movie Copperhead.
Welcome back to the show, Bill.
How are you?
I'm terrific, Scott.
How are you doing?
I noticed a theme.
I seem to be overusing the term America in these titles, don't I?
No, it's all right, because that's what you write about, and it's great.
Yeah, that's our country, man.
Yeah, you're a front porch Republican.
What the hell is a front porch Republican?
Well, it's a small r Republican.
I don't know.
I mean, for a lot of my career, if that's not too pretentious a term, I've written about sort of the little way, the alternative America, you know, the country we might have had that, you know, there's a lineage that goes all the way from the, you know, the anti-federalists through the local focos and the populists and the old right and the new left and, you know, the libertarians today, you know, people who stood against war and militarism and the centralization of power and stood for what I think is a more humane and human scale way of life.
Well, you know, I was looking at your Amazon page and I was kicking myself for not having read all of these.
I've actually read just the one, Ain't My America, which is a history of the entire, you know, Republican, all the different anti-war movements and all the different sort of very localist, inward-looking anti-adventurism type movements that we've had throughout and it seems like the peace forces always lose and the victors always write the history.
So, you know, we really got to turn to you to learn these things.
We've been getting our ass kicked for 200 years, I'm afraid.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Carlin said we average a major war every 20 years, but, you know, that depends how you define major because seems to me it's more often than that.
Yeah, but, you know, there's a lot of great, there's a lot of great hidden history, you know.
There's a lot of stories in the footnotes, I find, and that's, you know, that's where I like to delve.
Well, I like your movie.
I watched it yesterday and...
You did?
Yeah, it's based on a novel by Harold Frederick.
Who's that?
Harold Frederick was an interesting guy.
He's born in Utica, New York, which, in my opinion, is the literary capital of New York State.
Partisans of Gotham might disagree.
Anyway, he lived in the second half of the 19th century.
He was, for about 15 years, the London correspondent for the New York Times.
He died young under a cloud of scandal.
It turned out he had two families unbeknownst to each other in London, and he was actually under the...
He had very bad luck to be under the care of his Christian scientist wife, rather than the wife who believed in medicine.
So, anyway, an illness went untreated.
But he was...
He's better known as a novelist.
His novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware, which is about a Methodist minister's loss of faith, or crisis of faith, I've got Fitzgerald called the best American novel written before 1920.
And this movie, Copperhead, is based on a short story, or long short story, or novella called The Copperhead, which he published in 1893, and was included in a volume that contained a number of Civil War stories.
And it's about an upstate New York farmer, an old-fashioned Jefferson, Jackson Democrat, in 1862, who doesn't believe in the war, who doesn't want his son to go off to the war, and the war ends up splitting his family, other families, and in fact the entire town.
Frederick was...
He went into a long eclipse when he was discovered by one of America's great literary critics, about the greatest, Edmund Wilson, in the 1960s.
And Wilson was blown away.
He said that Frederick's Civil War fiction is like any other Civil War fiction, in that it eschews both, you know, like Battle Hymn of the Republic, Northern Righteousness, or Dixie's, you know, Moonlight and Magnolia's Romanticism, that ignores, you know, the hideous evil of slavery.
His stories instead focus on on the home front, which is always small upstate New York towns and villages, where there's great ambivalence often about the war.
And the stories are about...
There's a great line by Stephen Crane, who was also a Frederick admirer, I forget it now, but said something like, you know, Frederick's stories illumine the, you know, the tables set for three instead of five, and the mothers and wives and girlfriends waiting for men to come home, and these men may never come home.
So it's, you know, it's about the casualty of war that we never think about in all our wars, which is the home front.
Yeah.
Now, here's the thing about the Civil War.
This is...
I don't know what kind of controversy this is going to cause, but I imagine that this is going to be a pretty big deal, and that some people are going to be upset, because at least the way I learned it in government school is that the universal consensus in America, and even in the South, is that all that blood was the price that the nation had to pay to get it right finally, and abolish slavery, and prevent it spread into the West, etc., like that.
And the movie does not ignore these issues.
They're tackled in the movie, but you are challenging that entire theme.
Well, although, you know, it's...
I don't know.
I mean, it's not a political movie.
