We Won't Have Bill Buckley To Kick Around Anymore
What can one say about a man so devoted to small government and private enterprise that his talk show, with fully 1504 episodes, appeared on the Public Broadcasting Service. (I mean besides pointing out to Americans that their tax dollars helped subsidize William F. Buckley's collection of fine liquor.)
It is certainly fair to point out that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, National Review filled the niche of a serious magazine that catered to intellectuals who somehow felt that it was right to continue Jim Crow laws in the South and deprive African-Americans of the right to vote.
And, as Dennis Perrin has so ably described, Buckley's performances look ludicrous at best whenever he had actual left-wing guests on his program who were not intimidated by being on television.
But my favorite quip of Buckley's was his infamous gibe that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than the 2,000 members of the Harvard University faculty. Besides the fact that this is an insult to self-proclaimed manly man Harvey Mansfield, one wonders what Buckley's intellectual descendants at National Review would think about the first 2,000 names in the 2007 Boston telephone directory, given the magazine's obsession (390 hits) with "Islamofascism" in recent years.
By my count, the first 2,000 names include Aakjar, Ababe, Ababu, Abasali, Abbar, Abbas (4 names), Abbasi (5 names), Abbay, Abbaz, and so on through Abdi (14 names), Abdiaziz, Abdille, Abdin, Abdinur, Abdiraham, Abdirehman (3 names), until we get to Aburubieh, Abusabib, Abusief, Abuwi, and Abu-Zahra. And that is in the first 1,000. The second 1,000 features dozens of Ahmads and Ahmeds. All these new names (not to mention all the Acevedos) makes the Adamses look like a real minority.
(Worse let for the Buckleyites, many of these folks with telephones might be—horrors of horrors—immigrants!).
A just God would be making Buckley eat every word of his racist editorials right now, and for a very long time to come.
Labels: Boston telephone directory, Good riddance, National Review, William F. Buckley
