William F. Buckley, RIP

[Big Magilla]

Criddic, read the "important message" thread in the next topic down.

[criddic3]

No implication criddic, I'm saying it outright. The platform and ideology of the Republican Party has been racist for the past few decades.

I don't think so. If I thought that the platform was racist, I wouldn't be a Republican. I'd be an independent. Racism is not something I would condone or uphold. Many Republican presidents have done good things for minorities, from Eisenhower through George W. Bush. I don't see any of them as racists.

[Nik]

No implication criddic, I'm saying it outright. The platform and ideology of the Republican Party has been racist for the past few decades.

[criddic3]

Do I detect the implication that Republicans are racists?

[Nik]

Exactly Damien. Thank you.

Wow, reason # 2 to hate Yale. I'm so glad I turned them down for Grad school (and I can get away with shit-talking them now that Aakash is away. LOL)

[Damien]

We all revere Robert Byrd for his current outspokenness and he used to be a member of the KKK, a chapter of his life which he has also denounced.

It's easy enough to judge people of the past by the same standards we use to judge people today with. But one day, we're going to be 80 years old, and we'll look back on some of what we did or said or thought with embarrassment, and back then it all felt right simply because it was "the times".

It's one thing for a Southerner to have been a segregationalist because institutionalized racism was so ingrained (doesn't justify it, though, as there were brave independent Southerners who fought against racism). It was especially understandable for uneducated poverty-stricken Southerners, as the Powers That Be used racism as a means to pit the economically-deprived against each other so they wouldn't join together to fight those entrenched Powers.

But Buckley was a prep-school eduacted Yale graduate born into wealth. In 1957, there was no excuse for such a person to espouse such racist rants.



Edited By Damien on 1204586851

[Steph2]

But one day, we're going to be 80 years old, and we'll look back on some of what we did or said or thought with embarrassment, and back then it all felt right simply because it was "the times".

I sincerely hope for your sake that you will be one of them.

[FilmFan720]

It's easy enough to judge people of the past by the same standards we use to judge people today with. But one day, we're going to be 80 years old, and we'll look back on some of what we did or said or thought with embarrassment, and back then it all felt right simply because it was "the times".

Yeah Damien. You will be sitting in a nursing home some day praising the work of Pixar and Roberto Begnini, and feeling like a complete idiot for what you said way back in the day.

[Sonic Youth]

Thanks for posting Cockburn, Akash. Wow, "Why The South Must Win" is truly shocking -- I had no idea he had written crap like that. I had always pegged him as more of a laissez-faire economics conservative, not a racist but the different strands of conservatism all fit in together.

Yeah, but Damien, that was in 1957. He later recanted his position.

Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. ``I think that the impact of that bill should have been welcomed by us,'' he said.

No, it doesn't excuse him at all. Yeah, he was a racist. He did what he did, and he did it while in a position of at least some influence. But, you know, haven't we heard of moral relativism? A lot of people alive in the '50s are still with us , and a alot of them (when MUCH younger) were also civil rights opponents. I'd assume a good number of them have also repudiated their former position as well. We all revere Robert Byrd for his current outspokenness and he used to be a member of the KKK, a chapter of his life which he has also denounced.

It's easy enough to judge people of the past by the same standards we use to judge people today with. But one day, we're going to be 80 years old, and we'll look back on some of what we did or said or thought with embarrassment, and back then it all felt right simply because it was "the times".



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[Damien]

Well Nik, that was 1969/70. Back then kids in high school had no interest in, and paid no attention to, cartoons (nor did adults -- what a wonderful place in time!). We were all about seeing Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy and The Wild Bunch and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

It was a boarding school, and my housemaster (a pedophile priest lol!) ripped up my poster of The Killing of Sister George.



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[Nik]

Damien, my parents once met Buckley in London, at a dinner with a friend from Oxford, and they said he was one of the most contemptible, arrogant creatures they'd ever met. I grew up hearing how awful his politics were, so I was puzzled too when so many liberals seemed to be separating him from Coutler and the other nutjobs.

