William F. Buckley and Groucho Marx on Firing Line in 1967.

Is the world funny?

This meeting of the minds between Willian F. Buckley and Groucho Marx is awkward in places, which brings to mind an anecdote about the great Hollywood celebrity tennis match of 1937, which featured both Groucho and Charlie Chaplin.

As described in The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell (1982), match day found Groucho in his usual mood to avoid taking any sport seriously, including tennis. This irreverence wasn't to the liking of Chaplin, who nonetheless played along when Groucho produced a picnic basket and served lunch.

Thirty years later on Firing Line, Groucho is in similarly obstructionist fettle. Undoubtedly there is mutual respect between host and guest, and the comedian is serious at intervals, but he frequently deploys his legendary wit to remain safely detached. 

It's an interesting conversation between two intelligent people. Is this still possible? 

GROUCHO MARX AND WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY DEBATE THE NATURE OF COMEDY ON ‘FIRING LINE,’ 1967, by Martin Schneider (Dangerous Minds)

On July 7, 1967, Groucho Marx appeared as a guest on William F. Buckley’s current affairs show Firing Line to debate the topic “Is the World Funny?” Firing Line had been in existence only for about a year at that point, broadcasting on WOR channel 9 in New York City; four years later, the show would move to PBS.

Groucho was there to promote his new book The Groucho Letters: Letters From and To Groucho Marx, in which he reproduced selected correspondence with figures like Jerry Lewis, Irving Berlin, E.B. White, Peter Lorre, Edward R. Murrow, David Susskind, Booth Tarkington, Harry Truman, and James Thurber.

The legacy of James Baldwin.

The article isn't about the video, but I'd advise watching the video.

The fire this time – the legacy of James Baldwin, by Lanre Bakare (The Guardian)

His work fell foul of civil-rights-era binary racial and sexual politics but, as a new film shows, now Baldwin’s ideas are used to explain everything from Trump to Black Lives Matter

 ... For Baldwin scholar, professor of English at Yale and author Caryl Phillips, the return of Baldwin to mainstream thinking isn’t surprising at all. For him the big issues concerning American life now – the rise of crude, racially charged politics, killings of unarmed black men by the police, an apathetic public – repeat a history from which Baldwin’s critiques still offer some solace. “People are looking for someone who can articulate these issues,” says Phillips. “I think the person who has probably articulated what it means to be an American and what it means to be black, with more eloquence than anybody else in the last century, is Baldwin.”

Cultural education: Buckley, Vidal, and the essential documentary film Best of Enemies.

It took far too long for me to get around to watching this essential film. I highly recommend it. After you've seen it, please join me in lamenting the fact that Buckley and Vidal aside, their cultural perspectives remain locked in mortal combat, almost 50 years later.

Bilge Ebiri, writing at Vulture:

You might see a film about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal’s ten televised debates during the 1968 presidential conventions as an opportunity to bask in eloquent, pointed repartee. You might also enjoy the spectacle of two of the foremost intellectuals of their time coming very close to physically beating the crap out of each other. You might not expect, however, to find yourself weeping — for the state of the republic and the poisoned media landscape, for the decay of the American social contract. Yet here we are. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s masterful Best of Enemies leaves you with an overwhelming sense of despair. It’s not just a great documentary, it’s a vital one ...

 ... Best of Enemies’ true aim is to lament a bygone political discourse. Vidal and Buckley may have started off as representatives of an old-fashioned school of debate, learned and articulate and polite, but by the end of the conventions they wound up unwittingly inventing a new media landscape: one of constant conflict, sustained anger, and barely contained violence. Gordon and Neville find in these two men’s infamous clash a turning point, the moment in time when the networks, the press, the pundits, and even average Americans first realized their taste for political bloodsport. A terrible beauty had been born, as they say. This might be the saddest film of the year.

At The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw:

It is fascinating, not for any supposed lost standard of excellence in argument – the drawling debates look like a squabble between two snippy and indistinguishable twins – but for showing us two examples of that exquisite, extinct breed: the literate “political classes” willing to exchange high-flown badinage on television. The contest was always about who would lose their cool first and it was Buckley, furious at being called a “crypto-Nazi” and threatening to sock the “queer” Vidal in the face, live on camera. Buckley had, therefore, humiliatingly lost, but Vidal endured the ignominy of irrelevance as Buckley became the height of political fashion in the Reaganite years. They both then entered the wilderness as incorrect patrician wordsmiths who no one cared about any more.

