Thursday, November 19, 2009

Pat Buckley Gun Club at Hillsdale . . .

. . . for young ladies? There is talk of it. I will keep you posted.

BIll and Pat were responsible for my first 20-gauge (RTRP, pp. 238–9). I think she would be pleased by Hillsdale's memorial, and also say, "They'd better be effing good shots." 

11/19 08:55 AM Share

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

What a Friend We Have in Cheeses

As I bid farewell to Hillsdale, I bid farewell to the cuisine of southern Michigan. Right Time, Right Place describes the fare at Paone's back in the day (pp. 36–7), which was neither simple nor light, but this was something else. There are cheese-free zones: Hillsdale College itself; the Chicago Water Grill in Jonesville; El Cerrito and the Coffee Cup Diner in Hillsdale. If you come, seek them out.

I am grateful for the hospitality of everyone at Hillsdale, and for the attention and eagerness of my students: Casey Cheney, Michal Elseth, Cory Ewers, Mark Hensch, Joshua Rice, Maria Schmitt, Catherine Simmerer, Betsy Woodruff, and Marieke van der Waart. À la prochaine.

11/18 11:15 PM Share

Stimulus That Works

I saw one of my Hillsdale journalism students last night and asked her how the assignment I had given on Monday was going. She said she was leaving it until the deadline (Wednesday afternoon).

There spoke the true journalist: We don't stir until the gun is at our heads.

For an account of a three-legged race involving Colin Powell; John O'Sullivan, Linda Bridges, and me; and a 1:00 PM deadline from NR's printing plant, see p. 197 of Right Time, Right Place.

11/18 01:59 PM Share

Qs at Hillsdale

Sarah Palin; Who is the new WFB? WWWFB Do about NY-23? I gave my talk on Right Time, Right Place at Hillsdale, the exoteric face of the journalistic lessons I am imparting to my students. Many of the questions had come up before. When asked about Sarah, I answered with Cole Porter: "She's got that thing . . ." The question is, how will she do the work of self-education that Ronald Reagan, and George Washington — who, in their different ways, also had that thing — did? We shall see.

Who is the new WFB? Nobody, I said, repeating myself. Autres temps, autres Merlins. New messes require new wizards to show the way to heroic action.

What would WFB think of the race in NY-23? One more time, with feeling: This was the kind of race the Conservative Party of New York State was meant for. I see that Doug Hoffman has unconceded. Good luck to him, now or next year.

The most interesting question was, Was Right Time, Right Place meant to express a sense of alienation from my mentor, my friend, my (lost) leader? I almost cut off the gentleman who asked it. Surprises, disappointments — these are not set-ups for alienation, but incidents of adulthood.". . . the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."

The place, and the people.

11/18 12:03 AM Share

Monday, November 16, 2009

My Apologies

. . . for suggesting that President Obama is thirteen. I was lured to the insult by the jingle of symmetry. Our president's real problem is that he shows the strengths, and the compulsions, an earnest belle-lettrist (say, 27).

Some effective presidents have been younger than thirteen: Cecil Spring-Rice famously said that Teddy Roosevelt was "about six."

I said a similar thing about WFB: "His delight was a boy's, even when the taste was a connoisseur's and the judgment a man's" (Right Time, Right Place, p. 2).

11/16 09:22 AM Share

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Media Bias?

Tracy Simmons, director of the journalism program at Hillsdale, and longtime friend and NR-nik, showed me an old Firing Line, one of the series that is being reissued by the Hoover Institution. This pitted WFB vs. David Susskind, debating the headline of this entry: Is there a bias to the media?

This was a show from 1966, Firing Line's first year, when RKO, the sponsoring network, called it "The Fight of the Week," as Neal Freeman said in an earlier comment on this blog. There was no Brandenburg fanfare yet (and it was sorely missed). Nor did Bill use a clipboard—his notes were laid on a Jetson-ish sidetable (futurism usually refines the fashions of the moment).

David Susskind was a popular liberal talk-show host of the day. I was most struck by his rug; it looked like a swatch from my late mother's Persian lamb coat, about as inconspicuous as the Monty Python hair-piece sketch. My poor sex—since we can't arrest male pattern baldness, can't we accept it with dignity?

The debate between Bill and Susskind proceeded on two levels. On the central point—picked, the liner notes inform us, by Susskind—there wasn't much movement, although Susskind did admit that media generally reflected the movement of the country, which he said was "progressive." Bill called that an important concession, which it was.

At another level, Bill sought to extort respect from his opponent, by a combination of respect and disrespect. He said some gracious things about Susskind in his intro, and his dry, droll tone eschewed mere vituperation. But he also zinged Susskind repeatedly (if there was a contest to be Mr. Eleanor Roosevelt, he said, Susskind would win it). The implicit message was, Take conservatives seriously, or I will keep doing this.

The point was not to convince Susskind in that show, or ever, but to convince the TV audience, and the nation at large. In large measure, Bill succeeded, and that job doesn't have to be done again. The task before us is to demonstrate our relevance by showing that we better understand America's problems, and the range of possible meliorations.

And that we're still funny.

