As a card carrying-member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, I’d be seriously remiss if I didn’t mention — in sadness — the passing of William F. Buckley… especially after I managed to say something nice when Edward Said passed on.
My brother sent me a link of his debate with Noam Chomsky, and Andrew Sullivan posted a nice eulogy to the man here. You’d think Sullivan would have linked to the Buckley—Vidal debate, though…
34 Comments
I wonder what direction National Review will go in now.
The man was an absolute giant, an erudite, charming piss-taker of all things liberal. When conservatism was in danger of being marginalized by the John Birchers and the Ayn Randers, he took it mainstream. He will be missed, but not forgotten.
It was really a pleasure to get acquainted with the writings of those in National Review’s circle. Real individualistic scholars with big heaps of erudition - Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, James Burnham, John Greenway.
Jack Kerouac famously wanted WFB for president.
The guy could call bullshit better than anyone. A sad loss for humanity.
Here’s one individual who won’t miss him: the man was a defender of Jim Crow, for goodness sake! Some loss for humanity …
I don’t know much about WFB, but from the debate he strikes me as far more conceited than intelligent. Or perhaps he is intelligent, but is merely being, in the tradition of all good conservatives, deliberately evasive and dishonest.
#6,
WFB had an accent and diction that were positively weird (though certainly no weird than JFK), but he had debater skills and wit and wisdom to match with anyone.
He also had a quote that seems apropos of this year: Listening to two liberals debate anything is like listening to the Smith Brothers debate cough drops.
As you were, “weirder.”
The best eulogy I heard was a one liner from his son, who said that beyond (notwithstanding?) everything he did, “he was a good father”.
He consistently radiated intelligence, wit, and class. RIP
I learned vast ranges of perspective from him; he greatly enriched my early development. R.I.P.
and just BTW, his being an apologist for Jim Crow was something he grew out of long ago, and honestly publically renounced long ago.
” ….in the tradition of all good conservatives, deliberately evasive and dishonest.”
Your comment says so much more about you than Bill Buckley.
#5 makes a good point about what he allowed NR to print during the civil rights movement.
I love how he makes mince meat out of the piece of human garbage noam chomsky.
I like how your guy compliments his manners. The guy spent the whole debate interrupting Chomsky. I think Chomsky won.
Chomsky won like how Soviets and Marxist won. If he and they win/won, event can’t be a good thing.
His anti-war stands have cost millions of live in Vietnam and held back millions in poverty. Vietnam is stark contrast from Taiwan and S. Korea. Some of Chomsky’s contribution to this world is very self evidently poor.
And that’s where you should have stopped.
A lot of people never got beyond is mannerisms, but he was a truly great American - strike that - human.
#17 Hear, hear!!!!
Yes, but would he, George Wallace, and others have changed their views if not for the successes of the Civil Rights movement for which liberals fought and sometimes died?
We need both liberals and conservatives to act as counterweights to the polar extremes.
#18,
I don’t think WFB would have disagreed with your last point. In fact, that was his argument starting some 50-odd years ago.
Why did he put on a strange British accent -an attempt to portray himself as upper class? He was born in New York after all.
We’ll never know — historical hypotheticals like that are never really answerable. We can reasonably speculate that Yes most of them would have, just because of the general maturing and enlightenment around such issues that’s been going on all over the world at different rates of change; but we can also assume that such conservatives would have changed their minds more slowly than they did, and some would not have at all, in the absence of a successful Civil Rights Movement.
A strong part of the Conservative objection to the actual way that the Civil Rights Movement progressed in the 1960s was resistance to radical expansion of national government power at the expense of state and local government powers, in effect changing the United States Constitution and the way it operates on every issue — Buckley and the others were generally correct about this in principle, and the issue is still valid in contentious in American politics — probably always will be.
I quite agree, that within the context of free speech we Americans need all the voices of the entire political spectrum, from Communists, Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader all the way across to neo-fascists like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, in order to have a healthy Democracy. Effective political dialog in a representative republic requires that all points of view have a chance to put out the message (and they all have some point, at least one, that they’re correct about).
How could moderate conservatives like myself know where the “center” is, if the extremes are unheard-from?
