The Dreaded 'L' Word
William F. Buckley Jr.
The Dreaded ‘L’ Word
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ShareIn 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.
