Notebook: William Buckley and the Price of Kicks
Howe, Irving
I have never met William Buckley, and the only place I'd care to would be on a public platform, in debate. But for some time I've been hearing about his attractive qualities: he is...
...He did feel obliged, however, to propose that people on relief be sent to "rehabilitation" camps outside the city: "there are many arguments," said Gentleman Bill, "for locating them and their children elsewhere" (emphasis added) —which might also dispose of all that stuff about integrating the schools...
...But for some time I've been hearing about his attractive qualities: he is charming, witty, literate, a cultivated man who happens to hold distasteful political ideas...
...Perhaps one reason is that we have no tradition in the U.S...
...So he has been described by certain intellectuals who should have known better but out of their boredom with the fuzziness of American politics and their desire for sharp confrontations of mind, allowed themselves to be taken in by Buckley's style...
...of right-wing intellectuals...
...He learned how convenient it is to exploit the fantasies of lower-middle-class home-owners afraid that a Negro might move in next door...
...Think of the archetypal American reactionary and you summon an image of a stumbling primitive who wants the U.S...
...For the Buckley who emerged from this election was, in Alike Harrington's kindly words, "an urbane front man for the most primitive and vicious emotions in the land...
...It's interesting to speculate as to why this elegant jackanapes took in certain people...
...If tomorrow he were to initiate serious steps toward peace in Vietnam, I would be ready to forgive his bad taste in exposing his incision...
...This approach to politics seems to me quite unserious, a sign of decadence...
...Surely this did not complete Buckley's list of deportees...
...In the last two decades American intellectuals have tended increasingly to substitute judgments of taste for judgments of belief...
...Drug addicts should be shipped out of the city...
...The recent New York City elections should put an end to this nonsense...
...He could become a kind of fearful, snapping pet, whose neatly-structured sentences gave weary liberals and worn radicals a tremor of Schadenfreude—with the tacit assumption that it didn't really matter what he or anyone said, since things would go along on their usual course...
...they have responded to candidates more and more in terms of personal style, rather than of political content...
...to quit the UN, drop the bomb, bust the unions, clean up the reds, abolish the income tax...
...Surely he could not bear the hordes of homosexuals assaulting our national virility: a "largish," a very "largish" island for them...
...I have never met William Buckley, and the only place I'd care to would be on a public platform, in debate...
...The New York election should have proved how false this notion is...
...Surely in a purified New York, where Rosemary Gunning could walk the streets without threat of leer or whistle, the "epicene slobs" protesting the Vietnam war (as Buckley, in all his bubbling charm, called them) would also have to be shipped away...
...Buckley spoke the inside language of hatred: "I would go to Harlem to a place where garbage is regularly thrown out of the window and call a rally and ask the people to stop...
...It doesn't matter as long as nobody sees them...
...Darien, Connecticut...
...How about calling a rally before the windows of landlords who regularly gouge these Harlem tenants and asking them to stop...
...But that someone wanting a good many of these same things could also write a paragraph of lucid prose and make a clever wisecrack was not really within the bounds of our experience...
...And from this approach Buckley profited...
...Say something profound, Bill," cried one of Buckley's admirers at the pro-Vietnam war parade in New York, as if to plead: Justify our brawls in the eyes of Ernest van den Haag...
...This Buckley learned how easily a demagogue can inflame racist sentiments in his followers without having himself to use racist language...
...And all the reds and pinks and pacifists fouling the streets: anywhere, "as long as nobody sees them...
...r.s.—Let me reinforce my point: The ground for criticizing President Johnson is not that he is corn-pone but that his foreign policy is rotten...
...There is another, still more important reason for Buckley succes d'estime among some intellectuals...
...No...
...It didn't, apparently, strike him as quite so urgent...
...It should have proved that the price of kicks can come too high...
...He learned how stirring it can be to excite the McCarthyite hooligans while himself maintaining the disdainful posture of the wealthy snob— for which the hooligans came to adore him, feeling that their social meanness had found sanction in his polysyllabic "class...
...Had we reflected a little on European history, where cultivated intellectuals have always been ready to defend the politics of caste and greed, the appearance of the National Review would have seemed a commonplace event...
...Where to...
...Outside the city, perhaps one of the largish islands...
Vol. 13 • January 1966 • No. 1
