Dear Everybody,
Well, as that great American Woody Guthrie would say, “How’s that fer a how do ya do?”
Isn’t Buckley a marvel? It’s a shame we can’t bottle that stuff. OK, so his book is a mess, but there’s none of that Ron Radosh/David Horowitz/Norman Podhoretz ‘The Liberal Conspiracy Is Out To Get Me’ nonsense. Buckley (like Bill Kristol) knows better than to blame the phantom menace “liberalmedia” for his troubles. Instead, he simply denies the reality of the book’s reception–going so far as to quote a Terry Teachout review in a magazine where everyone who works there does so at Buckley’s own good graces, backed up by a review published by the young fogies (and would-be Buckleys) at the Spectator. The only legit critic he has found is Lance Morrow, who, if I am not mistaken, even had a few kind words to say about Podhoretz’s last memoir/kvetch, and so he doesn’t really count either. Finally, he sneaks in at the end with his own modest assessment. I can just see the paperback advertisement a year from now: “Buckley “accomplished what [he] set out to accomplish … a very, very interesting story” told in his “own engaging, characteristic way.” (Michael Kinsley’sSlateMagazine.)
Buckley shares with the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky a quality that many of their respective ideological comrades do not: the quality of having a passionate political perspective, far divorced from that of the mainstream, while at the same time remaining affable and charming about it. Neither one would likely ruin a dinner party by clamoring on about this or that conspiracy against honest–insert here, “progressive” or “God-fearing”–Americans.
I am sorry to say this is not the case with many others on the right. (I could mention a lot of unpleasant people on the left, too, but I am not here to shit where I eat.) One big problem with neocons is that so many of them started out as Commies. They have constructed their careers as one long guilt trip which the rest of us in public life are forced to watch–kind of like O.J.’s Bronco. Ron Radosh and his comrade David Horowitz were both fervent Communists as young pikers, singing the praises of the Stalinist Soviet Union, and so it is easy to see why they insist on denouncing it even when it isn’t there anymore. Since no one else worries about the Red Menace much, they are reduced to fulminating about The Nation and its refusal to see the light of day on poor old Alger Hiss. It can be entertaining from a distance, but I sure wouldn’t want to have dinner with it.
(By the way, I can easily answer every one of Radosh’s silly claims about my own work, including my wholly accurate use of Arthur Schlesinger’s TNR review. For instance, does anyone think right-wing foundations do give authors large sums of money to undermine the conservative case? And quoting a previous [and accurate] column of mine does absolutely nothing to exonerate Tanenhaus’ intentional perversion of a later one. I will be happy to offer a detailed reply if asked to do so by any Slate e-mail writer who really cares, hard as I find that to imagine. But given the space constraints that some of us take seriously, I had a choice: Buckley or Radosh. And whom, dear reader, would you chose?)
Buckley says I am too young to understand these matters, and I think he has a point. I remember hearing Alfred Kazin–with whom Buckley has absolutely nothing in common–complain that the greatest flaw in my generation was its lack of historical imagination. I cannot imagine what attracted people like Radosh and Horowitz to Stalinism any more than I can imagine–even after reading his book–what attracted Buckley to McCarthyism. I only know that both attractions–still alive in various transmuted fashions–poison political discourse. Being of a generation where no one I ever respected ever had good word to say about either history’s greatest mass murderer (going by numbers alone) or America’s most dangerous demagogue, I am at a loss to understand where all the tsoris comes from.
I must say, I had a much easier time making sense of a new book by another Buckley, Christopher. His new novel, Little Green Men, is not only funny–per usual–but it provides a wicked satire of the mores and pretensions of the contemporary punditocracy. (A word upon whose usage, I am pleased to note, Slate has finally surrendered.) In Buckley the Younger’s new novel, a George Will stand-in is kidnapped by government agents and, led to believe that he has been satisfied … ahem … anally, by space aliens. I must say I find that premise irresistible–and even scarier than a takeover of the United States by the editors of The Nation. For too long, the long-festering Columnist danger to this nation has gone unnoticed. Could it be that Fifth Column Columnists, loyal not to our god-fearing country, but to their alien agendas, have conspired to keep the American people ignorant of this peril on purpose? Is it just a coincidence that Mars is the so-called “Red Planet?” I have in my newly revised and reissued book*, a list of 206 known Columnists and Columnist sympthatizers, some of them working directly in government …
From Buckley fils, I not only learn, I laugh. Say what you will about McCarthy, Stalin, and Hiss, not one of them could tell a joke to save his life.
Finally, let me urge Slate readers to buy and to read my book–any one of them–since I need the money and Buckley does not.
Everybody’s pal,
Eric Alterman
*Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (Cornell University Press, 1999)