Bill Buckley in Hell (this is good )
hisvorpal.wordpress.com
Since, as we know, Astrology™ is demonically inspired, nothing could be more apropos to analysis of William F. Buckley’s death vis a vis cycles of Pluto, named after the lord of the Underworld. (Or, Hell, where he undoubtedly is at this very moment.)
As regular readers know, the “mission statement” of this blog has always been to cover a piece of the waterfront that no one else has reported on; generally, if it’s some mundane (from the latin, “mundus” or, literally, “world”) event, like the death of Buckley, that everybody and his half-sister from Carolina is going to blog on, I won’t blog on it. Why bother?
But if there are aspects that nobody seems to be talking about, then I will, and I promise you, Gentle Reader, there’s nobody else karazee enough to use the astrological Pluto Transit as a way of tracing the demonic arc of Bill Buckley’s checquered career.
I am not asking you to believe in astrology. I’m just asking you to use it as a metaphor.
We’ll begin in the vague, rich childhood of a spoiled little Katholik Kid named Bill, Junior. The New York Times obit:
William Francis Buckley was born in Manhattan on Nov. 24, 1925, the sixth of the 10 children of Aloise Steiner Buckley and William Frank Buckley. His parents had intended to name him after his father, but the priest who christened him insisted on a saint’s name, so Francis was chosen.When the younger William Buckley was 5, he asked to change his middle name to Frank and his parents agreed. At that point, he became William F. Buckley Jr.
The elder Mr. Buckley made a small fortune in the oil fields of Mexico and Venezuela and educated his children with personal tutors at Great Elm, the family estate in Sharon, Conn. They also attended exclusive Roman Catholic schools in England and France. Young William absorbed his family’s conservatism along with its deep Catholicism. At 14, he followed his brothers to the Millbrook School, a preparatory school 15 miles across the New York state line from Sharon.
In his spare time at Millbrook, young Bill typed schoolmates’ papers for them, charging $1 a paper, with a 25-cent surcharge for correcting the grammar.
Good Yankee capitalist. Now, this was what Pluto was doing — because of its eccentric orbit, Pluto spends from 12 to 33 years in each sign — then. Astronomers demoted Pluto to non-planetary status, but, as I said, we’re talking metaphor. Plutonic energy is metaphorically, the roto-tiller of time, just like Death energy: it breaks apart old forms and leaves a fine mulch for growing the sod of History within the Sign involved.
Astrologer Adrian Ross Duncan writes:
The Pluto in Cancer period, from 1913 (just prior to World War 1) to 1939 (as World War 2 started) brought the upheaval of hierarchies and families, as a great levelling factor transformed society. Men in Europe were slaughtered in their millions in the initial phase of this transit, elevating the role of women and preparing the ground for the beginning of political equality. Similarly the privileged classes lost much of their influence – no more so of course than in Russia , where they were eradicated.
Or, more succinctly, the forms of Cancer (the home) were “rototilled” by Pluto, with a massive destruction of class distinctions and, in some cases, entire classes within the human “family” of civilization. Young too-smart-for-his-own-britches scion of noveau riche Bill Buckley, Sr. naturally rebelled against this loss (the New Deal) of his family’s newly-acquired hoity-toitydom.
When he got to Yale, he decided to be a hell-raiser, tweaking the new “classless” order. The New York Times (ibid.):
He did not neglect politics, showing up uninvited at a faculty meeting to complain about a teacher’s having abridged his right to free speech and to oppose the United States’ entry into World War II. His father wrote him to suggest he “learn to be more moderate in the expression of your views.”
He graduated from Millbrook in 1943, then spent a half a year at the University of Mexico studying Spanish, which had been his first language. He served in the Army from 1944 to 1946 and managed to make second lieutenant after first putting colleagues off with his mannerisms.
The liberal primacy he challenged had begun with the New Deal and so accelerated in the next generation that Lionel Trilling, one of America’s leading intellectuals, wrote in 1950: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
Mr. Buckley declared war on this liberal order, beginning with his blistering assault on Yale, from which he graduated with honors in 1950, as a den of atheistic collectivism…
Mr. Buckley then entered Yale, where he studied political science, economics and history; established himself as a fearsome debater; was elected chairman of the Yale Daily News; and joined Skull and Bones, the university’s most prestigious secret society. As a senior, he was given the honor of delivering the speech for Yale’s Alumni Day celebration, but was replaced after the university’s administration objected to his strong attacks on the university. He responded by writing his critique in the book that brought him to national attention, in part because he gave the publisher, Regnery, $10,000 to advertise it.
