I Say Sincere

What possessed me?  I was busy.  I had plenty of to-dos pending on my living list of actions.  I had a mix playing on Youtube and it I think I first saw his face there as a one of a number of videos I might possibly be interested in clicking on.  But I was only listening to music.  Another call finished and another email sent.  Neither of these was on the list.  What’s next on the list?  That one will be quick.  But that one will take time.  Beneath the windowpane of the email he was staring out again. 

I clicked on an old clip of Firing Line.  Buckley was hosting Groucho Marx. Somehow I wanted to see that, immediately.  Groucho was grouchy.  Buckley wasn’t funny.  Neither seemed to like each other very much.  What I wanted to was to see William F Buckley when he was, in his prime as it were, handsome, pompous, adversarial.  I’ve seen dozens of these clips before.  There are the classic ones with Chomsky or Vidal or Hitchens where he is truly challenged or when he interviews Muhammad Ali or Allen Ginsburg and he is not quite sure what to do.  He is most certainly out-classed facing off against James Baldwin at the debate they had in 1965 at Cambridge University. (Who wouldn’t have been?)  But usually, it is Buckley who keeps the heat on his guests or his “adversaries” as he clarifies to William Kuntsler. 

This segue of pointless distraction had properly consumed me by now.  I “needed” to see just one last clip.  There is one that I recall with a British professor who had, as I recall Celtic name of sorts.  I remember it fondly because this Marxist academic was so squarely and unassailably abstract in his theoretical discourse that Buckley has a hard time keeping up.  I searched in a number of different ways.  I even looked for a complete listing of his guests on the show.  But after forty pages of Youtube links and nothing more beyond a vague remembrance of “Minogue” or some such name, I gave up trying to look for it.

I didn’t stop viewing for a bit though.  I took in a few more guests.  I think I was horrified to find that Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and even George Wallace all came across sounding a bit more articulate, and dare I say, sincere, than the charlatan showman we have as our current president elect.  Buckley treats each of those guests (and here they are guests and no longer adversaries) with far more patience than he does John Kenneth Galbraith or Eldridge Cleaver.  And he is, in a way that only Christopher Hitchens really reminds me, simply compelling to listen to speak, regardless of whether or not you agree with what he’s saying.

 

There is a clip where he derides Gore Vidal as “feline” taking a swipe at his well known and for that time, scandalous homosexuality.  I wandered around, chopping up my cucumber, peeling back the tuna can, imagining how fun and how risky it would have been to have a rejoinder ready:  “Yes William.  And I suppose that casts you as hircine?”   “And by that you mean?”  “Look it up William.  It means “goat-like.”   Daydreams are safe, as such.