As peninsular aborigine pointed out in his #20, i feel confident that WFB would be fully in agreement with this. That’s what distinguishes true conservatives like him from the radical-asshole Neo-Cons of the past two decades, whom WFB openly and passionately despised, and so very intelligently criticized.
Demonization and dismissive-insulting of those you disagree with, such as railwaycharm indulges in #14, say nothing about their object of contempt but only mark the speaker himself as devoid of intelligence, knowledge, wit and manners — in other words, either a radical-far-leftist or a Neo-Con neo-fascists.
He went to school/grew up in the UK and France.
#21/#23:
“After the attack six weeks later the AFC disbanded instantly; Buckley, like his two older brothers, served in the military. Still, he remained skeptical of Franklin Roosevelt and of the war’s aims. In his first appearance in a national publication, a letter printed in Time magazine just after V-J day, Buckley, then a 19-year-old Army lieutenant, wrote, ‘Few Quixotes still proclaim that this war is being fought for ideals.’ He had in mind the alliance, corrupt in his view, with the Soviet Union. ‘Christianity and Communism are irreconcilable in the same way that as Americans we believe that totalitarianism and democracy are incompatible,’ he continued. Nonetheless, he added that he, and all Catholics, could ‘heartily ratify the action of our Government in joining hands with a state, no matter what color its banner, if such a union will further our aim of beating Japan.’ Sixty years later, that ideological flexibility is intact, as Buckley has faulted Bush for trying to go it alone in Iraq and chided neoconservatives who ’simply overate the reach of U.S. power and influence.’”
“To some extent, this is merely the judgment of a ‘realist hawk.’ But Buckley’s caution is also rooted in cosmopolitanism. (So was Lindbergh’s: He was, after all, the man who bound the continents together with his historic flight and was greeted as a hero when he landed in Paris.) And, for all his patriotism, Buckley is indifferent to American exceptionalism. Indeed, he is probably the most worldly American conservative since George Santayana and has a similar attachment to Spanish culture. ‘Bill’s not a conservative,’ his onetime ally Karl Hess once said. ‘He’s a Spanish Aristocrat!’ This exaggerates only a little. Buckley’s father, Will, a Texas entrepreneur, made a fortune in the oil fields of Mexico’s ‘gold coast’ and planned to raise the family there until he was expelled following the revolutionary spasms of 1913 -1921. But the allure remained. Buckley and his siblings visited Mexico for months at a time and also lived for periods in Paris and London. Buckley’s first language was Spanish, which he learned from household servants. He did not speak English easily until he was seven or eight. His famous prose style, with its ornate syntax and rococo vocabulary, conveys, at times, a subtle hint of ‘foreignness,’ like that of his friend Vladimir Nabokov.”
http://www.tnr.com/story_print.....078985ba9e
#17:
WJB was an amazingly witty and principled renaissance man, and contemporary conservatives just haven’t stacked up to his efforts in the 50s and 60s to make conservatism into a real alternative for Americans to classical liberalism.
And how would Buckley and others have obtained enlightenment? By meditating under a tree? Sometimes big ideas do come to us just through solitary thinking, but most learning (any change in knowledge, understanding, or skills) involved interaction with other people or things. Maturation, especially of people who are already adults, doesn’t take place spontaneously or in a vaccuum. It happens through interaction. Behind every change is a stimulus.
What was it that made WFB change his mind about “the cultural superiority of the White over the Negro”? Was it seeing white police officers unleash German shepherds on unarmed demonstrators? Was it news footage of black college students being sprayed with fire hoses? Was it the unyielding conviction and oratory power of MLK? Or maybe one day over a round of golf, some more open-minded white buddies persuaded him to change his views.
Actually, it was all of the above. WFB was horrified by the violent tactics of white supremacists and convinced by friend Gary Willis to moderate his views.
You mean Ike sending in federal troops to Little Rock to enforce a Supreme Court ruling? And how about that pesky Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both in clear opposition to the Constitutional ideal that Blacks were 3/5ths of a person?
It’s good that WFB and many other conservatives sincerely changed their views on racial equality, but don’t sugarcoat their racism. They were racists not because they were evil but because they had been raised in a society that regarded people of color as inferior to whites. I suspect that WBF was never really comfortable around African-Americans simply because there were so few in his milieu. WFB was a great man, but he was no saint, which is fine with me. I find saints boring.
