Buckley Has Expired

Prominent in recent news has been the end of days for William F. Buckley, the renowned conservative professional intellectual. He had reached age 82.

I remember Buckley mainly because of three characteristics. The first of these and the one most easily recalled to the mind's eye was his manner. It was like that of no one else, and he displayed it in all its aspects on "Firing Line," the discussion show that he hosted on PBS-TV for a long time, several decades back.

"Firing Line" wasn't one of my favorite shows. I couldn't identify with Buckley, his guests, or the aura, but I did think it was an interesting curiosity, and also a challenge. My neuron processes must have a polarity that rejects abstract language and thinking, and that was what Buckley and his guests revelled in, no matter who they were.

He would first, with some sort of reading material on his lap, sound out a theme in his ineffably relaxed and almost soporific tones that made me think we had suddenly been transported to a room at Yale or Princeton, with the walls richly covered with dark, carved, oak panels. And then, like members of a chamber music group, the guests would fall into his manner and play their variations on the theme, and it would all be highly dignified, slowly paced, and civil -- totally unlike, I am told, today's discussion shows, which are often referred to as being "shoutfests."

Buckley's second memorable characteristic was his fondness for language acrobatics, most obviously shown in never shying away from using polysyllabic words. I could at least identify with that. My mother said that I didn't start talking till I was three, but then I immediately started using "big words." For this Buckley was often derided, but I've never seen anything wrong with it. I don't look on it as being showoff. Instead big words are necessary because they can carry nuance that's not available to little words. I admit, though, that in this there's also an element of succumbing to the advice that women who look a certain way often hear. "If you have it, you might as well flaunt it."

In a post dealing with a man who loved words in all their meanings and to lead into the third aspect that marks Buckley in my mind, it's appropriate to note that the name of the current regime that probably had Buckley's approval yet so consistently makes a mess of things from the White House is also the term that a certain group that I saw something of in the 1960's used in place of the bigger word, "marijuana." And before that "bush" was and maybe still is also a highly derogatory term used mainly in baseball to denote an inexcusable action or a lower level of play, as in "the bush leagues."

Buckley was a staunch conservative, a disease that I've been determined to avoid, even if it is expected after a certain age. So I was astonished when one day I read that he had exactly the same idea that I had about bush, spelled with a small "b." In the influential magazine that he edited, "National Review," he said that since the drug war had obviously been lost -- this was in 1996, 12 years ago -- marijuana should immediately be legalized, and that should be followed by studies to determine whether the honus of punishment should be similarly lifted off other drugs as well. This would extinguish the profit motive of selling drugs, with all its attendant evils.

I wonder how Buckley reached that conclusion. I like to think that, as a man of integrity and being the logical sort, he followed the subject straight through to its logical end, even if it offended the reactions of the majority of his team, draped as they were in ignorance. Maybe he knew lots of law-abiding people who smoked bush regardless of its illegality, and had done so for years, without graduating to harder stuff or becoming raging demons. Maybe he had friends or kin who had benefited from the use of marijuana in holding off the ravages of glaucoma and also of pain. And maybe he had also noticed that marijuana use does not result in a fraction of the injuries and deaths that are attributed to two really hard drugs, alcohol and tobacco, that -- with supreme hypocrisy and illogic -- are not only legal but also fashionable.

What do you think? Isn't it likely that in the numerous news reports and eulogies, Buckley's "Firing Line" and his big words are often being mentioned but almost never the bush bit?

Of course this enlightened notion had no more effect than many of Buckley's other dictums, and in the case of the latter that was a good thing. He was, after all, "only" an intellectual and at times a pompous one. But for just those reasons and others, he wasn't particularly toxic, and he was definitely one of a kind, for this side of the Atlantic, and therefore something of a slouchy wonder.