Published in 1951, “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom,’ ” charged the powers at Yale with having an atheistic and collectivist bent and called for the firing of faculty members who advocated values out of line with what he saw as Yale’s traditional values. Among the avalanche of negative reviews, the one in The Atlantic Monthly by McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate, was conspicuous. He found the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” But Peter Viereck, writing in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, viewed the book as “a necessary counterbalance.”
Now, I know that’s a long excerpt, but we’ve pretty well chronicled the arc of Wm. F. Buckley, Jr. to the national stage, where he more or less remained from 1955 (his founding of The National Review) to a couple of days ago, when he was found dead at his desk.
The praises and plaudits rolled in, as they have ever since the Greeks wisely warned “Speak no ill of the dead.”
But you know what? The monstrousness that spoiled rich kid Bill Buckley wrought demands speaking. This was a man who engaged in unforgivable behavior, and, in too many ways, was a living exemplar of what a cancer hereditary oligarchy is upon the body politic.
Spoiled rich kid who’s obviously gotten the Calvinist “grub for every nickel” training from the Old Man (an oil man of “There Will Be Blood” vintage) now spends a short time with the CIA (that old-boys’ club of Preppies that has evolved into our Modern KGB, the alphabet spookocracy that threatens our very existence as a free people.)
So, what was Pluto doing?
From 1939 to 1957/8, Pluto was in Leo, bringing the full flowering and fall of some of the most powerful autocrats (Leo rules ruling) ever seen. And, between 1939 and ’57 more crowns fell from more heads than has ever been seen before. The entire rulership of the world was suddenly based on Two Superpowers and their allies, as the Greeks had aligned Athens against Sparta in the Peloponnesian Wars of 2500 years ago.
And, now, little Bill Buckley had come into his own, who had filled a political void with the same political pornography that Ayn Rand was filling, as well, fueled by our fear of the “collectivism” and “socialism” of the Soviet Union and the “Cold War”:
The “Individual” versus the “Collective.”
Now, there has always been an inherent contradiction in this: that someone who is anally Catholic, and, thus, a member of the “Corpus Christi” the body of Christ, or the church as the body of believers, is AGAINST the very idea that civilization is organized in just that manner.
Using the old Ad Hominem fallacy that humans love to fall into, it was argued that since Hitler was a “socialist” — National Socialism = Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, National Socialist German Workers’ Party ( Amer. Heritage Dict. 4th ed.) — and Stalin was a “communist,” therefore we were at antipodes to “socialism” and “communism” when A) neither Hitler nor Stalin had practiced their professed ideologies, but, rather, B) had ruled much as George W. Bush (and Bill Buckley) had, as AUTOCRATS, which is the ultimate “validation” of “individualism” since the final “individual” who’s made it as alpha monkey is, by definition, the dictator of all the pyramid of individual carcasses he stands astride.
I don’t get it, either.
I’ve always thought that it came of a fundamental misapprehension of human consciousness. The idea of a Howard Roarke is, fundamentally insane. Roarke is the misunderstood genius architect of Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead — like the National Review, an extreme reaction against Stalinist “communism” from Rand, a refugee from Soviet Russia. Her father had been a successful pharmacist, whose business and noveau riche lifestyle was confiscated by the Russian Revolution, when Ayn was 12 years old.
Howard Roarke, the supreme individualist, is an architect. But what the hell does an architect do? He designs BUILDINGS for other people to live and work in, to be built by other people, etc . etc. There is virtually no profession that exists that is as dependent on the interlinked “corpus christi” of society, but the “individualist” lunacy of this philosophy is that somehow, Howard Roarke created himself, and, therefore, exists solely for himself.
That actually sounds an awful lot like Hitler and Stalin, when you think about it.
The great horror was the inevitable corrupt practices of the con-game “to each according to his needs, from each according to his means.”
And against this straw man, “conservatism” has fought ever since.