So do i, and i’m not in disagreement with you conclusion here, nor your general perspective; but i was not attempting to “sugarcoat their racism” — merely noted that WFB had grown above his as he matured, like many of his peers, and speculated that their doing so was not entirely due to Civil Rights militancy.
I have an abiding faith, perhaps misplaced, that people of high intellegence blessed with broad liberal educations will substantially improve both their personal character and the perspective-frameworks of their ideological/political beliefs/behavior. I suppose i’m something of a Confucianist on that… There may be no hope left for the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld and their gang, but we might still hope that the younger Americans misled by them will someday grow up and learn basic-right-from-wrong.
DID the elder WFB actually “change his mind about the cultural superiority of the White over the Negro”? About any innate / genetic superiority, of course he did; but i was under the impression that he remained to the end a champion of the superiority of the Western-European cultural traditions (including Catholic Christianity) over those of the rest of the world, particularly over the African-style elements of social-cultural belief/behavior practiced by many African-Americans and their imitators of other races. I’d be suprised to learn that WFB had become a fan of hip-hop and its culture, or anything associated…
Sheesh, Sanshinseon, hip-hop wasn’t even a gleam in Grandmaster Flash’s eye when WFB wrote that white supremacy drivel back in the 50s. Maybe he was disturbed after seeing Elvis howl and gyrate like a Negro on Ed Sullivan.
I do know the timing of those things, you mis-read or mis-understood my post. I have not actually read any of WFB’s writings on such matters from the 50s — could you link to what you’re talking about? — i started paying ateention to him in the 1980s, was a subscriber to NR for the early part of that decade — but i’d be surprised if WFB was focusing on music if or when he disparaged “negro culture” or whatever he said.
I did misread your post, Sanshinseon. Below is a link to the 1957 NR defense of Jim Crow:
http://www.j-bradford-delong.n.....01467.html
The reference to Elvis was a sarcastic retort to your example of hip-hop.
As for “the superiority of the Western-European cultural traditions” and “the African-style elements of social-cultural belief/behavior practiced by many African-Americans,” black and white Americans are not members of homogenous cultural groups, a statement you would probably agree with. As part of a teacher training course this summer, we had a discussion about culture. An African-American woman in her 50s talked about the sense of community in the segregated Richmond neighborhood where she grew up. The characteristics of that community were very similar to my own childhood experience growing up in a small midwestern town that was 99% white. African immigrants to the US find extreme cultural diffrences between themselves and native-born blacks. When I think of African-American values, I think of church involvement and strong extended family relationships as demonstrated by the large family reunions that are so popular in African-American communities.
Like I said in a previous comment, I don’t think William F. Buckley socialized much with African-Americans and the few he did come into contact with were probably from the same socioeconomic class as he. (I believe Henry Louis Gates has written on the growing socioeonomic split among Black Americans, and how socioeonomic class, much more than ethnicity, defines and distinguishes Americans.) If WFB judged African-American culture, he judged it from afar.
Bill Cosby to Blacks: Stop Blaming ‘The White Man’
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
July 02, 2004
Chicago (CNSNews.com) - Bill Cosby pleaded with blacks to stop blaming the “white man” for their problems on Thursday, and he reiterated his harsh critique of the current state of African-American culture.
“It is almost analgesic to talk about what the white man is doing against us, and it keeps a person frozen in their seat. It keeps you frozen in your hole that you are sitting in to point up and say, ‘That’s the reason why I am here.’ We need to stop this,” Cosby said in an address before Jesse Jackson’s 33rd Annual Rainbow/PUSH Coalition conference in Chicago.
The 66-year-old Cosby struck an introspective tone. “There is a time, ladies and gentlemen, when we have to turn the mirror around,” he told the crowd of 500 people at the Sheraton hotel.
Cosby bristled at any notion that he should tone down his views so they will not be taken out of context and exploited.
“I couldn’t care less about what white people think about me at this time,” he said to loud applause.
“Let them talk! What are they saying that is different from what their grandfather said? What are they doing or trying to do to us that their grandfathers didn’t try to do to us? But what is different is what we are doing to ourselves,” Cosby said.
