Thanks to the recent death of William F. Buckley, we’ve been treated to a number of panegyrics from George Will and others who’d like to assume the moth eaten mantel of chief conservative highbrow, all of them informing us of what a saintly, wonderful, brilliant hierophant he was, and how he’s had a monumental and entirely beneficial influence on American political and cultural life. And although old Billy himself would likely intone some thing along the lines of nil nisi bonum (speak nothing but good of the dead), I beg to differ.

First of all, in light of the fact that the entirely disastrous Bush regime is the first and only American administration operated entirely under the influence of conservative thought (somewhere along the line the compassionate part got lost), it’s pretty hard to demonstrate the brilliant superiority of conservative philosophy, and that that philosophy hasn’t been completely discredited has more to do with its appeal to the America’s baser instincts than its logical ones. Buckley laid the "intellectual" framework and trained the propagandists for the takeover of the government by the right wing and guess what – they flopped. In the end Buckley was just Rush Limbaugh with a snooty accent. I guess Goldwater wasn’t right after all.

I have no first hand knowledge of his personality, but the image I will always carry of Buckley is Jack Kerouac’s appearance on Firing Line. Jack was a pretty vulnerable character by then, his best work far behind him, and he was basically reduced to a walking nerve drinking himself to death. The ironic thing is that at that point he too was a conservative, and one that revered Buckley, who displayed his deep, often trumpeted Christian piety by merciless lampooning the defenseless writer. Buckley’s arched eyebrow, frequent sneers and snide asides to the audience make for a pretty demonstration of his sterling, chivalric upper class values. Of course the fact that people will be reading On the Road long after bully Buckley is forgotten suggests that the condescension should more justly have been flowing in the other direction, but Jack wasn’t like that. But then, had he been a contemporary, Buckley wouldn’t have been a very good host to Walt Whitman either.

And take a close look at Buckley on television, crabbed and contorted, with his cocked head and affected stammer, as if some degenerative muscular disease were tying him up in knots. The kid who had the guts to call the Emperor naked would take one look at him ask Mommy, what the matter with that man? You don’t have to be Freud to see that that rictus grin, those abrupt mannerisms and strange tics betray some deep psychological unease. Wilhelm Reich, another guy at whom Buckley would chortle dismissively, would see in it the bad sex that goes hand in hand with bad politics, and that seemingly far out diagnosis seems a little more plausible if you look at Buckley’s fiction.

Oh, yes, renaissance man Billy managed to toss off some spy novels. Tossing off might be the operative phrase, because there’s nothing like a pulpy spy tome to expose the fantasies of the writer, James Bond being the obvious example. The Blackford Oakes books could most generously be called mediocre — clunky, graceless things seemingly designed solely to exhibit the clearly superior yet becomingly humble nature of the Buckley like protagonist, who is "undeniably attractive" and filled with "innate sauciness." For me the most revealing (so to speak) passage in the first book Saving the Queen is the sex scene, where Oakes beds the only person who could possibly be his social equal, the Queen of England (and please, Mr, Microsoft censor, remember that the following was carefully crafted by a blue blooded American intellectual and pillar of polite society) :

"Courtesy of the United States, ma’am.