On the passing of William F. Buckley, Jr.

(X-posted to pas au-delà .)

Probably it would be better to say nothing, but as man is currently being lionized beyond belief...my family has a telling story about the real William F. Buckley.  So I'll tell it briefly in a minute.  Given the shameless right-wing bias of the obituaries in our SCUM these days, let's start with a few timely comments from this thread which will always bear re-emphasizing (my father–as it happens–made them more than twenty years ago)...the first from professional blog-commenter John Emerson:

Besides being wrong and right wing, Buckley made a lot of extremely unpleasant statements, especially about race.  His civility was limited to those whom he deigned to recognize as peers and who were willing to play his game, and did not extend, e.g., to queers like Gore Vidal.  Or most other people.

I'€™ve always thought of him as someone who provided a veneer of class for tacky people with unpleasant attitudes.  A bit like Hugh Hefner as a marketer of a cultural trend to people who needed training wheels.  His intellectual accomplishments seem to have been at the level of a generic second rank English or History professor who has a knack for popular writing.  Nothing very interesting, though better than Jonah Goldberg.  His affectation of aristocratic mannerisms was parodic.  Without his inheritance and his claque, he wouldn'€™t have been anything.

That should cover the motherfucker.

Buckley's real oeuvre was the upper-class sneer.

That's what his fans loved:  the cultured put-down of their enemies, the belittlement, bolstered by social class signifiers, of better-thought and more humane opinions.  My father, the paleo-Goldwater conservative and a man with no markers of social class, loved to watch Buckley stick it to someone liberal, and twist the knife.

I've read maybe 300 comments on his death and no one else seems to have pointed this out.

In spite of Buckley and all his lesser spawn, some elements of worth persist, with difficulty, here on Earth.
         -Posted by joel hanes

Joel, I was just commenting on something related over at Making Light: What I see again and again in movements that start off with suave people and end up with vulgarians is that the suave ones insist there must have been some way to keep spewing their hate and bile in classy ways. No. That'€™s not repentence, that's trying to save face, and it'€™s part of the problem.
     -Posted by Bruce Baugh

As I posted here a few months back when Buckley came up and in agreement with what others have brought up in regard to his role as an enabler/defender of the Limbaughs of this world, I think Lars-Erik Nelson summed up Buckley best:

   

Bill Buckley exist[ed] to wrap up peoples'€™ base, greedy, low-life, mean and nasty views into high-faluting language so that they don'€™t have to go around thinking they are just mean, stupid and nasty, but instead have a philosophy like Buckley's.
   -Posted by JP Stormcrow

Back in 1980 F. Buckley was invited to speak at Vassar College.  My father happened to have a sense of history and was disturbed by this, and so became responsible for reminding Vassar in a letter to the slipshod school paper that Mr. Buckley, in his glory days as McCarthy lapdog had diligently tried to smear and ruin a number of good and honest faculty, and therefore ought to be remembered as an enemy of the college.  At the very least the student body should think twice about inviting him on campus.

Buckley responded typically, that is to say colorfully offensive, evasive, and ad hominem, and he and my father editorialized back and forth for a while.  By this time the New York Times had picked up the exchange and was running it.

My father was an old-school liberal and he stuck to the issues, while not neglecting to point out that Buckley's response to the historical record was exactly what one should have expected from a person of such dubious character, should any proof still be lacking, etc.   Buckley's act, for his part, culminated in a desperate spitting at my father (by this time a distinguished professor of 35 years) and his students and the college, labeling them all "a bunch of ferocious illiterates."

But much to his wounded pride, Buckley was eventually forced to bow to mounting student and faculty pressure and withdraw as commencement speaker.  My father's students made t-shirts stating, "Vassar, Class of 1980:  Class of Ferocious Illiterates," which they proudly wore for graduation.   

Two decades later I found one such t-shirt they'd given my dad and during my time at Vassar also wore it proudly, including when Buckley's son Christopher came to tell some tasteless and benign jokes to a small audience followed mainly by uncomfortable silence (and from what I later heard, an incredibly arrogant and hollow answer session).   I do remember him saying, "I always wanted to speak at Vassar," at which point I simply walked out.

Anyway the New York Times has no search-able archives worth a shit (and I'm not about to pay).   There's a good chance all those editorials are still kicking around somewhere, but frankly I'm not all that inclined to look. 

After all times like this are hard on any family. 

Still it would be neglectful not to speak up to anyone who tries to lionize the man, now.  There is an old cassette recording of my father fumigating at home in the kitchen, stating bluntly, "the guy's a loser."  Which I sort of treasure.  No doubt Buckley would have called that kind of precious, but I always thought that it was fitting.

Maybe those old editorials are still around somewhere, and when I find them I may post them, if there's any interest, as they make for very interesting reading...

Comments

[McChesters]

His affectation of aristocratic mannerisms was parodic. Without his inheritance and his claque, he wouldn’t have been anything.... That should cover the motherfucker.

E-son hits pretty close to the mark, though Buckley's Burke meets Goebbels did not lack a noirish style. That Yalie style still sets the neo-con juices a flowing (as with Coulter's smegma-laden eulogy for WFB).

Napalm, schapalm: Lord Buckley allowed a Noam Nerdsky in the TeeVee-foyer and proceeded to dissect. Chomsky appears sort of comfy in those old Firing Line videos (now on You tubed).

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/02/william-f-buckl.html

[Alain]

Thank you for sharing this personal story. When I was growing up, for better or worse, Buckley was my image of what a conservative was (this was before the "Reagan Revolution"). Your story also reminds me of the following passage from the new Krugman book:

Today leading figures on the American right are masters of what the British call "dog-whistle politics": They say things that appeal to certain groups in a way that only the targeted groups can hear—and thereby avoid having the extremism of their positions become generally obvious.... Reagan was able to signal sympathy for racism without ever saying anything overtly racist.... George W. Bush consistently uses language that sounds at worst slightly stilted to most Americans, but is fraught with meaning to the most extreme, end-of-days religious extremists. But in the early days of the National Review positions were stated more openly.

Thus in 1957 the magazine published an editorial celebrating a Senate vote that, it believed, would help the South continue the disenfranchisement of blacks.

"The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—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 predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."

[matt]

Thanks Alain. I'd wager his act remains no less malicious at its core for appearing antiquated now; only that such antiquation is a measure of the times.

Times, some say, in which fundamental "progress" in appreciation for basic humanity has found its inevitable way into public acceptability, but not into real structural adjustment (on the severe contrary).

The conservative, some say, is today forced into a position of ever-increasing cognitive dissonance, a position of balding cynicism where attempts to overcome by sheer force in an arena that has long since declared such forces to be hypocritical yet still results in hollow victory after hollow victory, because God and Man's ideals are dead and the game is simply, criminally rigged.

As if such "philosophy" as Buckley's was ever going to endure! Even a dead bad actor cannot prop it up. Surely there's a word/historical precedent for such work of glossing and dignifying tyrants and their motivations. Today we'd call him a buffoon, but that isn't quite it, is it.

[Tyler]

I can send you a .pdf of the original NYT article if you like; I couldn't find the editorial exchange.

[matt]

Tyler: many thanks!

We have the editorials in a file somewhere, which I plan to re-read in about a month or so when I have access.