“Resist much, obey little,” advised Walt Whitman, who passed along this timeless wisdom in his 1860 poem “To the States.”

This Jeffersonian maxim hasn’t prevailed since, and it really doesn’t matter which party is wielding the iron first. Ronald Reagan and the Republicans coerced the 50 states to adopt the 21-year-old drinking age, Bill Clinton and the Democrats imposed the gun-controlling Brady Act on recalcitrant states, and Donald Trump’s conception of the seemingly limitless powers of the federal executive to interfere in state and local criminal matters reveals a disregard of the 10th Amendment that rivals his disregard of the Sixth Commandment.

The Old Gray/Gay poet’s R-word has regained currency over the last decade, though it is of the pinchbeck variety, as the middle-class college-educated white lady foot soldiers of the hysterical anti-Trump “Resistance” may as well be engirdled by sandwich boards reading “I am a Tool of the Ruling Class.” For instance, participants in last spring’s “Hands Off!” demonstrations carried placards demanding, among other DNC talking points, “Hands Off NATO!”

Say what? A genuine resistance would demand U.S. withdrawal from NATO and other bloody instruments of the anti-American American Empire.

But Whitman’s counsel remains sound. So how do those who value community defend the places they love against intrusive government, rapacious (and taxpayer-fed) developers, soul-sucking tech overlords, and the chilling anomie that produces zombies like Tyler Robinson?

Edward Abbey had one answer. They don’t come any more American than the rumbustious novelist, high-spirited anarchist, and defender of the desert Southwest. Abbey was a native of Home, Pennsylvania, and son of a Women’s Christian Temperance Union mother and a Wobbly father. In his much-loved novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), a merrily contentious band of mischief-makers dedicates itself to blowing up the Glen Canyon Dam and letting the Colorado River run free.

Cactus Ed’s monkeywrenching is a tempting model. My rural county of Genesee in New York State is currently being raped by subsidy-engorged outside developers, who are defacing and destroying as much as 8,400 acres of some of the most fecund farmland in our state with their industrial solar complexes—a curious blight for one of the most sun-deprived regions of the country. The energy thereby produced will not stay local—it will be transmitted to cities that never sleep. Industry flacks insist that property rights are inviolate, and a landowner can trash his land if he wishes, overlooking the fact that the trashing only occurs due to massive government incentives.

There are points beyond which a man cannot be pushed, even if his response entails trespass or creative vandalism. Disabling a tank rolling toward your town falls within the ambit of morally acceptable behavior, I think, even if the tank is properly licensed by the authorities and the driver has his CDL. 

If only Abbey’s fictive avenging angels of The Land could ride into town and destroy these hideous excrescences! Then maybe they could pull the plug on ChatGPT, hack robot umpires, and bash the unliving daylights (headlights?) out of driverless cars. All good and salutary fun.

But for all the primal appeal of monkeywrenching, the better option for resisters is that hymned by the great reactionary British rock band The Kinks in their 1968 number “The Village Green Preservation Society.”

The composer Ray Davies, while damning office blocks and skyscrapers, sings of protecting those things that made his England English: draught beer, custard pie, the George Cross, Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty, and “strawberry jam and all the different varieties.” He also pledges allegiance to “little shops, china cups, and virginity,” though it’s possible Ray didn’t do all that much to preserve virginity.

This wonderful song ends with the plea, “God save the village green.”

Far from the madding crowd and the madmen atop the anthill, I look around and what do I see?

Our own village green preservation society: a shoe-store owner writing the history of our town. A church lady baking and selling 800 loaves of St. Joseph’s bread and donating the proceeds to assist unwed mothers. An old hippie organizing the community garden in the shell of an abandoned wading pool. An aging punk hosting a Saturday series for local songwriters to try out their own songs. The woman from whom I bought—what else?—strawberry jam at the farmers’ market this morning.

This is the resistance. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump or the Trump-deranged and it will outlast them all. 

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

“Build soil,” Robert Frost recommended. What more can we do?

And to borrow another line from Ray Davies and the Kinks, via their anti-urban renewal rouser “Muswell Hillbillies”:

“They’re trying to build a computerized community / But they’ll never make a zombie out of me.”