http://www.wikio.com/search=William Buckley Wikio - William Buckley http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=69344425 Buried in his profile of Barack Obama’s background, David Maraniss discusses one of his mother’s favorite classes at Mercer Island High School near Seattle in the late 1950s: Their curiosity was encouraged by the teachers at Mercer Island High, especially Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert, who taught advanced humanities courses open to the top 25 students. [...] Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:54:22 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=69344425 2008-08-28T22:54:22Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=69327316 A s the Democratic National Convention prepares to nominate Barack Obama, on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, it's worth nothing that another memorable exchange occurred on this date. Forty years ago, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley debated issues arising from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where anti-war protesters battled police near the convention hall. During the third of their four debates, the politics became personal. Vidal and Buckley clashed over the protests. When moderator Howard K. Smith observed that the raising of the Vietcong flag in Grant Park was similar in effect to raising the Nazi flag during World War II, Gore objected. The U.S. had not declared war in Vietnam, many people object to the war, and besides, the protesters had a constitutional right to dissent. Buckley objected, again attacking the dissenters as Nazis. "As far as I'm concerned," Vidal told him, "the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself." "Now listen, you queer," Buckley said, "stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in you goddamn face and you'll stay plastered." Smith said, "Gentlemen, let's not call names," and after a moment the civility resumed. The only thing Vidal regretted about the encounter was his choice of words. He intended to call Buckley "fascist-minded," not "Nazi." But that's not the end of the story. A year later, Buckley asked Esquire if he could write about the encounter. Esquire's editor, Arnold Gingrich, agreed, and asked Vidal if he would contribute. Vidal responded with an extensive demolition of Buckley's politics. In "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley Jr.," Vidal demolished Buckley's politics and personality: On Buckley's debating style: "From past experience, I knew that as a debater Buckley would have done no research, that what facts he had at his command would be jumbled by the strangest syntax since General Eisenhower faded from the scene, that he would lie (‘McCarthy never won a majority in any state he ever ran in . . .') with an exuberance which was almost but not quite contagious; and that within three minutes of our first debate, if the going got tough for him on political grounds, he would mention my ‘pornographic' novel Myra Breckinridge and imply its author was a ‘degenerate.'" On giving Buckley exposure on the national stage: "Then, on a January night in 1962, on The Jack Paar Show, there was a discussion of the Right Wing. I mentioned Buckley in a half sentence, something to do with his dismissal of Pope John's encyclical Mater et Magistra as ‘a venture in triviality.' Buckley was not mentioned again. Then, unfortunately, this was the opportunity he had been waiting for, according to Buckley. ‘Paar was evidently pressured to invite me to reply.' Needless to say, Paar was not seriously ‘pressured' by anyone except Buckley who rang him up and asked for ‘equal time.' Buckley had now managed to get himself on national television. It was a heady moment. The fact that Paar cut him up badly made no difference. Buckley had finally hit the big time as a TV entertainer, and that was all that mattered. It is a source of some pain to me that, unwittingly, I helped Buckley lose his richly deserved anonymity. " On Buckley's taste in books: "As literary critic, Buckley is — how to put it? — lightly equipped. But that does not deter him. He will take on any subject with insolent pluck, confident that his readers are bound to be even more ignorant than he. He is probably right." Worse, to support the charge that Buckley was anti-Semetic, Vidal dredged up the vandalism of an Episcopal church in Sharon, Conn., — where the Buckleys lived — in 1944. Police, according to Vidal, found evidence at the Buckley's house and took into custody three of the Buckley children (whether young William was one of the three was not mentioned). They were found guilty and fined. The supposed reason behind the vandalism was that the church rector's wife had sold a house in Sharon to a Jewish family, where a "gentleman's agreement" was in existence to keep them out. Buckley's father bitterly opposed the sale, and Vidal believes that Buckley had adopted his father's prejudices. In the end, Buckley is not of course a "pro crypto Nazi" in the sense that he is a secret member of the Nazi party (and I respond to Buckley's charming apology to me with mine to him if anyone thought I was trying to link him to Hitler's foreign and domestic ventures). But in a