WFB, RIP

It still reads pretty damn fresh, doesn't it? There was a man.

He's been called the most consequential journalist in American history. That's about right. More than any other man of letters, of his time or any other, Buckley changed the world.

This speech by one of Bill's protege's gets it about right.

It's difficult to explain the impact of Bill Buckley on my life. I had a very modest upbringing. I was a bright kid in a blue-collar neighborhood. I didn't fit in. I adopted a sort of snide, condescending liberalism, born out of the '60's anti-war movement as my defense mechanism, I guess. I thought the hipppies were cool. I worshipped the Beatles. Conservatism was the last possible thing on my mind.

High school was not my scene. Not a jock because of some physical issues (hypermobile knee joints), not quite a nerd either, I settled into a cigarette and dope-smoking, guitar-playing quasi-intellectual. You know, the kind that thinks Rolling Stone is serious journalism. Hunter Thompson seemed to me to be the zenith of all that is great. Lots of drugs, gonzo journalism, elemental, stream of consciousness, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Fear and Loathing. I will say this. Fear and Loating in Las Vegas is still about the funniest thing I ever read.

And then I read Buckley. Of course, the words were bigger, but the ideas! They were huge. They are timeless.

Thank you, Bill Buckley, for teaching me your vision of America. Thanks for giving everyone your great life.

I'll close with a few of his oh-so-well-chosen words, which could easily have been written last week:

"I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater," said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does." We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much so that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything. (How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.

Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy Wechsler's bath and before he has scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will have written ten heroic cantos about our age of terror, Harper's will have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated for a Freedom Award. Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is serious question whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.

Rest in peace, Bill. Well done!