The entertainer has been at the center of a racially charged controversy since May when he ridiculed the poor grammar of some blacks. “I can’t even talk the way these people talk, ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ … and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk,” Cosby said in Washington, D.C. on May 17, at an event marking the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling.
On Thursday, Cosby urged blacks to take personal responsibility for their lives, and he hinted that social welfare programs may be having unintended consequences for African-Americans.
“The housing project was set up for you to move in, move up, and move out,” he said.
Being poor had a different meaning to older generations, according to Cosby.
“If you go up to people — when you ask them and you say, ‘Were you poor?’ they would say, ‘No, no, our parents were broke, but we were not poor.’ There was a spirit in that house,” he explained.
His message to black people who say he’s exposing the “dirty laundry” of the black community was blunt.
“Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day. It’s cursing and calling each other ‘nigger’ as they’re walking up and down the street. They think they hip — can’t read, can’t write — 50 percent of them,” he said.
‘An accepted word’
Cosby stressed the importance of education and proper parenting.
“The more you invest in that child, the more you are not going to let some CD tell your child how to curse and how to say the word ‘nigger.’ This is an accepted word. You are so hip with ‘nigger,’ but you can’t even spell it,” an impassioned Cosby lamented
Whatever happened to ‘Black is beautiful?’ Well, it was replaced with ‘nigger please,’” he said to laughter.
Cosby’s message on Thursday was part common sense and part shock value.
“Education, ladies and gentleman, respect the elderly, respect for yourselves, respect for others,” Cosby said.
“These young girls have no business having sex!” he emphasized as the crowd clapped approvingly.
“We got too many young girls who don’t know how to parent, turning themselves into parents. Ladies and gentlemen, our little eight-year-old boys, nine-year-old boys, having erections and only acting out that which they see and hear on some CD. They’re acting that out and they don’t know the damage that they are doing when they rape some little girl nine years old and what they have done to her whole life. It’s time to stop!” an animated Cosby said.
Cosby also took on the pop culture of music, movies and television.
“When you put on a record, and that record is yelling ‘nigger this’ and ‘nigger that’ and cursing all over the thing and you got your little six-year-old and seven-year-old sitting in the back seat of the car — those children hear that. And I am telling you when you put it the CD on and then you get up and dance to it — What are you saying to your children?” he asked.
“Eight-year-old, nine-year-old boys have no business teaming up to rape a nine-year or ten-year-old girl. And if it’s in that TV set, don’t bring it into your home, if it’s on your record player, don’t bring it in your home,” he said.
“We are going to call each other names of ugliness. Comedians coming on TV [saying] ‘I am so ugly, you are ugly, yuck, yuck.’ That’s all minstrel show stuff. I am tired of it,” he continued.
“I am talking about profanity. I am talking about cursing at each other like it’s something hip, like it’s something that’s right. I am talking about people calling each other a name that there are still — if DNA goes to the Mississippi River– you are gong to find African blood in there, dead from being called nigger and then hacking them,” he added.
Sounding like a motivational preacher at times, Cosby even joked “I can just talk for 12 hours on this and not have a collection.”
‘Taken care of at home’
Parents have to take charge of their children as part of a “parent power” plan, according to Cosby.
“You going to tell me that you are going to drop out of school? You are going to tell me that you are going to steal from a store? These things need to be taken care of in the home,” he said to applause.
“Where did we get so comfortable — when and who gave us the word that said, ‘You don’t need to know how to read and write again?’” Cosby asked.
“Before you get to the point where you say, ‘I can’t do nothing with them,’ I am just saying, ‘Do something with them,’” he added.
Today’s generation of African-American youth does not appreciate or understand the sacrifices of its elders, Cosby said.
“Understand, your children have to know where you came from. And they have to know about those people hanging [during the civil rights struggles] and how when they did hang them on a Sunday, the theme song was “Amazing Grace.” That is what they sang when the bodies were hanging. Your children don’t know that, your grandchildren don’t know it,” he said.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it hurts, it hurts, because these children don’t know about their poor mothers and fathers, they don’t know about how there was no done deal [regarding the civil rights struggle],” he explained.
Too many African-Americans are not motivated to better their life, Cosby said.
“The analgesic of cursing and profanity and standing around and just letting the day go by and wake up the next morning to start your next day of moving this day along — you’ll have no picture that is large enough to take you out of where you going,” he said.