11/15 01:10 PM Share

Friday, November 13, 2009

I was talking with a bright Hillsdale student . . .

. . . who was thirteen years old on 9/11 (see pp. 219–224 of RTRP for how that day went down at National Review). This is the ordinary march of time.

More unusual, and more interesting to us now, is whether our current president is thirteen years old.

11/13 11:53 AM Share

Thursday, November 12, 2009

"We had lunch at the Guardsman, a bar . . .

. . . around the corner from National Review that gave you free drinks if you had fought at Imjin River."

So I described my first meeting with Terry Teachout, it must be close to 30 years ago, in Right Time, Right Place (p. 92). "Terry was a little reserved, a little anxious, bursting with attention, eager to show how much he knew. None of us ever needed persuading of that; the proof was always on the page."

Now this promising young man has published Pops, a biography of Louis Armstrong that is being hailed everywhere. Read it, and enjoy.

11/12 09:34 AM Share

Saturday, November 07, 2009

What Worked for Me Might Work for You

From November 9 to November 18 I will be teaching journalism and writing at Hillsdale College. Specifically, I will be a Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism. Since Right Time, Right Place is, among other things, a how-to — the journalist's life, as told by one who has had one — my courses will, in part, be RTRP 2.0, the Liveware version.

Since Eugene C. Pulliam was Dan Quayle's uncle, I may have to explain how I wanted to defend Quayle from my colleagues in 1992, and why I failed (pp. 175–6).

11/07 05:16 PM Share

Friday, November 06, 2009

Baltic Night at the Yale Club

Last night I met a friend of Ojars Kalnins, the Latvian-American whose strange fate is recounted in RTRP. For many years National Review and (oddly) the State Department were the only people who, apart from the Baltic-American community, kept alive the notion that Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were legitimate countries, wrongly annexed by the Soviet Union. After the fall of Soviet Communism, they regained their independence, though Russia labors to sap it.

My new Latvian acquaintance told me that he likes to ask Swedes, What was the second-largest city in the Swedish empire in the 17th century? Primed by his question, they cleverly answer: Riga. Then he tells them the correct answer: Stockholm. Riga was larger back in the day.

Embattled countries get to play one-up.

11/06 02:17 PM Share

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Better Than a Poke in the Eye with a Sharp Stick

D. R. Tucker quoted the introduction to Right Time, Right Place—"In the age of Obama, conservatism is in retreat . . . but it will be back, and its ups and downs are of interest to conservatives, their enemies, and ordinary Americans"—then asked if Tuesday meant we were back. I answered, "It was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick." Much, much more needs to be done, but winning is different from losing, and often better.

He also told me after the interview was over that RTRP reminded him of Almost Famous, the coming-of-age movie about a teenage rock journalist. There is no Penny Lane, but instead there is my wife, Jeanne Safer, whom Mark Riebling called "the third character."

11/04 10:44 PM Share

No God, but Two Men at Yale

Tomorrow night I will discuss RTRP at the Yale Club (50 Vanderbilt Avenue, NYC). Drinks and snacks at 6 PM, me and WFB at 6:30. Members only.

Thank God it's not at Skull and Bones, I couldn't come.

11/04 04:46 PM Share

A Chance to Celebrate VA and NJ

Tonight I am on "The Notes" with D. R. Tucker on Blog Talk Radio, 8:30–9:00 PM EST.

What was the swallow for Reagan's spring? Probably Jack Kemp, who first came to national prominence with the Kemp-Roth bill late in the Carter years (see pp. 104-5, and 151-2 of Right Time, Right Place).

11/04 12:43 AM Share

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Rush: "It will inspire and motivate you."

A plug from Rush:

The name of the book, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement. Richard Brookhiser. As a powerful, influential member of the media, he sent me an advance copy. It's been out awhile. It is written from somebody close up and a true disciple believer of conservatism and William F. Buckley Jr. I'll tell you, if you liked the Reagan sound bites from his Goldwater speech yesterday, treat yourself to Brookhiser's book because it's a trip back to the foundations of conservatism today and it will inspire you and motivate you.

The occasion for this was a discussion of NY-23; Rush had noticed my post a few days back in the Corner.

Query: Did Rush mean to write, "As a powerful, influential member of the media, he sent me an advance copy," or  "As a powerful influential member of the media, I was sent by him an advance copy"? Both, of course, are true.

11/01 07:02 PM Share

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Moyers, Me and WFB

...on Bill Moyers' Journal (PBS), Friday. 9 PM in NYC.

10/29 11:45 PM Share

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

A (Pregnant?) Pause

Eve Tushnet and I were talking about WFB and she asked me which public intellectuals I admired today. (I dislike the phrase, but it is current, so let it pass.) I came up with three names — George W. S. Trow, for Within the Context of No Context; Camille Paglia, for the opening chapters of Sexual Personae; and V. S. Naipaul, for what, everyone knows — but thought, even as I did so, that there is something melancholy about that list. Trow is dead; Paglia and Naipaul are with us, but repeating or at best building on work of earlier decades. One could think of other names — Paul Berman on terrorism; the post-9/11 Christopher Hitchens when he is not tootling in the Atheist Salvation Army Band — but it does suggest that we are waiting for the next thing. 

