I’m on a Christopher Buckley binge at the moment: read Florence of Arabia
earlier this week; now I’m on Little Green Men
. Flo only takes an afternoon or so, and it’s excellent. Consider this passage about American opinion regarding a crisis in the Middle East:
There were those who urged caution, and those who urged that now was a time not for caution but for boldness. Then there were those who urged a middle course of cautious boldness. There were extremists on both sides: the neo-isolationists, whose banner declared, “Just sell us the damned oil,” and the neo-interventionists, who said, “Together, we can make a better world, but we’ll probably have to kill a lot of you in the process.”
Speaking, or writing, of Buckleys, I review Reid Buckley’s memoir of the clan, An American Family: The Buckleys
in the forthcoming (July 28, 2008) issue of The American Conservative. I won’t be spoiling too much if I say the book is a delight — and includes a showdown or two between Will Buckley, the family patriarch, and Pancho Villa in revolutionary Mexico.
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July 17th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Christopher Buckley has a great emotional range. His September 1983 Esquire essay “Vietnam Guilt” is a powerful meditation on warfare, and is well worth looking up if your library has back-issues of that magazine. The early-to-mid-1980s were something of an Esquire golden age.
July 19th, 2008 at 5:10 am
“Together, we can make a better world, but we’ll probably have to kill a lot of you in the process.”
That is a great line. It reminds me of a line from the great Mel Brooks “Get Smart” TV series. The Chief confesses to Max, “…you don’t know how hard it is for me to day in, day out send men on dangerous missions often to the deaths.” Max replies “..not as hard as it is on the men.”
July 20th, 2008 at 4:05 am
Turns out Christopher Buckley was interviewed in 2004 (i.e. before Thank You For Smoking hit our screens) about his writing philosophy:
http://americasfuture.org/doublethink/2004/05/interview-with-christopher-buckley/
Quite rightly, he is scathing about Esquire’s latter-day standards: “I picked up Esquire not too long ago and I was just appalled. … This was the magazine I started at.” A sad decline indeed for a magazine that once published Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, Murray Kempton, Truman Capote, etc. etc.
July 20th, 2008 at 4:09 am
I saw ‘American Family’ on the shelf at the bookshop but opted for Wittgenstein instead. I’ll have to pick ‘A.F.’ up, it seems.
“A sad decline indeed for a magazine that once published Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, Murray Kempton, Truman Capote, etc. etc.”
Don’t forget Vidal!
August 2nd, 2008 at 11:06 pm
[...] 1983 Esquire essay on his ambiguous feelings about not going to Vietnam — referenced by R.J. Stove in this comment thread — is included in Buckley’s splendid collection Wry Martinis. The book also contains a [...]