A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times:

In 1968, as the summer political-convention season approached, ABC News decided to take a gamble. The network seemed permanently stuck in third place, and its news division in particular suffered from the lack of a brand-name on-air authority figure to compete with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC or Walter Cronkite at CBS. Back in those days, the two leading networks covered the conventions live from beginning to end. (Can you imagine?) Instead of comprehensiveness, ABC went for provocation and at least the illusion of intellectual heft, hiring Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. to conduct a series of debates during the Republican circus in Miami and the subsequent Democratic debacle in Chicago. “Best of Enemies,” Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s lively new documentary, an accessible assemblage of archival footage and talking-head analysis, mines the Buckley-Vidal skirmishes for nuggets of historical insight.

And also — not quite the same thing — for zingers and gotchas and other flashes of that mysterious, you-know-it-when-you-see-it phenomenon called “great television.” The most memorable such moment occurred late in the battle, as the Chicago Police Department rampaged in Grant Park. What looked like law and order to Mayor Richard J. Daley and like “Gestapo tactics” to Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut set off a series of especially nasty personal volleys between ABC’s designated intellectuals. Vidal needled Buckley, calling him a “crypto-Nazi” until Buckley lost his patrician cool and snapped back: “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” Ratings gold.

The cover art? Indisputably cool. The contents? Well ...

The most rational explanation for "Rodger" Baylor recently being added to the subscriber list at National Review is my renewal of The Economist. I suppose many of these print publications are linked, and complimentary (albeit brief) trial subscriptions are activated from one to the next. Every now and then, Rolling Stone starts coming again, and I've no idea why. Then it stops again.

If it's a gag, then thanks for the freebie, although it isn't the first time I've read National Review. During my Reagan-era tenure at UMI Data Courier, I often abstracted it. Today's tone seems less erudite than the Wm. F. Buckley glory years. The man was often mistaken, but he sure could write.

My only complaint: You spelled my name incorrectly. Buckley wouldn't ever have done that.

Kathleen Parker on Chris Buckley, National Review: "(Republicans) do not ... deserve to win this time, and someone had to remind them why."

NAC has been following this story since Christopher Buckley's on-line Obama endorsement first broke.

William F. Buckley was articulate and intelligent, whereas contemporary conservatism boasts a crass anti-intellectualism that lately has become viral.

Surveying the scurrilous faith-based wreckage of the conservative movement, which today embraces the "we the people don't need no education" line of non-thought and would correspondingly not hesitate to ostracize Buckley elder in the same way that it has impugned the younger, as well as previously savaging Kathleen Parker for her apostasy in denouncing Sarah Palin, LEO’s Stephen George said it best earlier this week:

Let’s call this line of thinking the terrorism of the idiocracy. It did not start with John McCain or Sarah Palin — although they have found wild profit in it — and it surely will not end there. In actuality, it begins in the vacuum created by a general ignorance of the world around you, the pride you take in that ignorance, and the vulnerability that leaves you with. When some addled shit-peddler like McCain or Palin fills the vacuum with radical lies, these barely literate masses take a crazed posture, and the worst of their own fear and loathing manifests itself in heinous, hilarious ways.

Like the woman who still insists, despite McCain himself telling her otherwise, that Obama is an “Arab” and, by implication, “Arab” is bad. Naturally, McCain scored media points by calling off that particular dog, but he never said anything like, “Hey nut-job, Arab is not a bad word.” In fact, by avoiding saying that but nonetheless acknowledging she’d erred, he subtly reinforced her “epithet.”

----

WFB Would Be Proud, by Kathleen Parker (Friday, October 17, 2008)

Christopher Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama -- followed by his abrupt departure from the back page of the magazine his father founded, National Review -- has caused a ripple of contempt from the conservative right.

Nay, make that a tsunami of hostility. An avalanche of venom. A cataclysm of ... well, you get the idea. People are mad. Good riddance, they say, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Let us proceed, gingerly.