Two caveats: Good things remain good even though they are old; and even old things are new to those who discover them for the first time. When I discovered National Review the major columnists — James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — had been pulling their oars in the magazine for 15 years, some of them for longer than that elsewhere (see chapters 1 and 2 of RTRP).  That didn't stop me from learning a lot from them.

Still, if you see a strange, interesting man talking to himself . . .

10/27 11:00 PM Share

Sunday, October 25, 2009

The Yale Political Union turned 75 . . .

. . . and one of the pix in its gala dinner program showed WFB and George McGovern debating before the Union in 1980. I describe that debate on p. 99 of Right Time, Right Place.

Also on view at the dinner Saturday night, in the Presidents' Room in Woolsey Hall, were posters and pictures announcing or depicting other Union guests: Jerry Falwell, Allen Ginsberg. There was also an early shot of WFB speaking. His body language in formal situations was like a matador's or a dancer's — shoulders back, chest up, spine slightly bent. It was nervous in both the 18th- and 21st-century senses of the word: strong and vigorous, but also high-strung. Speaking was always work for him, exciting but intense.

After the dinner, I attended the Bacchanalian Orgy of the Party of Right, where I told members of the classes of 2009 to 2012 what WFB had done for us — pleasant work. The Chancellor's cup helped too.

10/25 07:37 PM Share

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Bill Moyers' Journal

I discussed Right Time, Right Place and WFB with Bill Moyers Thursday, to air October 30.

10/24 12:04 AM Share

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Laudator Temporis Acti

Victor Davis Hanson and John Derbyshire have written variations on an old winger theme, Professor Hanson on his blog, John in his brand-new book, We Are Doomed. I have read the blog, not the book (I look forward to the book party Monday), but John's title seems clear enough.

The Latin phrase — "a praiser of things past" — is from the Ars Poetica of Horace, and it is not meant to be flattering. The praiser is depicted as a querulous crank. But the mood is an ancient and universal one, which we all feel at moments.

It can be expressive and entertaining. I have never liked it as an attitude towards life, though, chiefly because of its dishonesty. Professor Hanson has manifested this dishonesty in an unusually direct way, which is enitrely to his credit: He laments, on his blog, the decadence of modern movies, TV, fiction, and sports, and says he hardly consumes any of them anymore. But he consulted with the makers of 300, the movie about Thermopylae, which sold a zillion tickets. Now he can righteously say that 300 was a little indie film, not a Hollywood schlockbuster, so his point survives, and it does, but only relatively. I host documentaries for PBS, and I will bet him a copy of Thucydides that his little indie film had a bigger budget than any of mine. So he plunged into the culture and made an impact — as, on a different level, do I.

But, leaving aside this exception, why is the laudator temporis acti insincere? What should he do if things were really as bad as he says they are?

He could kill himself. Some cultures honor this choice — ancient Rome, samurai Japan. He could also kill himself slowly, with drugs and booze and venereal disease, and other cultures — Romanticism — honor that choice. But if he is not so dramatic, then he should just stay home. Why rail? No one will listen, and if they do, nothing can be done.

The laudator temporis acti honors the past moment and disdains the moments to come, but says nothing about the present moment, which he is determined to enjoy (in his case, by writing, or praising).  He does well, but he argues badly. So to his arguments, however sharp or clever, I say, feh.

I was looking at Up From Liberalism the other day, one of my favorite books of Bill's,
and it ends with Whittaker Chambers, Bill's favorite author, who could be a very gloomy writer. But he also wrote, "To live is to maneuver. . . . And, of course, that results in a dance along a precipice . . ." "We cliff-dancers," added Bill, "resolved not to withdraw into a petulant solitude, or let ourselves fall over the cliff into liberalism, must do what maneuvering we can . . ."

I did not understand that when I first read it at age 13 or 14. I am beginning to now.

10/22 10:52 AM Share

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

The War on Rush

Sometimes it seems like I can understand the headlines by reading Up From Liberalism (1959). This was the first of Bill's books that I read (see pp. 11–13 of Right Time, Right Place). For the war on Rush, I turned to the foreword by John Dos Passos.

The "liberal" mentality which Mr. Buckley puts over a barrel in this book is, I am beginning to suspect, the ideological camouflage of the will to power of [a] new ruling class. I can't find any other explanation of these fits of hysteria, these fixations which time will prove to have been irrational. . . . Only some such phenomenon as the solidarity and esprit de corps of a class recently risen to power can account for the lynching spirit aroused against those who have sought to dislodge any fraternity member, whether bureaucrat or college professor, columnist or commentator, from an entrenched position of power. This disparity between the provocation and the reaction is, as the emotions of the moment cool, what stands out more and more as the characteristic trait of the "liberal."

Me: The class is not recently arisen to power — 1959 was 50 years ago — but the shaky old are perhaps as insecure as the newly arisen. In Rush's case, the fit was designed, not to defend a comrade, but to strike an alien aspirant to mainstream prominence.

Otherwise, Dos Passos could have written this at 10:00 this morning.

10/20 10:55 PM Share