It doesn't...
I mean, I think it'll be seen broadly as an anti-war movie, but it's...
Ron Maxwell, the director who did Gettysburg, Gods and Generals, he's, you know, our foremost cinematic interpreter of the war.
He and I hate message movies.
I mean, I hate polemical movies that pound you over the head.
And so in this movie, there are...there's really only one exchange about the rightness of the war between Abner, the Democratic farmer, and character Avery, played by the great Peter Fonda, who's the eloquent and respected spokesman for the Union cause.
So, you know, it doesn't... the movie, in a sense, the movie's not really revisiting the question of the war, though it's set there and it's, you know, like I think in any art, it has to be particular and localized.
It's about a specific man and a specific time and a specific place, but there are obviously universal themes.
And I think if there's... if the movie has a political point, to me, it's a defense of dissent, you know?
I mean, it's very easy.
Of course, everyone says he's for dissent, you know?
Or everyone's for the First Amendment.
Everyone is for, you know, oh, I disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
But I don't know how often...how often we really mean that.
And so most works of art, movies, plays, books, whatever, about dissenters, to me, they really stack the deck, you know?
And they, like, they, you know, they mark the cards, because the author flatters himself and the audience that, of course, the dissenter is right, and, of course, all right-thinking people, including you, the audience member, will be on the side of the dissenter, because the dissenter is always someone, you know, the guy who insists that the earth goes around the sun, or that, you know, the earth is older than 6,000 years, or, you know, the witches at Salem, you know, and who's not going to...
It's so easy to stand at a great distance of years and miles with Galileo, or with the witches of Salem, or with, you know, Scopes and Darrow in Inherit the Wind.
This movie, I think, was one reason that it's challenging, is that it shows a dissenter that many audience members may not instinctively want to stand with.
He's a farmer who's against the war.
He explains why he's against it, maybe you'll agree, maybe you'll disagree, but he's gradually ostracized by the community, and a horrible act is committed, and I don't know, I mean, I think it challenges audiences in the way that historical films tell them to.
Yeah, well, I would certainly agree with that, and so I see what you're saying.
I guess I was just sort of thinking of the knee-jerk reaction is going to be to make the protagonist an anti-war guy in the greatest, most justified war ever, ever, is pretty challenging to the audience right there, but then I see what you're saying, that what you're really getting at is, you know, you want to pick a subject that people aren't going to agree with.
You don't make a Lysander Spooner out of him, where, oh, he's even more abolitionist than anybody else, but he's anti-war, or something like that, right?
You don't patronize us like that, and so I see what you're saying.
I guess, ultimately, what you really want them to stand for is love thy neighbor, and respect thy neighbor's right.
He's still a man, he's not a snake.
Sure, yeah, I mean, there's an element of, I mean, there are any number of strains coursing through the movie, I mean, because films are always a collaborative enterprise, and there is one strain, I think, that you can find in the movie of Christian pacifism, which was once a powerful force in this country, and which still exists at the margins, but, you know, for the most part, you know, unfortunately, our churches have not stood up against the non-stop wars of recent years, but, yeah, I mean, and, of course, I mean, it's set during the Civil War, and you know that if, you know, normally, if you have an anti-war dissenter, well, he's got to be the bad guy, you know?
He's got to, you know, we should have painted, like, a snidely whiplash mustache on him, you know?
We should have had him kick a dog, or something like that, you know, to establish, oh, you smoke a cigarette, I guess that's how you do it now, right?
Well, but you couldn't have made him a bad guy.
You couldn't have made him a southerner, though, right?
Right, right, yeah, exactly.
We should have, yeah, but normally, in the movie, I find a a working-class southern guy, wearing a baseball hat, oh, yeah, clearly, that's the bad guy.
In this case, he's a northerner, and it's also, yeah, I remember he's an upstate New York anti-war northerner, who were different.
I mean, you did find, among the Copperheads, the, you know, the really, the most rabid anti-war northerners.
