Christopher Buckley and the oddities of truth
By Marjorie Kehe | 10.16.08
So perhaps it would be most accurate to say that truth is at least as strange as fiction.
When the Monitor reviewed Christopher Buckley’s political satire “Boomsday” last year, our reviewer, Cristin Lupsa, began his review by quoting Tom Wolfe.
“Tom Wolfe recently told a group of journalists that politics has become so odd that fiction faces a real challenge,” wrote Lupsa. “How can an author make stuff up when the news is almost always a step ahead?”
The news in Buckley’s own life is indeed a step ahead. Buckley, the son of famed conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr., this week lost his job as a columnist at the National Review, the magazine his father started, over a blog he posted on the Daily Beast endorsing Barack Obama.
(The blog’s title: “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama.)
Buckley offered to resign when, as he put it, “It became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands.” The magazine accepted his resignation.
Today, in a followup post on the Daily Beast, Buckley says his original post has prompted a “tsunami” of response.
Response at the Daily Beast has been running 7-to-1 in favor of his post, says Buckley. But at the National Review Online, according to Buckley, “That’s been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against.”.
“In fact,” he adds, “the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.”
Yet despite the charges of patricide being hurled at Buckley (literally), he points out that, “My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith…. He liked to mix it up.”
It’s hard to know whether all of this sounds more like a chapter from “Boomsday” or a muddled retelling of a Greek tragedy. (Maybe something like… Oedipus??)
At any rate, either way, it seems clear that in the US, once every four autumns, we go through a brief period where we have less need of fiction. We have instead presidential politics to astonish us – and that may be as much as any of us can handle.
Comments
2. name | 10.17.08
Instead of filling only half of your article with quotes from the other, why not just quote the whole thing?
3. JJ | 10.19.08
Those who contend that Willam F. Buckley would be appalled at the actions of his son Christopher apparently hadn’t been following the opinions of the father in his last days very closely. As his last breath drew near William became increasingly disenchanted with what had become of the contemporary consevative movement, to the point that ideologically committed wife Patricia wondered aloud if he was beginning to suffer pangs of senility.
William’s disaffectations weren’t entirely recent. This was his commentary about neoconservatives in 2004: “I think those I know, which is most of them, are bright, informed and idealistic, but that they simply overrate the reach of U.S. power and influence.” He came to favor drug legalization, and in an article published December 3, 2007 he advocated banning tobacco use in America. About George W. Bush he said, “If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we’ve experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign.”
In a February 2006 Buckley wrote in the National Review Online, “One cannot doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” The American Conservative observed that Buckley “saw it [Iraq] as a disaster and thought that the conservative movement he had created had in effect committed intellectual suicide by failing to maintain critical distance from the Bush administration…At the end of his life, Buckley believed the movement he made had destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq.”
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1. t glover | 10.17.08
Kudos to Chris for following in his father’s integrity.