Despite the fact that it is, in fact, the utopian Christian vision. And yet, this rejection of taxes, of military service, of any and all obligation to  Society is most rooted in the Fundamentalist Christian Right, and the Purity of the Uber Right, like the John Birch Society, and into the Neo-Confederate Movement, which is experiencing a renaissance.
Because most of the “lassaiz faire” and “no tax” libertarianism of the Old South now finds expression in the new “Conservatism.” (In quotes, because, in actuality, there is literally nothing that the “conservatives” are “conserving.” The Modern Variety, as practiced by William F. Buckley, Jr. consisted of an attempt to overthrow virtually every instutition of society in service to their “individualist” philosophy, whose most salient feature is “I get to keep all MY money,” and “nobody can restrict my ability to make money; but please restrict that OTHER guy’s, to protect ME.”)
Again, the irony of that kind of socialism and communism is that it ITSELF is a reaction against the few “individuals” sucking up all the resources of the society, and when, rightly, society turns upon this cancer it confiscates the wealth of the privileged, as Ayn Rand experienced, and the Buckley family feared:
The lure of oil money, moreover, created early alliances between Texas and Wall Street: Gulf Oil was created by the Mellon family, Humble Oil and Magnolia Oil served as Rockefeller proxies, and Dresser Industries was closely connected with the merchant bankers Brown Brothers Harriman. Ivy League graduates such as George H. W. Bush swarmed to the Permian Basin field in West Texas after the Second World War, leading the locals to refer to them generically as “the Yalies.” Conversely, the Texas oilman William F. Buckley, Sr., directed his company’s activities in Venezuela and Cuba from New York. He had been a vehement opponent of the restrictions on American capital in the Mexican oil fields and was expelled from that country after he supported the insurrection of the warlord Manuel Pelaez, who ran protection for American and British oil interests in Tampico. Buckley’s son, William F. Buckley, Jr., later put the stamp of New England patrician hauteur on the revivified New Right; his family background, however, suggests the genuine source of its power. [ Dissent Magazine]
Scion of the Eastern wannabe Establishment, networked in the Skull & Bones Society and an early recruit to the CIA (which he purportedly left) Buckley became the voice of the cranky Richie Riches and Frat Boys, and, in the supreme irony of “free market” economics that he propounded, The National Review never once turned a profit, and relied heavily on donations and subsidies from True Believers (including, prominently, Buckley himself, loathe to let his soapbox collapse simply because he couldn’t make it profitable.) NYT Obit:
In 1955, Mr. Buckley started National Review as voice for “the disciples of truth, who defend the organic moral order” with a $100,000 gift from his father and $290,000 from outside donors. The first issue, which came out in November, claimed the publication “stands athwart history yelling Stop.”
It proved it by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying Southern whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them. After some conservatives objected, Mr. Buckley suggested instead that both uneducated whites and blacks should be denied the vote. … Circulation increased from 16,000 in 1957 to 70,000 at the time of Goldwater’s candidacy in 1964, to 115,000 in 1972. It is now 166,000. The magazine has always had to be subsidized by readers’ donations, supplemented by Mr. Buckley’s lecturing fees.
And what was Pluto doing?
Pluto in Virgo 1957-1972 was characterized by the complete upheaval of the concept of “purity,” from the eradication of Veneral Diseases (syphilis — incurable for 500 years –and gonorrhea) to the elimination of all natural materials in hospitals, the advent of widespread, legal contraception, and, finally, as 1972 dawned, the emergence of pornography from the underground and the emergence of homosexuality from the status of hunted, persecuted perverts. The great prophylactic institution of eternal, institutional marriage broke down, as well, as the entire conception of human sexuality emerged from superstitious barbarity to a scientific basis.
Buckley, naturally, was against prophylaxis, contraception and choice in marital partners, if the original marriage wasn’t working out.
It was also the period when Americans decided strongly to put their vaunted notions of “equality” to the purity test, by dispensing with the rationalizations for apartheid that had existed since Blacks were forcibly imported to Jamestown, Virginia three and a half centuries earlier. And then women, and then gays, and all other Americans. Native Americans, for the first time since Wounded Knee, were legally allowed to grow their hair long again.