In southern Illinois, southern Ohio, there's a certain, sometimes, cultural affinity with the Upper South, and so, sometimes, you would find, among those people, it would amount to defenses of slavery, or, I just don't care, you know, that sort of attitude, that sort of indifference to this, you know, great injustice, but this is an upstate New Yorker, and, you know, there was an interesting, I mean, again, I'm extremely parochial here, I mean, I think American history would have turned out better if people had listened to upstate New Yorkers, which they seldom have, but, you know, there was an upstate New York democratic tradition of, sort of, being limited government Jeffersonians, but also recognizing, you know, that slavery was a national discussion, and, you know, needed to be extirpated peacefully, and so, even through someone like Martin Van Buren, I mean, he, you know, the most prominent New York democrat of the first half of the 19th century, and, in a lot of ways, kind of a party man and a democratic wire puller, you know, he bolstered the party in 1848 to run as the first presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party.
So, there's a sense in which Abner Beach is, in some way, part of that tradition, which is a, which is kind of a singular tradition in northern democratic politics, and again, I mean, it's part of the film's, I mean, it takes on broad themes, but there's also kind of a particularistic quality to it, I mean, it's set in a specific place, you know, and so that the characters and their actions are, in some ways, expressions of that place.
Right.
Well, and it's funny, because it's a very alien world to me.
I'm from Texas, and so it's America, but I don't know too much about upstate New York, really.
I've only even been to Manhattan one time.
Yeah, well, that's, to me, that's one of the glories of the country, that it's, is it diversity, you know, it's true diversity, and that's, I mean, that's one of the problems with political discourse today, is that, you know, we get the corporate media try to stuff everything in this idiotic, you know, red-blue duality, you know, or Republican-Democrat, you know, team A, team B, as though two colors, you know, two colors are enough to paint, you know, the variegated and multi-hued country we have.
I mean, to me, you need all the colors in the rainbow, in the palette, and yeah, so I think it's great that, I think it's great that Texas and upstate New York are different than Texas and Manhattan, and these places were more different, you know, there's obviously, there's been a, there've been a lot of homogenizing forces over the years, and really in the 20th century, especially, war has been one of those homogenizing forces, you know, it helps create an anneal, like a national culture, you know, because you're, we're always told to, not to look into our own backyards, but, you know, to look toward Baghdad, or Hanoi, or wherever.
Right, well, and you know, I hope this isn't going too off-topic, but I think this is the kind of thing that you talk about in your books, too, is, well, and sort of like you're saying, the homogenization of political views, and just the way we live all together, too, and I always think of George Carlin's rant about how, from coast to coast, in every town now, every town is exactly the same, with the Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and the Old Navy, and the big concrete block strip malls, and there's many malls and strip malls connecting to major malls, and all the malls, and whatever, and to me, that is all just a side effect of the central bank, which is primarily a function of the empire, and the war machine needs the central bank in order to disguise the cost of the empire, as we look towards Baghdad, whatever.
Well, at the same time, you get a generation's long construction boom in commercial property.
It doesn't mean, and so, like you're saying, kind of the counterfactual history of America, how it could have been if people had listened to your kind all along, that sort of thing.
Things could be very, very different.
The degree to which we are homogenized, it doesn't have to be that way at all.
I mean, we could have, you know, equal protection of rights without having to have our culture just shaken to where we're all just the same, but it really is a side effect of, like you're saying, always looking toward, you know, who's next, the Indians or what, you know?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's always an enemy.
I mean, here we thought there wasn't going to be an enemy when the Soviet Union dissolved, you know, that Jean Kirkpatrick said that if that ever happened, well, America would go back to being a normal country, but, you know, there was no peace dividend, as you remember, and I don't know, now we seem to have more enemies than we can count.
Even though in the country itself, there's very little enthusiasm.
I mean, I could go up and down my street and ask my neighbors, are you in favor of sending ground troops to Syria?
And I get either befuddled stares or heartily shaken heads, no.
But, you know, when's the last time public opinion counted on matters of war and peace?
Yeah, no, of course, they just speak as though no one even challenges the premise that the president gets to draw red lines wherever he feels like, and then he can move them if he wants to, and he can use them as it costs his belly if he wants to, too.
Sure, yeah.
It's only up to him.
Yeah, and you don't find the, I mean, you know what, 10 years ago the Iraq war was launched, and the folks who propagandized for it are still the folks who, I gather, are, you know, on the talking head shows.
