28 February 2008

Sibilant Lizard



William F. Buckley is dead at 82. I had just hung up the conference call with Seoul when I saw the scrolling words across the bottom of my web browser.

It took me aback. I had not thought of him lately, though it was his intellect that formed the basis of the Republican Revolution, the one that is about to be overthrown by the golden Liberal from Illinois.

It is not a great leap, I think, to argue that it is Buckley brought us to this, since his ideas were distilled in crisis, focused through the prism of idealism, and ultimately squandered in ineptitude.

The best time to talk to Korea was cocktail hour here on the eastern coast of North America. Mr. Buckley liked his wine, and I was hankering for that or something stronger, based on the complicated business in Seoul. It struck me that the controversy there was getting me roped into another battle across the Date Line. It is always a complicated thing. President Johnson never got it right when he tried to direct the Vietnam War from the Oval Office.

The problems in lining up a decent strategy start with the clock. In this case, there were participants here, and some in Colorado; the Texas voice with the booming accent had decamped over the course of the week and joined a cell in Hawaii; some of the management had arrived to set up a command post in Seoul.

Harry Truman did not have this problem with Korea. He let General McArthur run things until the situation got out of hand, and fired him. President Johnson was so impressed with new technology that he tried to manage the conflict in Southeast Asia from here, imposing day on night.

Asia is long pole in the tent, of course, whether it is war or business. As I write, it is nine at night in Seoul, coming up on tomorrow shortly, and two in the morning in Honolulu. I have a little stack of issues, and an interview with some government folks to get through before we can talk to Asia again tonight. Then we are in the weekend for them, and a wasted Friday here.

I hate wasted days.

So did Mr. Buckley. The angry young man from Yale had paced me over the course of my life, mellowing a bit as he went, but still the ideological center of the American Right. He wrote “God and Man at Yale” when I was an infant, and founded the National Review when I was getting ready for Kindergarten.

His rhetorical flourishes, combined a penchant for free-market economics and fierce anti-communism was a tonic that inspired the Young Americans for Freedom, who with the fringe of the John Birch Society, begat Barry Goldwater.

The pivot of American politics, as I understand it, was the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On the distant side of that year is the Solid South, rigidly Democrat and implacably hostile to the Federal Government that had crushed the Confederacy, and devoted to the notion of States Rights as a defense against Washington.

The murder of a sitting President in Texas, and the elevation of a Texan to the levers of power was part of critical mass that built over the killings of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi. IN March of 1965, the Alabama State Patrol attacked peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

President Johnson convinced the Democratic leadership in Congress to over-rule the powerful Southern legislators to enact an effective Federal voting rights bill.

Hearings began late that Spring and continued through the summer. I remember Senator Goldwater stepping forward, saying the Bill was admirable in intent, but clearly unconstitutional. Buckley agreed, a civilized man who feared that one evil would not be remedied, but only replaced by another.

We now recall Barry with a certain fondness, since over the course of his life he demonstrated that his commitment was truly to the liberty of the individual, but in the moment he became the standard-bearer for all that was ugly in that decade.

The American people trounced him at the polls in the last election in which President Johnson chose to participate. That defeat begat the Southern Strategy of the Republicans, and the bizarre migration of the Party of Lincoln to become the Southern part of reaction, a hijacking that must have borne considerable irony to the erudite Mr. Buckley.

I never read his magazine, and like Goldwater, he was true to his principles all his life. I did see his television shows occasionally, marveling at his repudiation of the conventional wisdom that guided us through the end of the sixties, and the end of Vietnam and Richard Nixon, and eventually into the Age of Reagan, now regarded as the patron saint of conservatism.

I will never forget his animated tongue, parodied as that that of a sibilant lizard, slithering as he skewered his intellectual rivals.

Americans tend to be resistant to change, until things get so pent up and so wrong that things must be changed. We tend to lurch into these things. There has been a remarkable amount of dialogue about the 1960s in this election, since John McCain and Hillary Clinton represent the archetypes of that generation.

I think the election will show that most people are about fed up with that.

It is so over. If there is a lack of rigor or intellectual discussion of where we are going, at least we have hope.

We are going to have to deal with the coming lurch to the left without the sibilant commentary of Mr. Buckley.

I'll miss him. He understood a good joke.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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