Buckley’s Achievement
- 02.27.2008 - 12:43 PMHe was the model of the modern American intellectual. He published a small magazine of ideas whose influence and centrality to the country in which he lived vastly outdistanced publications with 100 times its readership. He wrote a newspaper column for a half-century, twice or three times a week, at which he grew so expert that he could dash one off in the time it took his driver to navigate the length of the Bruckner Expressway, and with a quality of prose that made other newspaper scribes seem as simple-minded as the anonymous authors of Dick and Jane. He ran for office once, a fool’s errand that led to the publication of one of the best books ever written about politics, The Unmaking of a Mayor. He was one of the first writer-thinkers to find a home on television with his show Firing Line, and his wit made him a superb talk-show guest. For all these reasons, he transcended his roots and became a pop-culture icon, the only writer to have appeared as a caricatured figure in a Disney movie (when the genie in Aladdin, voiced by Robin Williams, converts himself into Buckley, complete with his patented lean-back in a chair, as he details the “three-wish” rule). From the first to the last, however, he had an intellectually transcendent purpose from which he never deviated: The explication of, defense of, and advancement of, traditional mores and traditional beliefs, and a concomitant commitment to the notion that social experiments are very dangerous things indeed. He was, ever and always, a serious man in an increasingly unserious time.
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February 27th, 2008 at 12:53 PM
Buckley’s greatest achievement: the “tattoo their buttocks” comment from the 1980s. Classy guy. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:03 PM
William F. Buckley may have saved Western Civilization. Think what might have occurred had he not lived? The leftist establishment could have easily destroyed this great nation. He and a small handful of allies are all that stood between the West and Armageddon. May God bless Mr. Buckley. He will be long remembered and appreciated.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:29 PM
He was perhaps the last public balance of pure faith and pure reason triumphing over bluster, mythology, naivete and misanthropy masquerading as a love of humankind.
For those of us who came mentally alive in the 1970s, he was more than that—an island of intellectual probity and temperamental balance in a sea of of splashing nut jobs. Hard to believe that the New York Review of Books once published a working diagram of how to make a Molotov Cocktail (1970); hard to believe that Buckley’s fellow New Yorkers, people like Bella Abzug and Elizabeth Holtzman (among many others) were once seen as the future.
And harder to believe that William F. Buckley, coming of age in a time of Father Coughlin, Jewish quotas at Yale and a Right Wing dominated by America Firsters would ultimately expel Anti-Semitism to the margins of America, there to be picked up by the Paleocons and the left.
He was a true Christian in the best sense of that word, and a soul from which so many faux-Christians of today (one thinks of the Archbishop of Canterbury) could have learned much
To use NRO’s own style, William F. Buckley, Jr., R.I.P.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:34 PM
Actually, maybe Buckley’s only achievement is when he challenged the elder Podhoretz by asking, “aren’t you embarrassed by the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?” The elder Podhoretz was not amused. But soon then will meet in gehenom, and argue it out forever, im irtze Hashem!
February 27th, 2008 at 1:44 PM
AVI: You are quite a loathsome presence. And, may I point out, you are a total idiot with no sense of humor. For anyone who is curious why, just scroll down to Podhoretz’s joke below about saying Kaddish for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Poor Avi didn’t understand it was a joke, and proceeded the lecture everyone about the how Kaddish is really not Hebrew but Aramaic, and that it is a sacrilege to say Kaddish for a living person who was a gentile to boot. He then says (in the last post) that Podhoretz could say Kaddish for the gentile Buckley. Go figure. Anyway, Avi, you have no class, speaking so ill of the dead. And failing to get the joke (and then pontificating like some expert on religion and linguistics) is really pathetic. Please crawl back into your rat hole.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:45 PM
Requiescat in pacem.
Avi, stay classy.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:52 PM
Avi, his comments about tattooing AIDS victims were ill-considered.
I must say that I have never seen a public person, or for that matter a private one, who has failed to say something ill-reasoned or poorly constructed at some point. It is the human condition.
Your comment’s here imply that you are altogether familiar with this concept.
for my part, I shall look back in thanks for WFB’s efforts and grace in playing a role in influencing American policy.
February 27th, 2008 at 1:56 PM
“Why The South Must Prevail” (1958):
“The central question that emerges . . . is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politcally 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 . . . . National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened.”
February 27th, 2008 at 2:17 PM
I’m amazed at all the mean spirited comments here (though maybe I shouldn’t be given the way leftists operate). Whatever happened to “de mortuis nil nisi bonum” (of the dead speak only well)? To bring up a few ill considered quotations (from a vast body of work), some 50 years old, is especially odious - I’m sure that none of those writing here have ever uttered anything they regret later or had their views evolve over a half a century.
February 27th, 2008 at 2:35 PM
The tattoo idea may have been good or bad, but it would have saved many lives, which was his point: a brave stance in an effort to save people from each other. He cared more about gays than most gays.
WFB always made sure that people like Avi were not his supporters. Quod licet bovi non licet jovi. He did more to police his own side of illegitimate presences than anyone of his time.