And, you know, I get these people like John McCain or Lindsey Graham who have never met a foreigner they wouldn't like to bomb into submission, and yet, you know, they're treated with deference, with obsequiousness.
And the people who were right about the war, I don't know, Ralph Nader and others, I mean, they're invisible in the national media.
I mean, this is an old complaint, of course, but, you know, being against a war tends to be a very bad career move, so, which is why careerists seldom make it.
And, you know, I don't think I was ever really naive.
I mean, I've been reading about secret government since I was a kid, and Reagan was, you know, hiring death squads down in Central America and stuff like that.
But I remember thinking there's got to be some kind of accountability for the media people that just went blindly along with the Bush administration's claims about the warehouses full of chemical weapons that we swear are there and their advanced nuclear program and all stuff.
And then there was no accountability at all.
It became a red-blue thing, as you pointed out, and that was it.
It went away.
Half the population still identified so strongly with the Republicans at that point that they took the side of the guys who lied us into war and said it didn't matter, or maybe they're all in Syria now, or whatever they needed to tell themselves to justify it.
Yeah, yeah, and the Democrats, who were some very eloquent critics of the war and of the Patriot Act and clamped down on civil liberties, but you know, a lot of them, once, you know, once a Democrat and, you know, once their party gains the White House, you know, they lose their tongues.
And, I mean, you know, the founders, you know, the founders saw party politics, especially the division of of American politics into two parties, as a, you know, a disaster that was to be avoided.
But, you know, there's obviously, very quickly, this kind of binary system was set up, you know, and at this stage, I mean, attempts to launch something a third party, you know, the main parties have so rigged the game that, you know, and with ballot access laws and such, that it's tough.
But, you know, there are a lot of great, culturally, there are a lot of great currents out there from community-supported ag and farm markets and the resurgence of regional literature and poetry and homebrewing, all sorts of stuff.
So, you know, a lot of people understand that things are, things have gone off track and kind of groping to get us back on the path.
So, I mean, I'm a congenital optimist.
But, yeah, you sound like it.
Well, that's good.
You know, there's a lot of nullification efforts on left-wing and right-wing identified topics, right, from health care to gun control and medical pilot and those kinds of things, as well.
All right, now, let's talk about the movie It's Copperhead, the movie.
Of course, on the line is Bill Kaufman.
He wrote the screenplay for it.
It's directed by Ron Maxwell and it stars Billy Campbell and Peter Fonda and the website is copperheadthemovie.com and now there's a way that people can help out with getting this movie into the local theaters.
Can you tell us about that?
Yes, there is.
I'm a little bit of a technocretan, so I don't know if I can exactly explain, but you go to the website www.copperheadthemovie.com.
The film opens nationally June 28th in theaters in quite a few cities in the country, but it's not going to blanket the country the way that, you know, Batman 6 or one of those does.
And if you'd like the your local theaters to get the film, there's a button you can push on the computer.
I hate to sound like a little old lady talking about a car, but if you go to the website and you go to the Facebook page, there's a way to, I think it's called Demand Copperhead, and you could do that.
And that would be great because as Scott said, I guess he saw a screening, and it's a good movie.
I think it looks at American history from an angle seldom encountered in American popular culture.
And it's challenging.
It's not a didactic or preaching movie.
I think people will, different people will interpret it in different ways.
And I think it's entertaining.
Ron Maxwell is a terrific director.
There's a fantastic cast.
Billy Campbell, the star, it's really a subtly powerful performance.
And we're proud of the movie.
I hope you all see it.
Oh yeah, you definitely should be.
It's a good one.
And like you said, it is going to be very challenging.
I hope it'll be very controversial and that you'll, it'll, you know, turn out to be really successful.
I actually can't imagine that it won't be very controversial because I certainly...
Well, it'll sell tickets, right?
Yeah, well, yeah.
I mean, that's good.
And it's good for, you know, getting the challenging people on the ideas you're trying to challenge them on.
It's certainly the most, you know, I've never seen a protagonist make a case for, if not southern secession, at least a lack of northern invasion to prevent secession in something, you know, major like this, in major theaters going around, that kind of thing, or on TV.
You just don't ever hear that point of view of all, at all, ever.
