Remembering William F. Buckley

William F. Buckley died yesterday.

When I was growing up, liberal by default (because everyone I knew was liberal), William F. Buckley was a figure of ridicule. What I knew of him came from the impressionist David Frye, who imagined him speaking of Apollo 11 landing on the "Mare Tranquillitate" (Latin) rather than the Sea of Tranquillity, because Latin sounded so much more erudite.

In the 70's, after I had discovered Solzhenitsyn, I came across an issue of National Review. To my surprise this publication wasn't foolishly spouting idiocy in Latin. What won my regard was this issue had excerpted a whole chapter (perhaps two) from First Circle, the passage where Stalin is alone pondering that it isn't egocentric for him to become Emperor of the World, and pondering how he has to control everything. Buckley introduced this excerpt saying we needed to remember this is how totalitarians thought.

In this decade, when I began looking for political commentary on the Internet, I remembered National Review quoting Solzhenitsyn, and looked it up. I haven't seen them run more excerpts from Solzhenitysn since, but they do mention him from time to time. And the NRO (National Review Online) has become one of my Internet favorites.