I associate William F Buckley with pornography and spiders. Coming from a left liberal family this is probably putting a kind face on what the older generations of my family thought of him. But I am too young to have experienced the animosity they held towards Buckley when he was at his height, so instead I knew him as the punchline to two great Woody Allen jokes.
The first is in Bananas where Allen’s character– Fielding Mellish– is at a newstand buying pornography, finds The National Review in the pornography section and buys it to cover up the other obscene material he purchased;
The second- not on the internet- is in Annie Hall when Alvy Singer comes over to Annie Hall’s apartment to kill a spider. When he gets there he notices a copy of the National Review and reacts with horror. Annie tells him she is trying out new things. Alvy replies: ” Then why don’t you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider.”
Both jokes are hilarious, but they treat Buckley better then he deserved. As the following exchanges with Vidal and Chomsky demonstrate: he was a toff, racist, jingoist, classist, proto-fascist with ideas far more obscene then the worst pornography and a magazine that wasn’t even worth wiping your ass with. Its a shame there are so many more where he came from.
The videos are also a depressing reminder that there used to be Leftists on TV worth a damn, who could obliterate the gibberish the right wing calls an argument. Yet, somehow Buckley’s follows are hegemonic and DLC hacks represent the Left. That is the real tragedy.
March 1, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Hi Chris,
Yes, quite right, William F Buckley is more of an association than a person. In a past life I had a brother in law who used to force me to watch firing line and read his articles, until I was able to escape. Don was an unemployed Catholic right-wing Manhattanite culture vulture, who had moved to Canada to escape New York’s ‘troubles’, and was sort of like a failed version of the Tom Buchanan character in the Great Gatsby. I will always associate William F Buckley with this sordid phase of my life, and I will always associate my escape from it with a mental picture of Buckley’s face stuck to a big red dartboard.