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: Ninomania

By David M. Wagner

William F. Buckley, Jr., 1925-2008. Oh, to be sure, one can complain (one did, in fact) that in his later years he seemed spent more time schmoozing the New York glitterati than manning the conservative barricades. No matter. For three or four generations, he was proof that conservatives could not rightfully be denied a place among those glitterati, if they happened to desire one; that Lionel Trilling (see the linked WSJ editorial) was just dead wrong and behind the times.

Bill's amusing and stirring book Up from Liberalism (his best polemical work, imo), and the twinkling eye with which he would skewer guests on Firing Line, inspired me, and, as I compare notes with colleagues of my own age and younger, I suspect hundreds of thousands more.

The WSJ collects more Buckley rhetorical gems here. My favorite:

[W]e offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D.s in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town. ("Statement," National Review, 1955)

Full post as published by Ninomania on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).