And, in the law, the Warren Court demanded, for nearly the first time in the corrupt history of the “supreme” Court, that we LIVE UP TO OUR CONSTITUTION. All of which, William F. Buckley stood against.
Buckley, standing athwart history, was squashed flatter than a bug, again and again. But he kept getting up, because his “individuality” and his money were more important than human rights, were too important for him to release his death grip on the illusion of wealth and privilege that he not been born to the manor of, in reality.
Buckley’s father was a greasy oil man with dirty fingernails, and not a Yankee Blue Blood, whose fingernails had ceased showing traces of the dirt and blood which had built their castles generations past.
Painfully aware of this, Buckley thrived on being a contrarian. Even if it meant that he would be proven historically a throwback time and time again. It didn’t matter. He was being paid attention to. It is telling, perhaps, that Allahpundit at Hot Air “praises” Buckley by remembering the flustered and outmatched Buckley slutting Gore Vidal as a homosexual and having his plug pulled by ABC News as a guest commentator to the Political Conventions of 1968. When you consider that Buckley had grown up in a world in which the revelation of homosexuality was often a death warrant, as it was, later for Matt Shepherd, except that no respectable newspaper would print the REASON for the beating and or/murder, you begin to realize just how ugly Buckley’s attempt at “outing” Vidal on national television really was.
How anyone can find that kind of Klannish bigotry praiseworthy is beyond me. How such a despicable hater of blacks, gays, women and anyone else who got between Buckley and his ego/wallet, is beyond me. But anything can be rationalized, I guess.
Electorially, the Goldwater movement was, in large part, fueled by the Young Americans for Freedom, founded at Bill Buckley’s swimming pool in 1961. In 1964, the American electorate repudiated Goldwater’s “conservative, libertarian” stance in one of the greatest landslides in American history, 38% of the national vote. (By 1972, George McGovern, on the other side of the equation would lose by an equally stunning figure.)
It is instructive to remember that, no matter how severely a party nominee gets their ass handed to them, or how big a landslide a major candidate gets, four in ten (or, if you’re being prissy, more than 7 in 20) Americans are going to be AGAINST the winner.
Buckley tapped into this opposition, and, as the New Deal philosophy became more and more unfocused, blurred and indistinct, his minions were waiting for the inevitable flip of the pendulum, and in 1980, he got his wish: Ronald Reagan.
In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan joked that he picked up his first issue of the magazine in a plain brown wrapper and still anxiously awaited his copy every two weeks — “without the wrapper.”
“You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.
“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.” (ibid. NYT)
From 1972 to 1984, Pluto passed through Libra, as the entire institution of marriage was transformed into mulch. A generation of kids grew up with divorced or unmarried parents a matter of course. The law was transformed, as the Religious Right demanded that the Warren Court Rulings be overturned. Warren Burger and then his acolyte, William Rehnquist became Chief Justice, and, slowly but surely, the Supreme Court was shifted from a liberal (in the classical sense) view of the law based on the equality of all persons, to a very stern, elitist view of the law based on the primacy of an elite class over all other classes of society.
The “New Ageyness” of secular thought was supplanted by the rise of an “underground” secretive culture of “Christians” with their own schools, radio stations, magazines, books, and a prohibition against being “infected” by the Straw Man of “Secular Humanism”– a scapegoat term, like Hitler’s “Jewish Intellectual Bolsheviks,” to focus the hate at — invented by Jerry Falwell, whose rise took place during this period.
Society’s equilibrium subtly was shattered by the Plutonian energies, as “anti-abortion” protests adopted the “sit in” strategies of the earier free-speech and anti-Vietnam protesters to blockade abortion clinics across the nation. “Pro Choice” and “Pro Life” polarization of American politics takes place through the Libra passage of Pluto.
Buckley, of course, was on the side of money, authority, and repression, as usual. But now, he was being lionized, as the selfish elements of society held sway, and Reagan’s presidency was characterized by its Stalinist disregard for law or procedure. The USA secretly sold arms, and, later, smuggled cocaine for cash to fund their own private, covert war in Nicaragua, against a regime that the oligarchs pulling Reagan’s strings were against.
Naturally, none of this lawlessness bothered Buckley.
Hilariously, he took his YACHT beyond the 3 mile limit (so as not to break the law), smoked some pot. Thought it was OK, and pronounced, based on his grave regard for the absolute freedom of the individual, that it ought to be legalized.
