Rabid and Rascally Creatures: Richard Brookhiser’s “Happy Darkies”

“Pain is like water,” journalist and historian Richard Brookhiser writes in his new memoir, “it finds every crack in your character and makes it wider.”

The rapidly-rising waters encircling the sinking ship of the conservative movement in the American body politic is revealing cracks and fissures so vast and wide as to elude hyperbolic description. A political and social movement willing to embrace a monosyllabic, moose-killing, Barbie Doll hockey mom as a viable candidate for the office of Vice-President of the United States (okay, maybe it doesn’t defy hyperbole) falls far short of the “the circular pattern of six WASP traits”, as defined by Brookhiser, that form the bedrock of conservatism: “conscience, industry, success, civic-mindedness, use, anti-sensuality.”

Book: Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement in America

Author: Richard Brookhiser

Publisher: Basic

Publication Date: 2009-06

Length: 272 pages

Format: Hardcover

Price: $27.50

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/columns_art/j/jacobs-righttime-cover.jpgAs a book about the often contentious relationship between a mentor – conservative columnist, publisher, and television host William F. Buckley Jr. – and his star pupil, Richard Brookhiser’s narrative is hit and miss. The reader doesn’t come away from Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement with a sense that they really know the author and his elitist, Ritalin-popping idol.

In some regards, this is a good thing. A short section of the book, for instance, details Brookhiser’s battle with testicular cancer, a detour that the Yale English major keeps mercifully short because heaven knows that the market is saturated with self-congratulatory cancer survivor memoirs destined for a second life as weepy, feel-good melodramas for the Lifetime television network.

Books ponder the order and structure of events. Putting the weaknesses in Brookhiser’s memoir aside (even the author notes that “memoirs are a dubious genre”), what emerges in the fast-moving pages of this first-person account of over 40 years of moral, social, and political change is the answer to a question that has been haunting pundits for some time now: What has happened to the Republican party and the conservative movement in America?

The answer is as simple as following the Peter Principle of upward failure: Conservatives launched careers in Washington to affect social change rather than selling the force of their ideas through cultural means.

All in the Family

Like Richard Brookhiser, I was raised in a conservative American household, affording me an early inside look into the dysfunctional, paranoid, and unrelentingly bigoted mindset of “the moral majority” that ushered in the so-called Reagan Revolution in 1980 and, by default, its own demise as a power base in American politics almost a decade later.

It’s important that we understand these values-driven people, because the recent hemorrhaging of unregulated free-market economics and the blood of unjust wars and failed banana republic revolutions stains their hands and would most likely plague their conscience — if only they believed in something as quaint and abstract as a human conscience — but their rabidly anti-intellectual stance does not afford them that luxury. Consider the following from page 88 of Brookhiser’s memoir regarding his marriage to psychiatrist Jeanne Safer:

Religion made a bigger problem than where to get married. My parents, particularly my mother, did not want me to marry Jeanne. Ideally, my mother would not have wanted me to marry anyone, not even a younger replica of herself (such a woman would have been too strong willed), But Jeanne’s Jewishness was certainly a bad part of the mix. My father had encountered similar opposition himself, but as he always did in family matters he supported the policy of the administration, which was set by my mother. He never said anything against Jeanne, but he let my mother give the evil eye unchallenged.

Sadly, Brookhiser’s portrait is a dead-on accurate assessment of many conservative American families. When one of the family members steps out of line – as the author’s mother does with her apparent anti-Semitism – the other clan elders remain deaf, dumb, and blind because the offending party is family. This is why, after calling Democratic President Jimmy Carter “the worst ex-President in history… (and) a very bad President: small-minded, moralizing, and incompetent”, Brookhiser, on page 167 of his tome, writes: “Because Reagan was family, we forgave him many sideslips.” The apple never falls too far from the tree, Rick.

My mother, who passed away at age 65 one year ago this month, was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative with family roots burrowed deeply in the rural farm country of Indiana and Virginia. She was also an anti-Semite, but it would probably be more fair and accurate to say that she was against any thought or action that failed to advance the superior White Anglo-Saxon Protestant cause of middle-class America. She adored, in no particular order, John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and John McCain.

Like many conservatives, my mother believed in forcing morality down people’s throats, but her own morality was oddly flexible. She had prior convictions for grand larceny and drunk driving. In the early ’80s, at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution that she so wholeheartedly endorsed (for conservatives, Brookhiser recalls wistfully, the Reagan presidency was “like getting the keys to the kingdom”), my mother was a significant narcotics dealer in the working class West Los Angeles community of Mar Vista.

She sold rock cocaine when she was the manager of a 365-unit apartment building; she had a built-in community of users within the complex, back in the heady days of disco when everybody was snorting or smoking something; eventually she began skimming cash from the rent collections to cover her drug-buying expenses as her network of buyers grew larger. Her larceny was caught by the management company (the apartment complex was owned by Carol Burnett and her husband Joe Hamilton), she was fired, threatened with prosecution, but a PI hired to investigate her revealed that she had neither a pot to piss in or a window to toss it out of so they dropped prosecution because they were seeking recovery of the money my mom stole, not putting her behind bars.