‘Going nowhere’
Cosby focused much of his attention on African-American youth.
“They put themselves on the train, you know, the buses, and they don’t even care what color or what age somebody else is, it’s about them and their cursing and grabbing each other and laughing and giggling and they’re going nowhere. Their book bags are very, very thin,” he added.
Cosby also pleaded with black men to improve their ways.
“Young men and old men, you’ve gotta stop beating up your women because you didn’t find a job, because you didn’t want to get an education and now you are [earning] minimum wage. You should have thought more of yourself when you were in high school,” he said.
“When you beat up your woman, when you beat up your wife, those little children are watching, it’s almost irreparable, you can’t get it back what you’ve done to that child,” he added.
Cosby’s own personal life has come under scrutiny in the past for his admitted extra marital affair with a woman named Shawn Byers in the 1970s. Byers’ daughter, Autumn Jackson, has publicly claimed that Cosby is her father.
Jackson was convicted of extortion because of her attempts to blackmail Cosby. Cosby has denied he is Jackson’s father, but he admitted providing financial support for her.
‘Our people agree’
An emotional Jesse Jackson told the crowd on Thursday that many in the media have tried to exploit Cosby’s words and divide the black community, but Jackson said it would not work.
“Bill is saying, ‘Let’s fight the right fight, let’s level the playing field,” Jackson explained. “Drunk people can’t do that. Illiterate people can’t do that,” he added.
Earlier in the week, Jackson said, “Our people agree with Bill…Bill took it to another level. His point was to lift up and not tear down,” he added.
Judge Greg Mathis, the no-nonsense star of the syndicated television program “The Judge Mathis Show”, also spoke at the event and defended Cosby’s words as well.
“We should not allow anyone, any media, to try and turn us against one who is indeed our father,” Mathis said.
See Related Articles:
Jesse Jackson to NASCAR: ‘Negroes Can Drive Cars Fast’ (July 1, 2004)
Jesse Jackson Says GOP Pushing ‘Ideology of the Confederacy’ (June 30, 2004)
Protestors Call Jesse Jackson ‘Worst Nightmare’ for Black Community (June 30, 2004)
Thanks for the link. I can only say that there were very many political and social leaders of the USA, of that generation, who had quite a different view of the political rights of racial minorities in the 1970s compared with that which they held in the 1950s.
I don’t disagree with anything you say in #30…
But when you say “When I think of African-American values, I think of church involvement and strong extended family relationships…” that is certainly true as one side of “African-American values”, but then there is also the other side of them that is celebrated in the hip-hop videos and has led to the tragedy of one in 15 black adults being behind bars as of 2006 (including one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34).
Another good article in memory of WFB:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02.....ckley.html
@#31:
Bill Cosby’s words to that African-American audience were tough love. Your long cutting and pasting them here (ever heard of LINKS?) smacks of judgmentalism. The difference between Bill and you is that Bill said what he did because he cares about the people he was speaking to and about. I don’t get that feeling about your post. The tone is more like STFU, N*****!
@#32:
A group of teachers, including the African-American woman mentioned in comment #30, were chatting during a break. One white teacher asked her, “What happened?” meaning “Why are African-American children no longer respectful of adults?” She explained to us that in Jim Crow segregated black communities, there was a much greater socioeconomic mix of African-American families than what is seen today in many all-black neighborhoods. Married couples with employed fathers provided positive role models and assistance to poorer, broken families. In the 1960s and 70s, middle class Blacks moved into integrated neighborhoods, leaving few role models of working adults with life skills for children to look up to.
Family history also matters. Henry Louis Gates researched the family backgrounds of 20 successful African-Americans in politics, academia, the arts, and sports. He found that 75% had a property-owning ancestor at the turn of the 20th Century, a time when only 15% of blacks owned land. He concluded that these grandparents and great-grandparents passed on wealth and life skills to their children and grandchildren, which got them started on the road to success. Whoopi Goldberg, upon hearing that her grandfather owned a chunk of land, remarked, “So he got his forty acres and a mule, after all.” Some of us white folks are the descendants of homesteading ancestors. My Michigan roots on my father’s side date back to a New York couple who came to Michigan in the early 1800s to farm the open spaces that were free for the taking.
#33. It would not take the link, I tried twice.