Those without yachts were about to meet the Drug Police when Pluto went into Scorpio, of course.
Nor was any of it punished. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The next passage of Pluto, through Scorpio, took place between 1984 and 1995, as Pluto achieved its fastest speed, ducking inside of Neptune for a time. This was a period characterized by the outing of secrets. The Iran-Contra Scandal, the War on Drugs, and its attendant hyper-surveillance society and the wholesale suspension of due process and confiscation rights (confiscation of automobiles drugs were found in and auction of same, BEFORE the trial, which was later upheld as perfectly OK, under the Rehnquist Court).  The satellite surveillance and the “Nintendo War” of George Bush the Elder, and, finally, the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives after 40 years by Newt Gingrich and Company.
The entire Soviet Empire, based on secrecy and the control of information, fell, unable to maintain its spookocracy in the face of its TRUE enemy: the cassette tape, the xerox machine, and the videotape. Clueless conservatives everywhere gave Ronald Reagan the credit (even though it happened after Reagan left office, and, arguably, not because of his huge run up of the defense budget)
The secret “term limits” campaigns, funded by the Right Wing Koch Machine, as millionaires proved that they could operate as private legislatures, hiring petition gatherers to put their cranky initiatives on state ballots nationwide.
Buckley continued on, happy as a pig in slop. But the movement was passing him by. As he continued at center stage, his voice had become less and less effective. He had become the Dr. Joyce Brothers of Conservatism, a creation of, by and for the media (Brothers rose to prominence in the 1950s by winning The $64,000 Question television game show in the category of “boxing”), useful whenever a Hollywood Square went unfilled, but not much heeded ideologically. The Falwells and the Neo-Cons battled for supremacy.
And the ultimate “collectivist” fascist machine, the Military-Industrial-Media Complex continued to demand more and more of the “individualist” budget, gorging itself on the national treasury like a tick sucking blood.
Buckley found nothing wrong with this. After all, CORPORATE welfare was good, even if welfare to the poor was unconscionable.
The Bush family romance, especially in the thinly veiled hostility of the son to the father, thus exemplifies a larger transformation of American capitalism and power. At one level, this is the integration of Wall Street and the oil patch. Enron, for example, could trace its history back to John Henry Kirby’s Houston Oil Company in the first Texas oil boom, but the Enron of spectacular recent memory represented the financialization of the energy industry—the development of a market in energy futures. An American economy increasingly addicted to speculative bubbles reached a fever pitch at Enron, with Harvard MBAs working old cons that would have been familiar to Dad Joiner and Doc Lloyd. The oil patch in its heyday had always been a gamble. The narratives of Texas fortunes are often stories of money won and lost. The distinctive aspect of Enron was the synthesis of the old oil patch with the Clintonesque New Economy, united in a concerted assault on one of the pillars of progressive-era reform: the regulated public utility. [ Dissent Magazine]
Buckley turned to writing spy novels and being a celebrity.
And then, the Twentieth Century drew to a close, as William F. Buckley fiddled and Rome burned.
In his last years, as honors like the Presidential Medal of Freedom came his way, Mr. Buckley gradually loosened his grip on his intellectual empire. In 1998, he ended his frenetic schedule of public speeches, about 70 a year over 40 years, he once estimated. In 1999, he stopped “Firing Line,” and in 2004, he relinquished his voting stock in National Review. He wrote his last spy novel (the 11th in his series), sold his sailboat and stopped playing the harpsichord publicly.
But he began a new historical novel and kept up his columns, including one on the “bewitching power” of “The Sopranos” television series. He commanded wide attention by criticizing the Iraq war as a failure.
On April 15, 2007, his wife, the former Patricia Aldyen Austin Taylor, who had carved out a formidable reputation as a socialite and philanthropist but considered her role as a homemaker, mother and wife most important, died. Mr. and Mrs. Buckley called each other “Ducky.” (NYT ibid.)
Pluto’s passage through Sagittarius moved us from 1995 to 2008, when it entered Capricorn last month, where it will remain until 2024 (yes, the transits are getting longer, again).
