Amidst the Saccharine, We Find a Lump of Real Sugar

Okay, it's starting to feel like the second death of Reagan out there, but I will admit that this (excerpt) is pretty good.

When I was in college, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a book called “Overdrive” in which he described his glamorous lifestyle. Since I was young and a smart-aleck, I wrote a parody of it for the school paper.

“Buckley spent most of his infancy working on his memoirs,” I wrote in my faux-biography. “By the time he had learned to talk, he had finished three volumes: ‘The World Before Buckley,’ which traced the history of the world prior to his conception; ‘The Seeds of Utopia,’ which outlined his effect on world events during the nine months of his gestation; and ‘The Glorious Dawn,’ which described the profound ramifications of his birth on the social order.”

The piece went on in this way. I noted that his ability to turn water into wine added to his popularity at prep school. I described his college memoirs: “God and Me at Yale,” “God and Me at Home” and “God and Me at the Movies.” I recounted that after college he had founded two magazines, one called The National Buckley and the other called The Buckley Review, which merged to form The Buckley Buckley.

I wrote that his hobbies included extended bouts of name-dropping and going into rooms to make everyone else feel inferior.

Buckley came to the University of Chicago, delivered a lecture and said: “[redacted], if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.”

That was the big break of my professional life.

Can you guess who told this story?

He told the same story during his TV gig, and added a nice reaffirmation:

And how many people of that stature take somebody who's made fun of them and said, "I want to give you a job"? We know a lot of people who aren't quite that secure who would never have done that.

Say what you will about William F. Buckley, Jr., and I could have said plenty, which is why I haven't, that's a real point in his favor. No matter how heinous I found almost everything he espoused, he offers a real goal toward which many of today's ideologues could strive: being big enough to be able to laugh at yourself.