[lbo-talk] WFB, again

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Sat Mar 1 02:42:05 PST 2008


JM:> Why should anyone on the left pretend he was anything but a bad
> influence on U.S. intellectual culture?


>DH: Who does pretend that?

JM: Everybody who would rather talk about his pose and grace, his manner and the wonder that is the great personality of William F. Buckley instead of focusing on his role as right wing enforcer of intellectual reaction. Everyone who praises the gestures of his "private" life instead of the fact that he was a supporter of murder regimes, terrorist dictatorships, and deathsquad republics in every part of the world. Pretending that he was anything but a supporter of mass murder in say El Salvador is accepting his own public persona as his real face and it is to confuse public with private, which as I explain below, is the political function of celebrity gossip. .

In the context of the usual sober celebrations of his life in the bosses media, for leftists to contribute to it is quite annoying. At least Coulter was half-honest about why she liked Buckley -- he was a vicious intellectual enforcer of privilege and advocate of U.S. dominance. She leaves out his racism and support of Jim Crow, but such old fashion marks of "conservatism" are no longer mentionable in polite society.

If people on this list pay attention to him at all why not analyze his role as intellectual enforcer and trainer of intellectual bullies? Why talk about how nice he was to have a conversation with in this context. I am savvy to the idea of trying to understand the individual psychology of a Ku Kluxer or a Podhoretz by understanding how he treats his wife and family but that is not what is happening here. There is no attempt to understand a contemptuous intellectual bully who established around him a coterie of college boys to look up to him. There is only talk about how good he was to his dog.

Maybe Pinochet was good to his dog but who cares? Why should those of us on the left treat Pinochet as a dog lover instead of _anything but_ a brutal dictator?

To treat Buckley as a dog lover is to confuse the public and the private. To treat Buckley as someone good to his servants is to confuse his public role as an intellectual in the forefront of anti-working class intellectual propaganda with his private role as pater familias.

I too love gossip but part of the function of gossip is to make us believe that we are still in a small village society with little class divisions. That is what gossip does for us in mass society. It helps us to confuse the private and the public in such a way that we forget the public role, the ruling class role, of this very public intellectual. So yes I would prefer that leftists treat him as a public intellectual who did all in his power to harm the bourgeois commonweal as well as the working class. But instead even among people I would prefer to think of as comrades this despicable reactionary man is treated as an object for gossip.

Gossip is fun but it is also a systematic confusion of public and private. And this systematic confusion of public and private is important. It should be addressed by those of us on the left because it is how the U.S. rulers run their elections and make their entertainment. Instead of being analyzed it is imitated. It is imitated even by those who should know better.

I certainly agree with John Thorton's sentiments above. But I'm one of those people who has an instrumental definition of intellectuals -- Anyone who does intellectual work can qualify. (Thus all lawyers qualify, as do all teachers and all journalists and pundits. Writers and artists too.... and even accountants.) I generally agree with Sartre's division between classical intellectuals, technical intellectuals, and ruling class ideologists. (Somewhere in among these classifications there is room for the working class intellectual.)

So I would prefer to say that WFB was pseudo-intelligent but none-the-less an intellectual. I am not saying he wasn't intelligent but part of his public persona was to imitate intelligence by literally tipping back his head and looking down his nose at anyone who questioned ruling class privilege. He rarely used his intelligence, but substituted for thinking the gestures of intelligence to enhance his intellectual bullying. And this is where the problem of gossip comes in again. One can accept him on his own terms and talk about Buckley's gestures and masks, the acting personas he used to enhance his role as ruling class intellectual bully, but to do so is simply to subtly give into the legitimacy of his class role.

As far as what I said previously about his influence on Catholicism I would like to explain a little. (Warning: I am an ex-Catholic and atheist.) Buckley lived through a transformation of Catholicism and was part of the intellectual reaction to that transformation. In the 1980s one of the few consistently liberal elite groups left in the U.S. was the conference of Catholic Bishops. During this time Buckley kept right-wing reactionary Catholicism alive. He supported terror regimes in Central America and Brazil, regimes that murdered more Catholic church supporters -- priests, nuns, and lay practitioners -- than any government since the Catholic Church has come into existence. He supported the reactionary torturers of priests and nuns and he never once even acknowledged that this was anything but a "good." When liberal bishops in this country spoke out against the murder of their brethren in Brazil or Central America he condemned them. In short William F. Buckley made it respectable for right wing Catholic intellectuals to justify mass murder.

I am not a Catholic and I am not a Christian. I see no reason why I should pay homage to any aspect of this man who helped to justify mass murder.

In my youth I could express much animosity toward the church for its reactionary role. And William F. Buckley certainly represents the continuing attempt to return to the reactionary role of the Catholic Church..

But over the years I have met many Catholic intellectuals I admire and so slowly I changed my mind about the overall function of religion while still remaining anti-religious in general and an atheist in particular. The people I met were Dorothy Day, the Berrigan Brothers, and a number of priests and lay workers in base communities in El Salvador and Brazil. Their examples and their writings have impressed me as radical and hopeful and their record of consistent support for working class and peasant solidarity and organization has impressed me even more. So I am not willing to condemn all Catholic intellectuals. Still the Church, with the help of the likes Buckley, has mostly abandoned such people or persecuted them. I tell you though, one Dorothy Day is worth any number of Bill Buckley's.

On 2/29/08, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
> On Friday 29 February 2008 23:14:31 Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > [Bucley] was a scumbag, but I'm all for gossip.
>
> Total agreement on both counts.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/

His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/

Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list