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CounterPunch
February
17, 2003
Return to the Stone Age?
The Last Days
of Bill Buckley
by ANTHONY GANCARSKI
"They've got to draw in their horns
and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into
the Stone Age."
Gen. Curtis LeMay
Talk about your goof-ups! I guess we can attribute
his mistake to advanced age, but Bill Buckley's recently expressed
enthusiasm for George Wallace's 1968 running-mate Curtis LeMay
simply couldn't be overlooked.
In "McCain Levels With NATO",
a February 11 column, Buckley extols the Senator [R-AIPAC] as
having "sounded like General Curtis LeMay sounding the tocsin
for relentless military action". This naturally pleased
the commentator greatly, as he had fretted that McCain would
be "ambivalent on the Iraq question"; apparently, Buckley
had gauged the Senator's appeal as primarily to "liberal
ambiguists".
Of course, Buckley's not what he used
to be. Used to be you could count on Bill Buckley to turn an
interesting phrase every paragraph or so. Now the Yalie is but
a shadow of his former self, a frumpy widow lingering as the
youngsters wait for her to die so they can divvy up her legacy.
In this very piece, the author of GOD & MAN AT YALE was reduced
to praising career henchman Don Rumsfeld as "vigorous and
persuasive confident and resourceful"; encomiums so bland
I would've thought them beneath Buckley, who seems to be working
from an old script.
Time has passed from when the press conferences
were aflutter with questions about such trivia as Rumsfeld's
status as a sex symbol. The marriage has lost its novelty; we
stare across the breakfast table every morning and see a venal
old man with mismatched dentures, who sometimes forgets himself
and puts his Gold Toe socks in the toaster oven. That metaphor
notwithstanding, it's difficult to see in what way Rumsfeld resembles
a leader in any way accountable to his citizenry. Appointed by
a court-appointed president, willing to play hard man with other
people's lives and land, Rumsfeld can't even be bothered to admit
how unpopular the war he pimps is in front of people without
press passes and security clearances.
Buckley's essential disconnect from the
political reality his big-guvmint conservative disciples have
foisted upon us could be read as the sort of mindless propaganda
for the Bush agenda we've come to expect from the corporate media.
But if that were true, then why would he invoke the name of Curtis
LeMay, which carries with it precious little political cachet?
LeMay's biography, typical of those of
historically inconvenient figures, gets little ink in history
books. In WWII, he took the impressive step of having B-29s under
his command bomb Japanese cities at night from low-altitudes,
softening up the evil ones for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rumor
holds that he viewed JFK's autopsy while smoking a cigar; one
can only hope it wasn't a Cuban.
LeMay was not without his idiosyncrasies;
no one who gets that close to power is. He must've been feeling
really idiosyncratic during a campaign stop in October 1968 at
Madison Square Garden when running-mate Wallace let loose with
some crowd pleasing lines like "you anarchists are through
in this country", in between references to "left-wing
intellectuals and Communists professors who advocate a victory
for the Vietcong" and "the rebellion in our streets."
Certainly a long way from compassionate
conservatism, aren't we? Whether in the electoral or the military
realms, LeMay seemed instinctively drawn to war as a governing
ethos, an end in and of itself. Want to increase economic "cooperation"
between the US and Asia? Bomb the hell out of them -- nothing
else will do! Tired of negotiating acceptable levels of dissent?
Run as silent partner in an allegedly populist campaign, nodding
assent as your mouthpiece threatens to neutralize political opposition!
It's easy to pick on a dead man, perhaps
easier to pick on someone at death's door. The latter was proved
when Trent Lott's enemies within his own party cut him down to
size after his retroactive advocacy of Strom Thurmond as Presidential
timber. Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of the jackals
jumped Lott and left him to bleed to death, and the whole mess
was spun as the Republicans making a clean break from the Southern
Strategy that spawned Lott, among others. No more appealing to
white nativism, ran the spin from the Party of Lincoln.
If we are to take those heady days of
late December at face value, then what do we make of Bill Buckley
giving props to a man who, in 1968, actually outflanked the GOP
to the "right" on prickly issues such as segregation
and military engagement? Is Bill Buckley a mad bomber, or just
nostalgic for the days when a dollar was worth a dollar and a
black man knew where his drinking fountain was?
Anthony Gancarski, the author of 2001's UNFORTUNATE INCIDENTS,
welcomes comments at Anthony.Gancarski@attbi.com
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February 15
/ 16, 2003
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