Thus, my mother was aiding and abetting the cocaine-smuggling Latin American revolutionaries that Reagan was actively trying to thwart in his battle against communism through overt and covert counter-revolutionary operations that would ultimately lead to the disgraceful Iran-Contra scandal. All of this while Ronald Reagan was beefing up DEA coffers in an attempt to eradicate marijuana cultivation in Central and Northern California. Familial or political, conservatives in America actually have no moral boundaries whatsoever.

The Dreaded ‘L’ Word

William F. Buckley Jr.

The Dreaded ‘L’ Word

What Richard Brookhiser unintentionally and skillfully demonstrates in Right Time, Right Place is that these intolerant, imperialistic moralists had no business ascending to political power in this or any nation. Happy darkies, indeed.

In Right Time, Right Place we see that the collective glue that held the Republican party and conservative movement together – a trembling fear of communism and a lethal willingness to aim a rifle and troops at any nation espousing a political philosophy that may have roots in Lenin and Marx – completely fell apart with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

There is no common fear to bind the conservative movement together any longer except, of course, for the dreaded “L” word; here, for instance, is Brookhiser’s take on the nemesis of Buckley’s National Review, the Libertarian Review, a magazine that the author believes is “among other things, soft on communism”:

This is a common destination for anti-war libertarians and pacifists generally. If the state at war is the worst thing in the world, then the enemies of the state can’t be so bad, even if they are Nazis, communists, or al-Qaeda. Logically, it makes no sense, but emotionally it is a necessity.

Translation: If one does not support the state’s position in a war, then one is either a Nazi, a red, or a terrorist. Where have we heard that one before?

On page 153 Brookhiser dismisses Democratic candidate Jesse Jackson’s run for a Presidential nomination as “an instance of liberals letting blacks get away with anything.” That is the sound of the thinly-veiled racist heart beating at the center of the conservative movement in America, and they are inhumanly shameless about their elitism and race-bashing tendencies.

In the last year of my mother’s life (she was battling non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver and in denial the whole time) I accompanied her on a visit to her internist. Dr. Adjavou is a large, barrel-chested physician from Nigeria with a boisterous laugh and hearty enthusiasm for life. My mother was complaining to Dr. Adjavou about the dark color of her stool, which she took to be a possible indicator of internal bleeding.

“What color is your stool, Jackie?” Dr. Adjavou calmly inquired in his thick, Nigerian-accented voice. Without missing a beat, my mother looked the doctor in the eye and said, “It’s blacker than you are and that’s pretty damn black.”

These people can’t help themselves. They simply have no boundaries.

On page 234 of Brookhiser’s memoir, the author recalls revisiting the global dystopias of British novelist Evelyn Waugh:

Waugh the anthropologist, I wrote, had taught me, or confirmed in me, a belief in “happy darkies.” This was my term, not his, for the subjects of his exotic writing: people with dark skins who lived in Africa, Asia, and much of the Americas. It was ironic to call them happy, since their lives were blighted by poverty and pathology. Yet, Waugh believed, their lives could be worse. That happened whenever someone tried to transform them. Various characters in Waugh’s novels – assorted black totalitarians in Scoop, a reforming African emperor and his English sidekick in Black Mischief – caused real mischief by wanting to make the darkie modern and better. They only vexed him, until their inevitable failure, when things returned to their grim and natural course.

9/11 had shown the problem in a new light. “The world of the happy darkies,” I wrote, “was not in equilibrium, but in flux, and the flux could come here.” Millions of Africans and Asians moved to Europe and America; the millions more who stayed home learned of us, not always inaccurately, from news and entertainment; and it took only a few box cutters to bring down skyscrapers. In such a world we could not play defense, and the offensive would have to be more than military. It would have to involve doing, wisely and better, what Waugh’s rabid or rascally characters tried: transforming the world. Doing it wisely, I added, would mean “not doing most of it ourselves, but helping other people – the other no more – do so.”

What reason was there to think that anyone wanted help? The flux of civilizations create frustration and rage, but it also stimulated hope for something better. All men had such hopes, along with their many vices, because all men are created equal.

That’s all well and good but one who truly believes that “all men are created equal” would never have embraced Waugh’s backward thinking in the first place; a social Darwinist might buy into the theory but to hell with Charles Darwin because we all know that an omnipotent Creator cobbled together the universe in seven days. We know that Darwin’s theory of evolution is mere quackery because the conservative movement in America told us so

What Richard Brookhiser unintentionally and skillfully demonstrates in Right Time, Right Place is that these intolerant, imperialistic moralists had no business ascending to political power in this or any nation. Happy darkies, indeed.