Wednesday June 03, 2009
The Right-Wing Pisses on You—Literally
I now “get” that Pup’s greatness was a piece with the way he conducted himself at sea. Great men always have too much canvas up. Great men take risks. It’s the timorous souls—like myself—who err on the side of caution; who take in sail when they see a storm approaching and look for snug harbor. Not my old man. Or as Mum used to put it, “Bill, why are you trying to kill us?”
—Christopher Buckley, “Losing Mum and Pup,” pg. 122
I’m a similar timorous soul, a worst-case scenario man, and so I inevitably feel some admiration for men who are tougher and braver, who venture out in worst-case scenarios rather than imagining them, as I do, during best-case situations.
Even so.
Not sure where one crosses the line from “adventurer” into “asshole” but William F. Buckley seems to cross it. He constantly plows his boat into docks; he risks lives—including his only son’s—to venture forth in storms; he steals lobsters from the traps of fishermen (but leaves behind bottles of Johnnie Walker as payment); he switches channels and movies and party locations without consultation. Consultation? What’s that? Hell, in his later days he often opened the front door of his car while it was moving to pee. Sometimes he did this in traffic. Onto other cars.
It would be easy to see this as a metaphor for the right-wing in this country but it’s probably a better metaphor for our ruling classes—regardless of political persuasion. Buckley, it turns out, was friends with not just Henry Kissinger but George McGovern and Ted Kennedy. One almost gets the feeling that the whole thing is a game to them and we’re the pieces. A less chilling comparison is to professional sports. Yankees and Red Sox fans may hate each other but it doesn’t mean David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez have to. They’re just two men playing the same game. They have more in common with each other than with the fans in the stands.
In the end no metaphors are truly needed to fathom the conservative mind. Merely go to the footnote on pg 117:
The book [on Goldwater] ends with an anecdote in which I, age twelve at the time, figure. Pup had gotten the details a bit wrong, and I had e-mailed him from Zermatt the correct version. He declined it, saying “I like my version better.” I thought to say, “Pup, it’s not a question of liking your version better, but of using the accurate version,” but then thought, Never mind.
That’s part of the reason why we’re in this mess. They always liked their version better.
As for C. Buckley’s book? It’s breezy and funny—although the humor is occasionally too rim-shot. The book jacket compares Buckley’s effort to Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in “The Year of Magical Thinking,” but that book was devastating while this one is...kinda fun. Meanwhile, the best book I’ve read in the genre, if you want to call it a genre—“the death of loved ones by famous authors”—is Philip Roth’s “Patrimony,” in which the sickness and eventual death of his father is grounded and specific, and no messy detail is ignored. Put it this way: Christopher may have put up with his father’s shit but Philip cleaned up his father’s.
So we begin with piss and end with shit. The way of the world.
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