(btw, I totally would've loved to see you as a high school freshman, telling all the other kids why cartoons were crap )



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[Damien]

Thanks for posting Cockburn, Akash. Wow, "Why The South Must Win" is truly shocking -- I had no idea he had written crap like that. I had always pegged him as more of a laissez-faire economics conservative, not a racist but the different strands of conservatism all fit in together.

I remember when I was a kid my Mom decrying the Buckleys because of an anecdote in which they were sailing on the Hudson on their yacht, and a boat filled with kids from a summer program on a field trip came near them. Mrs. (Pat) Buckley said to her son, "Wave to the poor children, Christopher. It's their river, too."

Actually, Christopher went to the same high school as I. He was a senior when I was a freshman and he was one of the very few seniors who was actually nice to us little kids. And Senator James Buckley's son was in my class and we became very close friends.



Edited By Damien on 1204531914

[Akash]

Alexander Cockburn has a less rosy memory of Buckley. Thank goodness. I thought all the liberals had lost their minds.

COUNTERPUNCH
Weekend Edition
March 1 / 2, 2008
The Race Card; Liberals Sniffle at Buckley's Passing

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

When I first came to America in 1972 I was astonished to find that the conservative cold warrior William Buckley had a television channel paid for out of public funds and reserved for his exclusive use. This was PBS, which alternated Buckley's show with "Wall St Week". In an effort at balance PBS offered the left's point of view in Sesame Street. Buckley's syndicated column was also featured in Dolly Schiff's New York Post. I found him mostly unwatchable and unreadable, being 97 per cent predictable and disgusting in all his views, with a style intolerably loaded with affectation -- fake English urbanity and pompous usage. He was the sort of writer who could never use the word "punishment" without sticking "condign" in front of it, the better to flaunt his stylistic credentials.

His staple was straight cold-war paeans to the unfettered glories of capital. It was all aimed at college-age conservatives. I doubt the rubes could endure him. Who would, when the alterative was Jimmy Swaggart in full spate?

It's astonishing to read the funeral paeans from liberals, flush with homages to Beckley's "urbane civility". Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, issues a warm eulogy in Newsweek. John Nicholas echoes these kindly sentiments in The Nation itself. The supposedly left Portside site promptly reprints Nichols. What are these people thinking? All this is evidence of the decay of liberalism. Do they have any memory? Buckley wore urbanity like cheap make-up, badly applied. At the slightest challenge it disappeared and we were left with the hiss and venom of a true reptile. Coulter and the other yahoos descend in part from him. Here's Buckley confronting the AIDS crisis with an advisory of Nazi lineage: "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."

Here are some lines from Buckley's editorial on "Why The South Must Win" in the National Review in 1957:

"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 predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own. National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could.Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom. The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. 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."

Spoken like a true Nazi!

So, farewell Mr Buckley. How wrong you were. How vile the tyrants and the wars you cheered for.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03012008.html



Edited By Akash on 1204511052

[criddic3]

Admittedly, I knew little about Mr. Buckley before his death. But having seen many tributes and interview clips in the last few days, I think I should do more research. It is interesting how he almost single-handedly brought about the "conservative movement."

Being a conservative myself, I should have been more aware of him.

[Sonic Youth]

Yet on the platform, he was all... reptilian languor.

Some image. The flicking tongue must have given them that impression.


I liked him. He's NOTHING like the conservatives of today. Pro-legalization, anti-death penalty, and when he got nasty in his discourse, at least he engaged in intelligent and erudite put-downs. And he knew well enough to take his yacht eleven miles from shore so he could safely smoke a doobie.

Oscar connection - His son is Christopher Buckley, who wrote the novel "Thank You for Smoking". It was adapted into a movie directed by Ivan Reitman (the novel is MUCH better), who went on to make the Oscar-winning "Juno".

How's Gore Vidal's health?



Edited By Sonic Youth on 1204154044