Killed Bill

February 28th, 2008

Views: 745

Posted by ChrisG at 10:44 am

Another sad loss.

With brilliant mind and Brobdingnagian vocabulary, his spine stiff and jaw locked, William F. Buckley Jr. stood athwart history to reinvigorate America’s right.

And a double-edged epitaph. Buckley stood ‘athwart’, always ‘athwart’. No common man can stand ‘athwart’, just as only colossusses can ‘bestride’ things. Although ‘athwart’ is also the stance that would be taken by a jock pissing on a debagged nerd, of course. In addition, Buckley apparently suffered from an unexplained form of partial paralysis (conservatism, presumably).

But overall, it’s a piece that reminds you why, instead of being about remembering, political obituaries are more often forms of forgetting, tools for smoothing out within allowable public discourse the carnage that the venerated corpse inflicted during his or her lifetime. Sure, maybe the old bastard said some unfortunate things, but, boy, could he salsa!

The form of presentation you adopt, can, if it becomes part of your media ‘brand’, ultimately absolve you of anything. All you have to do is deposit a few memorable traits in the media’s memory, and the judgement of history is guaranteed. Buckley gets forgiven his racism and segregationism on account of his book-larning and his ‘civility’. Thatcher was forgiven her violence against the working class because of her ‘conviction’.

And the great thing about this understanding of the virtues of great men and women is that it helps people deal with the carnage they’re experiencing in the here and now, to the point where, as Mark Steel said of Boris Johnson, so long as it’s done with a mop-top and buffoonish grin, you won’t even mind if you’re being corralled into a football stadium to be shot en masse.

(Via Lenin)