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Melinda,
I'm so glad you posted on Christopher Buckley leaving the National Review. I was saddened to read his column in the Daily Beast saying he'd left. Also, I had just been conjuring up a post in response to your post and Ellen's from earlier today, in our ongoing discussion about intellectualism and what it is and why it's become a smear, and I think the Buckley story fits in. I especially appreciated Ellen for both calling me out on making intellectual a dirty word and for bringing me into the ranks of great thinkers (even though I spend far more time curled up with Sports Illustrated than with The New Yorker).
It was unwise and unfair of me to group intellectuals as a whole in with the condescending elites that bug me so much, and I admit I was probably thinking of someone like the gentleman Melinda worked for, who constantly reminded others of his genius. Haughtiness drives me batty, and so does what I perceive as intolerance. Which brings me back to Christopher Buckley. It's annoying when smarty-pants liberals say, "Why I don't know anyone who would vote for that imbecile George Bush/John McCain," and it's just as annoying when it comes from the opposite direction, when an angry mob takes on an individual who arrived at a different conclusion from them after much thought. (I've seen Rich Lowry's response, and I find it hard to believe that a great magazine like the National Review doesn't have room for both Christopher Buckley and Mark Steyn, who recently earned a huge victory for free speech in Canada.)
What made me especially sad was Buckley's assertion that the Republican Party was more "yurt" than big tent. The rest of you might laugh at me for thinking so, but I have always felt that GOP was a bigger tent than most outsiders gave it credit for. I know more pro-choice Republicans than I do pro-life Democrats. I know Republicans who are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and some who are not religious at all. Some of us can't get too worked up about global warming, but that doesn't stop us from recycling and setting the thermostat at 68 in the winter. I've written a lot on this blog about how dismayed I am with our national discourse, about how divisive and bitter some have become. It hurts even more when those within my own party resorts to petty tactics and cruel words against one another.
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It's unbelievable that Christopher Buckley has been asked to clean out his cubby at the magazine his father founded—"briskly'' allowed to resign for the sin of endorsing Obama. Where the National Review thinks it'll find another writer who can throw around Jane Austen's favorite verb quite the way he does, I aver I don't know. (See? Not even close.) But apparently, even they can't have any damn intellectuals hanging around thinking outside the talking points. Isn't the point of any debate—political or otherwise—that you don't know where an open mind will take you? Hardly worth the trouble if you're required to wind up the same place every single time.
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