And so there will be people who are...
It's not, it's not even done in a partisan or taking sides way, but we're trying to, in the limited political discussions in the film, and we want sides to be represented fairly, you know?
Which, you know, and this is an unusual side.
I mean, you know, northerners against the war.
It's like southern unionists, you know, the southerners in eastern Tennessee and parts of northern Alabama and elsewhere, who did not want to go to war to preserve slavery.
You know, they thought, as people often have over the years, war is fought by the poor and for the rich, you know?
And I think there are terrific movies to be made about southern unionists, just as there are about anti-war northerners.
You know, we were talking about foreign policy a little bit there, and there was one thing I was thinking during the movie was about, you know, the parallel with the current wars and how they're all so far away.
And though, even though the vast majority of the Civil War was fought on southern grounds, still the northern casualties were so high.
I mean, it really affected everybody throughout the entire northern part of the country and in every community.
But with the Iraq War, a million of them died in the war that just happened there.
The Americans lost about 4,500 soldiers and a couple thousand other contractors and NGO types and that kind of thing.
And then, of course, a few tens of thousands of casualties, which are all horrible for those individuals, but otherwise it's all so far away.
And to the American people now, the Iraq War might as well have been back during the Korean War, you know, in the 50s or something.
It's out of sight, out of mind, long gone.
And I wonder whether they'll be able to comprehend, whether they'll think of the Iraqis at all, that like, yeah, it must really suck to have the Union bomb the hell out of your town, you know?
I never really thought of that.
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Again, I mean, the film is about the the home front in the north and, I mean, the one, I mean, even something like our current wars, I mean, obviously the impact on the home front is less, but still, you know, young fathers and mothers being deployed, you know, which happens in every town and city across the country.
The images of, like, you know, a young mother being separated from her, you know, three-year-old to go across the ocean to serve the empire, I mean, to me those photos are obscene, you know?
And I think a lot of, you know, I mean, maybe I'm just an old-fashioned American and thinking that, but I think a lot of people would have the same reaction.
And so, you know, I mean, I still think there's not much enthusiasm for foreign crusades, but you're right that the impact at home isn't quite the way it was during the world wars or or Vietnam.
Right.
Well, I do hope the movie will make people think of that a little bit, that, you know, the war can't be, the Iraq war especially, was much more violent than the Afghan war, even though it's lasted that much longer.
And I just wonder whether people even think of that at all, you know?
I hope so, because I think, you know, like we're talking about with the the media accountability, if there's no kind of personal moral accountability, like, oh geez, I cheerlead for that and that was kind of wrong after all, huh?
If we don't even admit those kinds of things to ourselves as just regular people, not that I got it wrong or anything, not that you did, but anyway, the people who did, without even just the personal kind of admission about it, then we're just on the path to being lied by the same liars and being the same gullibles into the next situation, just as bad or worse.
Yeah, I mean, you certainly see very few public or private acts of atonement.
I mean, if Dick Cheney had a soul, he'd spend the rest of his life washing bedpans in a veterans hospital, but I kind of don't think that's going to happen.
Yeah, or see any of these guys with a washcloth cleaning up depleted uranium dust in Fallujah, that's what I want.
Doug Fythe with a with a weight around his ankle, a ball and chain, you know, and a wet washcloth.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
Listen, I'm sorry we're all out of time, Bill, and I don't know how I got so far off topic from your film to my fantasies about Doug Fythe's punishments, but anyway, you are a great author and you are now apparently a great filmmaker and I really appreciate your time on the show very much.
Well, thanks.
I hope everyone goes out and sees Copperhead.
Me too.
Thanks again.
Thanks, man.
All right, y'all, that is Bill Kaufman.
He is the writer of the screenplay of the new movie Copperhead.
The website is copperheadthemovie.com and he's also just a brilliant author.
Go check him out at amazon.com, all his books.
Ain't My America, Look Homeward America, and Bye Bye Miss American Empire.
It's Bill Kaufman, the front porch anarchist, little r republican, something or other like that.
Isn't he great?
Go see this movie.
It's really good.
And it comes out, did he say June 28th or June 6th?
And how did I confuse those numbers?
They don't even rhyme.
Comes out in June.
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