William F. Buckley Jr.: Man and Showman

Today's Financial News - Posted March 19, 2008

When he came on the scene in the 1950s, the conservative in America was not far removed from the swamp and the lynch mob. Fire-breathing Christians roamed the land. The earth was, indeed, flat. Here be dragons. Buckley made the yahoo and the simpleton swell with pride. Half a century later the conservative movement is back where it started. – Christopher Corbett

by Christopher Corbett

Baltimore — (TFN): The death of the conservative columnist and showman William F. Buckley, Jr. – whom Fox News called “the icon of the American conservative movement” – and they would know for Fox News was part of his regressive legacy – reminds us what a sorry state the conservative movement is in America.

Buckley’s exit provided occasion to recall when he long enjoyed the pulpit of a weekly public television show, Firing Line – a medium richly suited to a man who was chiefly a performer. Buckley was basically a showman, far more Phineas Taylor Barnum than Edmund Burke, and that seems to be largely overlooked on the occasion of his death. The faithful were besotted, his disciples transfixed. The panygerics, loony and laudatory, saluted him for founding the National Review, which we are told rallied American conservatives and led to a brighter day.

But Buckley was at heart an early opponent of civil rights, no fan of “queers,” as he called them, and a “crypto-Nazi” (in the estimation of Gore Vidal) but we’ll come back to that. He was an enthusiast of the American monster Joe McCarthy. Naturally, no encomium failed to mention his devotion to the Roman Catholic Church.

But at his core, his center, Buckley was a fake of the first order. Pure and simple. A sideshow act cooked up at a time when the rising medium of television needed such variety. Everything about Buckley was calculated, a performance, from the logorrhea aimed at sending the gaping rustics, as Mencken called them, to Roget and Webster. His speech, so affected as to be almost self-caricature, was one of his trademarks in an act perfected over decades. The lizard tongue lolling, the eyebrows arching hither and yon, the louche slouch. The popular historian Theodore S. White was reminded of Oscar Wilde when he saw Buckley in action (and he was a fan, too), reminding that among other things part of the show was a dubious sexuality.

Slate magazine, quoting various authorities on the Mother Tongue, noted that his accent was completely false and that none of his kinsmen spoke this way. It was – like so much of Buckley – a calculated and practiced affectation designed to dazzle the rube.

When he came on the scene in the 1950s, the conservative in America was not far removed from the swamp and the lynch mob. Fire-breathing Christians roamed the land. The earth was, indeed, flat. Here be dragons. Buckley made the yahoo and the simpleton swell with pride. Half a century later the conservative movement is back where it started.

When the novelist Gore Vidal branded him a “crypto-Nazi” on national television Buckley flipped out. Vidal had obviously hit a nerve. Buckley was so enraged that at one point he shouted on air, "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face."

Buckley loved the sucker punch. He was a bully. There was a streak of snooty meanness in the man that was little concealed. He lured poor drunken Jack Kerouac on his show in the final year of his life and ridiculed him - an easy laugh and nothing to be proud of. But Kerouac now belongs to the ages, his most famous novel, On The Road, a classic. What did Buckley leave that is timeless? (His performance art may have appeal much in the way that cultists watch Lucille Ball or “The Honeymooners.”) Buckley did not fare so well in debate with genuine intellectuals of the first order when he was more fairly matched. The linguist Noam Chomsky handled Buckley so deftly that Buckley also suggested that Chomsky needed a punch in the mouth.

The conservative kingdom of this world that Buckley dreamed of is now largely the bullying of radio talk show windbags like the Rush Limbaugh or the cruel harridan Ann Coulter, the nasty braying of Bill O’Reilly or the preposterous Tucker Carlson, a fourth-rate Buckley impersonator, replete with bowtie. Talk show nits denouncing global warming and Darwin.

Yes, the earth is still flat. Quite a legacy.

Surely this was not what Buckley was hoping for when he wrote God and Man at Yale? He must have had some painful moments in his final years looking at what had dragged itself out of the La Brea tar pit.

The ululations, to use a Buckleyism, on his passing credit him with begetting Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan (as if that were something to boast about), but they stopped at any connection with the current jackpot the Republic finds itself in. As for Buckley’s legacy, what legacy might that be? He left the stage with the country’s economy in a shambles. Our money worthless. The United States is loathed around the globe. And a genuine boob is sitting in the ruins of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This was the conservative’s dream? Buckley departed this vale with the nation embroiled in a hopeless, winless war that has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 Americans and wounded some 29,000 others. I should doubt that many of them were readers of National Review.

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