I am not a passive bystander to these events. Buckley is a friend, as are other members of his family, especially Uncle Reid, with whom I have worked for several years. National Review is home to many friends, and its online editor, Kathryn Jean Lopez, kindly subscribes to my column. Like Buckley, I have enjoyed a decent fragging for suggesting that Sarah Palin excuse herself from the Republican ticket.

What gives here?

What does it mean that the right cannot politely entertain dissenting opinions within its ranks? What, if anything, does it portend that Buckley The Younger has bolted from the right, even resigning (with enthusiastic editorial approval) from the family flagship?

Some have opined, ridiculously, that Buckley -- son of the famous William F. Buckley (WFB) -- was merely seeking attention. Christo, as family and friends call him, has written more than a dozen acclaimed books, one of which, "Thank You for Smoking," became a movie. In 2004, he won the Thurber Prize for American Humor for "No Way to Treat a First Lady." For 18 years he edited a magazine, Forbes Life, and otherwise seems to be doing all right.

Other critics have surmised that Buckley's "betrayal" was a publicity stunt for his newest novel, "Supreme Courtship" (which I reviewed for National Review). When you're as funny and write as well as Buckley, you don't have to resort to stunts. You are the stunt.

So why did he do it?

Because he had to. It's in his genes.

True believers of whatever stripe too often forget that the men and women who create movements are first and foremost radicals. Great movements are not the result of relaxing afternoons musing along the Seine but emerge from flames of passion ignited by injustice.

When WFB created the modern conservative movement, he didn't call a neighborhood meeting and whisper, "Come along now." He stood athwart history and yelled, "Stop!"

His son, though he customarily takes the more circuitous route to the revolution via satire, is now merely answering WFB's original call to political activism. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the younger Buckley said: "I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me."

In 1955, when WFB announced his new magazine and explained the reasons for it, he described conservatives as "non-licensed nonconformists":

"Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity."

Fast-forward half a century, and the old is the new.

Radical conservatives are still having an interesting time of it, though these days they are being mutilated by fellow "conservatives." The well-fed Right now cultivates ignorance as a political strategy and humiliates itself when its brightest sons seek sanctuary in the solitude of personal honor.

The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing -- the "kooks" the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right -- have created a party no longer attentive to its principles.

Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of "conservatism" have brought us "a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance."
Republicans are not short on brainpower -- or pride -- but they have strayed off course. They do not, in fact, deserve to win this time, and someone had to remind them why.

Christopher Buckley, ever the swashbuckling heir to his father's defiant spirit, walked the plank so that the sinking mother ship might right itself.

No doubt his seafaring father is cheering from heaven: "Ahoy there, Christo! Well done, my son."

The last of a dying breed.

Hard as it may be to comprehend, for a time I was a regular reader of William F. Buckley’s National Review. Buckley, the oft-caricatured and curmudgeonly gadfly of the conservative movement, died this week at 82.

For a year and a half during the late 1980s, I was employed by a company that was creating an early CD-ROM version of a database somewhat along the lines of the old paper copy readers’ guide to periodicals. The staff was small, but generally competent, and even though we weren’t supposed to specialize in any one topic, human nature led us in that direction. Management tolerated it so long as the results were acceptable.

Thus, the woman who’d always wanted to go to medical school always abstracted the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet. One of the guys was a budding young investor and grabbed Barron’s and Forbes, while another hoarded the sports magazines.

Being the resident Europhile and history buff, it soon fell to me to act as the division’s foreign affairs desk. In practice, since we only abstracted English language publications, this fact brought me into constant contact with periodicals from the UK, and The Economist, New Statesman and Punch all were constant companions throughout my stay. Because these alone didn’t provide sufficient articles to meet the quota, I looked for other fairly dependable choices that would provide both sustenance and numbers. National Review fit the bill.

Buckley was a familiar name and face, and I’d read some of his essays and columns while in college, but it wasn’t until the period of twice monthly paid exposure that I began to appreciate the breadth, erudition and vigor of his polemical style. Good writing’s good writing, though in my view sadly wasted in defending the likes of Joseph McCarthy.

Certainly the oppressive whole of today’s bile-spewing conservative blogosphere could learn more than a few lessons from Buckley’s techniques of argumentation and his ability to express himself without overtly foaming at the mouth. That so few today aspire to such levels of credibility emphatically should not be interpreted as an indictment of the late wordsmith.