larger sense his views are very much those of the founders of the Third Reich who regarded blacks as inferiors, undeclared war as legitimate foreign policy, and the Jews as sympathetic to international communism. Buckley sued Vidal and the magazine for libel, and settled out of court, with no public resolution of who was at fault. But elsewhere, it was clear that the queer beat down the crypto-Nazi at his own game. Also from the Reader's Almanac: 'Elizabeth is leaving me for Ted Turner (2007) Pottermania reaches its peak (2007) Norman Mailer's song (1981) Chance saves Jerzy Kosinski (1969) Desiderata rises from the grave (1965) B orn: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, playwright, author, philosopher, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1749; Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, novelist, poet, short-story writer, Dublin, 1814; Gustaf Hellstrum, author, journalist, critic, Kristianstad, Sweden, 1882; Liam O'Flaherty, novelist, short-story writer, Inishmore, Aran Islands, 1896; John Betjeman, poet, travel writer, Highgate, London, 1906; Roger Tory Peterson, ornithologist, artist, Jamestown, N.Y., 1908; Robertson Davies, novelist, playwright, essayist, Thamesville, Ontario, Canada, 1913; Janet Frame, novelist, memoirist, Dunedin, New Zealand, 1924; Mark Helprin, novelist, short-story writer, children's author, New York City, 1947; Rita Dove, poet, Akron, Ohio, 1952. Died: Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, memoirist, theologian, Hippo Regius, 430; Hugo Grotius, scholar, jurist, Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 1645; Leigh Hunt, poet, essayist, critic, London, 1859; William Lyon MacKenzie, journalist, insurgent, Toronto, 1861; Frederick Law Olmsted, architect, author, Brookline, Mass., 1903; Bruce Catton, historian, Frankfort, Mich., 1978; Robert Shaw, actor, novelist, Western Ireland, 1978; Max Shulman, humorist, playwright, Los Angeles, 1988; Joseph Alsop, journalist, author, Washington, D.C., 1989; William Edgar Stafford, poet, Lake Oswego, Ore., 1993. Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:22:58 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=69327316 2008-08-28T20:22:58Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=69247098 Rude on-screen behavior didn't begin with Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter. For the 1968 Democratic Convention, ABC hired two pundits from opposing sides. Gore Vidal was a novelist and essayist known for his international perspective, liberal politics, and open embrace... Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:59:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=69247098 2008-08-28T07:59:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68885246 I mentioned William Buckley the other day, escaped convict, friend o’ aboriginals and frequenter of Indented Head (and speaking of odd Australian place names, I’ve since discovered some others: Middle Intercourse Island, Chinaman’s Knob and, drum-roll please, Tittybong). One aspect of his memoir that gets people’s porkie-detector twitching is his account of going on a bunyip hunt. Reader, the bunyip does not exist. It is a mythical lake monster with flippers and tusks, much beloved of cryptozoologist types, of which there are many down under. It has been suggested that, rather than an outright hoax, the bunyip could be a folk memory among aboriginals of extinct Australian species. (The same benefit of the doubt might be extended to the multiple ‘crypto’ sightings of the thylacine or Tassie tiger, officially extinct since 1936, but whose alleged lingering presence in the bush offers the nostalgic a symbolic mandate for the ‘otherness’ of Tasmania.) (One problem with sightings of the thylacine, by the way, not to mention the bunyip, is their frustrating tendency never to be accompanied by any scat, which is to say scat of the non-Cleo Laine variety. I mention this since a thread on the Poets on Fire discussion board the other day about odd book titles turned up a handy book about animal dung called What Shat That? ) Anyway, I was skimming through the poems of Weldon Kees in search of a poem about birds, for an anthological whim of mine, and found, not a bird but a bunyip poem. The bunyip was ‘feathered and gray’, WK says, and possessed an ‘emu’s head’ covered in fur. ‘From its back //a plume of water sprouts’, to general consternation. And more: It crosses oceans into inland waters, Crying sometimes, after dark, that it is not Extinct, imaginary, or a myth – Its feathers ruffled, and its voice Not like a thousand drums at all, But muffled, dwindling, hard to hear these nights Like far-off foghorns that the wind throws back. {Ends} I think we have the effects on the young Kees of the Nebraskan bush to thank for this one. And speaking of the thylacine, here it is, the very last one. Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:48:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68885246 2008-08-25T12:48:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68964909 Ya gotta scratch your head at the editorial decisions of mainstream U.S. media outlets: for the first time ever Israel’s cursed siege of Gaza has been breached by a band of brave peace activists and all the Times can muster is a hundred words or so on page 12. And this is the only story it’s written on the subject. It’s the equivalent of an editor’s yawn followed by: “is that all ya got'” I’ve been more and more disappointed by Ethan Bronner’s reporting as the new NYT Israel correspondent. He couldn’t even be bothered to report this story himself since he judged it so insignificant. You’ll also recall that Bronner reserved to himself the right to write Mahmoud Darwish’s obituary. Bronner knows a smattering of Arabic, yet held forth on the poet’s poetics as if he were a literary critic. Choosing an American Jew to write this story would’ve been as if William F. Buckley wrote the obituary of Malcolm X. I don’t wish to say that the obituary was bad (though there was one insulting statement I’ve written about here). It wasn’t. But it was attenuated by the fact that Bronner was an outsider to Palestinian culture and literature, and the story called for someone who was, if not an insider, then at least more of one than Bronner. A GoogleNews search shows 998 articles on the Free Gaza Movement sailing of which only the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and Time were U.S.-based. There seems to be an unspoken editorial agreement among U.S. media that this story is trivial. I’m glad to say that the rest of world sees things differently. Which means that we aren’t being well-served by our insular media, which decides on our behalf that citizen peacemaking is reserved for the far back pages. Mon, 25 Aug 2008 08:30:23 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68964909 2008-08-25T08:30:23Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68674750 Rebels All A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America By Kevin Mattson Rutgers University Press; 171 pages; $21.95 If the father of the modern conservative movement, the late William F. Buckley, had a love child, it might be Ann Coulter.... Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:00:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68674750 books@sfchronicle.com (Sanford D. Horwitt) 2008-08-22T07:00:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68301064 From Mark Royden Winchell’s William F. Buckley Jr. — this passage comes just after a discussion of Buckley’s support for the hiring of more black teachers: Perhaps Buckley’s most extreme please for racial preference came in a January 13, 1970 article in Look in which he argued for the election of a Negro president “in 1980 [...] Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:29:31 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68301064 2008-08-20T00:29:31Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68272937 Title courtesy of William Buckley. Just what exactly do employees around the world think about their organizations, its management, products, markets and their odds of employment survival in these uncertain times? ... Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:00:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68272937 2008-08-19T07:00:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68140445 You’ll notice two different banners on this new site design. The front page shows, obviously, the Capitol building. If you click on a specific article and bring it up on its own page, there is a different one… for the uninitiated, the man on the left is William F. Buckley Jr (the founder of National [...] Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:41:45 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68140445 2008-08-18T17:41:45Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68062616 It took liberals 30 years to take conservatism seriously. Now we're obsessed with it. Mon, 18 Aug 2008 04:41:38 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=68062616 2008-08-18T04:41:38Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=67962478 I want to be Ramesh Ponnuru–my generation’s William F. Buckley Jr. Happy b-day, bro. Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:17:50 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=67962478 2008-08-16T17:17:50Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=67699057 In my recent post, Referee in a catfight, commenter Joe Albero smugly brags that Salisbury News has “always” been in the top 10 since becoming involved with the Blognetnews website. Unfortunately, Joe’s a little bit incorrect in that rash assertion because I have tracked the numbers since the Influence Ranking’s inception in June 2007. And the numbers [...] Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:05:02 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=67699057 2008-08-14T05:05:02Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=67452106 We all have favorite music and voices that give us hope and keep us going –- whether Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Bob Dylan, Kiri Te Kanawa, Sarah Brightman, Tina Arena, Annie Lennox, José Carreras, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Michael Bolton, Bryan Adams, or Eric Clapton with a sultry guitar. It depends on the moment, but we’ve all been blessed with lovely music and immortals right up to contemporary composers like Andrew Lloyd Webber who built bonfires as big as Bach, Handel, Verdi, Puccini, and Donizetti centuries ago. My parents gave me a nice Zenith FM radio for my... Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:26:10 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=67452106 2008-08-12T06:26:10Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=67113819 In what is perhaps a brilliant meta move, today's David Brooks column on how aggregation is the new taste is actually composed entirely (and without citation) from ten years of embittered blog posts,... Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:24:01 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=67113819 2008-08-08T14:24:01Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66903868 Related PostsRevolt On The Hill: Republicans Refusing To Leave House Chamber, Members In Shorts And SandalsNewsBustedWilliam F. Buckley Jr. Dead At 82‘Which One?’ Romney Plays Defense as Huckabee Mocks Position ShiftsVideo: Beck Talks To Andrew Breitbart About Conservative Blacklisting In Hollywood Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:15:19 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66903868 2008-08-06T22:15:19Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66886080 Oh look. Someone has invented the official Pink Floyd cruise. For three days and three nights you can enjoy the sweet sounds of "Think Floyd USA," the country's "number one" Pink Floyd cover band,... Wed, 06 Aug 2008 19:22:49 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66886080 2008-08-06T19:22:49Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66860842 First of all, I would like to thank Dan for inviting me to join the Concurring Opinions community this month. In a recent conversation I was reminded of this article about post-cold war conservative defections which appeared in Lingua Franca... Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:59:55 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66860842 2008-08-06T15:59:55Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66773788 Megan McArdle at the Atlantic has a post up on the all- but- vanished "Mid- Atlantic accent" of the old Eastern WASP upper class . This interests me because I remember it well, but I have the sense that it is virtually extinct. (Think George Plympton; William Buckley's was a variant but very idiosyncratic. Betsy Huntington had it in spades and didn't know it; shortly before she got sick she heard a tape recording of herself and was caught somewhere between being amused and appalled: "My God, I sound like a lady from Philadelphia!" (Whatever THAT means!) I think it died between the generation that are sixtyish now (boomers) and the next cohort up. A couple of Megan's commentors had good things to say too: "Take a moment to think about the sound of Hepburn, Roosevelt, Plimpton, and WFB. This is what's commonly known as Mid-Atlantic, and was the preferred mode of pronunciation prior to WWII. At most schools this was how language was taught, and disseminated through media, thus aped by most of the public who wished to assimilate into polite society. It was a curious amalgam of American and English accents on words. After the war, however after many working class men found their way into the ascendant middle class via the GI bill, and spawned the infamous baby boom, the old received dialect of Queens English became stodgy and pretentious, dare we say, "elitist" - and a new Queens County English, if you will, was de rigeur. It is here that we find the shift from William Powell to Humphrey Bogart, from Fred Astaire to Frank Sinatra." Another in part: "...your native dialect is determined largely by who your peer group was as a child, and has very little to do with how your parents speak. And while exposure to other varieties and dialects can change how you speak to some extent (I spent several years overseas in an Anglophone country, and came back to strangers in my home town asking what country I was from), your speech will probably still be characterized mostly by your native dialect (I did not sound like a native to other people in the country I was living in while overseas)." This last especially interests me: Bostonian, all private school, half my life in the rural west. I know no more than Betsy what I sound like, but I know my siblings think my accent odd. Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:43:00 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66773788 2008-08-05T21:43:00Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66777912 LOS ANGELES, CA, AUGUST 4, 2008 — Robert D. Novak announced today that he is retiring from writing his column, Inside Report, distributed by Creators Syndicate, due to the dire prognosis resulting from his recent diagnosis of a brain tumor. Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:08:45 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66777912 2008-08-05T11:08:45Z http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66663893 He was a major figure in the defense of American freedom. Tue, 05 Aug 2008 04:13:32 GMT http://www.wikio.com/search/William+Buckley?rinfoid=66663893 editor@spectator.org (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.) 2008-08-05T04:13:32Z