The passage through Sagittarius was marked by the Plutonic destruction of Truth, as Sagittarian Johnj Kerry was successfully “swiftboated” and Rovian politics of outright lying reigned supreme (2000's “Al Gore says he invented the internet.”) Sagittarius, which also rules law, saw Plutonic devastation as even so ancient a legal verity as habeas corpus — a cornerstone of English Common Law going back to Magna Carta in 1215 — came under attack.
And, as Pluto exited Sagittarius for Capricorn, William F. Buckley, Sagittarius, passed away and went to hell, wherein mythic Pluto rules. He had, by turns, been the cheerleader of racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, greed and noblesse (no oblige).
Pluto’s passage through Capricorn, which rules the skeleton in traditional natal astrology, should send that Plutonian roto-tiller through the physical infrastructure. We already know that the USA’s physical infrastructure is crumbling, through years of selfish neglect and miserly refusal to perform maintenance while sending out “rebates” and “stimulus packages” wherein, we bribe ourselves with our own tax money, which we pay the Federal Bureaucracy and the semi-private Postal Service a nice chunk of vigorish for printing and mailing BACK to us. (And that we pay as taxes on later, since it’s a “prebate” after all).
Look for significant chunks of the USA to collapse and require rebuilding, as Pluto smashes through the Capricornian china like the proberbial bull in a closet. But, perhaps, the truth has a chance to come back into vogue, as the “conservative” philosophy comes back into intelligent disrepute, rather than via the collapsed tenets of the New Deal, which now seem as clunky as crank-start automobiles.
And William F. Buckley, the fellow standing athwart history yelling “STOP!” is dead and gone. And history may well have diverted, but it did not stop. Nor has the fundamentally progressive direction of American politics from the very beginning been stayed in its course by the older, more traditional practice of authoritarian, elitist aristocratic/oligarchic greed been much in fashion, even when, via paid and volunteer hucksters, like Buckley, it successfully sold us the idea that cutting all taxes, jettisoning all aid to the poor and indigent, and jackbooting into any country we so desired were qualities to admire.
Buckley had lived, I think, to see the destruction of his own philosophy by virtue of having witnessed its actual success — as “anarchists” must have realized when a perfectly lassaiz faire economy existed in Chicago in the 1930s. Take it from an old pornographer: there’s nothing that will kill a fantasy quicker than living it out.
Ultimately, there is the final irony: that Buckley could only express his “individuality” with a society in which to be a celebrated figure FOR that alleged individuality. In other words, kiddies, Buckley’s egocentric philosophy owed the very collective itself for its existence. Without media to the masses, the “individualist” would have been nobody at all. Without the authoritarianism of Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Bush, the “freedom” of which Buckley inveighed would not have been possible to “spread,” and without the batting of the eyelashes, the Ann Coulter-esque monstrosities he spouted would never have been listened to. Long before Malkin and Coulter and Steyn, there was Bill Buckley.
Without people to inhabit and build his buildings, of what use is an architect?
Always brave enough to call you a ‘queer’ if you weren’t winning the debate.
And, finally, that was the essence of William F. Buckley’s life: nostalgia for a time and a culture that never existed. A dream of the last robber-baron generations, destroyed by the Great Depression, and proclaimed by an ideological class of wannabes: Wannabe richer, wannabe socially more elite, wannabe a greater political theorist. Wannabe a celebrity.
Or, perhaps, just wanna take our yacht out beyond the three  mile limit and smoke a doobie.
Pluto has claimed William F. Buckley, Jr. and is welcome to him.
But. you might ask in all of this: Given the monstrousness of Buckley’s spew, how did he last for so many years on the American political stage?
Good question. Twofold answer: First, four in ten Americans will ALWAYS agree with a contrarian position, no matter how crazy — otherwise, how come the majority numbers for “Creationism” in surveys of belief?
And second, by all accounts, he was personally charming.
Which just goes to show, you can say the ugliest things imaginable, so long as you say them with a smile.
Courage.
UPDATE – It has been pointed out that Buckley was a brilliant man. That point is conceded, with this caveat: If only he could have used his talents for Good instead of Evil, think how the world might have benefited.
PS: Tomorrow, my Special Superman’s Birthday Feb. 29 Column, which broke a couple daze ago but which I’ve been saving (Oct. 19th) for several months now: KILLER DEATH ROBOTS! |
