No Words of Praise for William F. Buckley Jr. [View All]

[McCamy Taylor]

Oh my. Chris “Tweety” Matthews of MSNBC and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal waxing poetical about their indoctrination into High Brow Conservativism by William F. Buckley Jr., who has shuffled off this mortal coil. For those of us who think that the Queen’s English will suffice, that means Buckley is dead.

No surprises from Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speech writer, but did Tweety really want to reveal that as a teenager he would search the suburban drug stores for copies of The National Review to broaden his mind? Maybe you had to encounter Buckley as an adolescent to admire his wordy charms. Or maybe it was a generational thing. I was born in 1959, and I watched him on television as I was growing up in the 1960’s. To me, he represented everything that respectable Democrats opposed. What Matthews refers to as a “new Conservatism” which rejected isolationism and anti-Semitism in the 1950s had become a very old kind of American Imperialism by the 1960s. Anti-Communism and Pro-Israel policies have been the best friends of U.S. oil companies, facilitating their attempts to steal the crude of third world countries for over half a century. If the U.S. military could not claim that it was stepping in to protect native peoples from Godless communism, how could we secure their oil fields for the progeny of Standard Oil?

My favorite memory of William F. Buckley Jr. was his conflicted state when he interviewed a left wing priest. Good Catholic meets Good Conservative. No contest. Religion trumps ideology. That is why the Religious Right was created. The right wing was losing too many hearts and minds to bone fide spiritual movements, which offered satisfying answers and solutions to life’s problems---more satisfying than napalm anyway. So, a bogus form of Christianity was created in which it is a sin to keep a fertilized egg from implanting but Jesus cheers every time a Muslim has his head blown off.

No wonder Buckley disavowed the latest “conservative” trends. Now that he is dead, all his little bastard ideological children will be rushing to claim their share of the inheritance. People like Tweety.

Pardon me now, while I speak badly of the dead. Maybe it is because I am from the South, where great orators are a dime a dozen, but I never could understand what all the fuss was about. Buckley mumbled. And he violated the first rule of communication which is make sure that your audience understands your message in a visceral as well as intellectual way. I think maybe he did not want to have a connection with the “first 2000 names in the Boston phone book” even though he said (and Tweety seemed just thrilled when he quoted)

“I would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the 2000 members of the faculty of Harvard University.”

Check out the contrast between Buckley and Gore Vidal who were both asked to provide political commentary about what to expect from a Richard Nixon presidency in November 1968.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AzjZrtqCIw

Buckley didn’t just get it wrong (the key word there among all the extraneous words is “air” as in lots and lots of air), he got it wrong in a droning, monotone that might be a cross between James Joyce and Tennessee Williams if there was a lilt to his voice and a hint of poetry in his words. He sounds like a vice officer practicing hip jargon before going undercover.

Vidal, in contrast, did the job he was hired to do. He presented a very accurate assessment of Richard Nixon and the direction which the country would take under his leadership.

Here is something for admirers of Buckley and his “new” “intellectual” conservatism to chew on. It is a quote from the National Review from a 1957 editorial:

http://www.amren.com/ar/2000/09/index.html#cover

“The central question that emerges … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.”

“National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct… It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.”

“The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class… Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.”

So, did a thrill go up Tweety’s thigh when he read this good old fashioned Southern racist hooey, all prettied up with fancy words from William F. Buckley’s thesaurus, the one that was supposed to anesthetize the reader (or listener) to the crypto-fascist propaganda that he was spouting?

See Buckley lose his cool when he is called what he really is by Gore Vidal at the 1968 Democratic Convention:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8

Look in Buckley’s eyes as he makes his threat of bodily violence against the laughing Vidal. For just a moment, you can see the jack booted thug that lived inside the too cool for school conservative pundit. No one writes words like those above without having a load of hate in his heart.