Michael Moynihan, FIFTH COLUMN co-host and man about town, joins Nancy and Sarah to discuss The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, the new PBS documentary about conservative firebrand William F. Buckley. They discuss his eloquence, mistakes, and political evolution, and Sarah calls the old Firing Line episodes “a call to civility in a time of chaos.”
Also discussed:
Sarah puts her vibrator on time-out
The unfortunate rise of “churnalism”
AJ Cowling? Tacos anyone?
The Big 5-0 murder-suicide plan
That time Tracey Ullman talked to Michael about Morrissey
The affliction of presentism
Ronald Reagan as “the pretty ship of ideas that Buckley could load up and push out to sea.”
What did Hitchens think of Buckley?
Gore Vidal, dragged
James Baldwin, praised
The Buckley biography 20 years in the making
Are WE the new conservatives?
Don’t cancel Milk Duds!
“Free trade is a net gain for people, but there are going to be losers”
“Technology made us rougher people when it came to politics”
Who will lead a new campus movement. Could it be… Michael Moynihan? (If you let him do it over Zoom?)
Also, why we watch documentaries we disagree with, Nancy’s kind of town, and more literary and video links than you can shake a Rabbit vibrator at.
Also: CALL FOR LETTERS! You have questions? We have answers! smokeempodcast@gmail.com
Episode Notes:
Japanese Maple, by Clive James
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
--New Yorker, September 15, 2014
“Go Back to the Cold!” Clive James on John Le Carre (New York Review of Books)
Best of Enemies documentary about Buckley and Vidal
A Traitor to His Class by H.W. Brands (about FDR)
Letters to a Young Contrarian by Hitchens
Nearer My God by William F. Buckley
Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley
Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription by William F. Buckley
Reagan in His Own Hand by Kiron K. Skinner
Overdrive: A Personal Documentary by William F. Buckley
Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America by Ted Morgan
Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus
“Firehose #84: Did We Really ‘Mostly’ Endorse ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’?” by Matt Welch (Fifth Column Substack)
What’s in your hot box?
Sarah:
Nancy: A love of Chicago and, in anticipation of the 2024 DNC in that big-shouldered town, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko
Michael:
“The Secret Army: The True Story of a Lost Documentary”
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and The Snakehead, by Patrick Radden Keefe
Unanimously chosen outro:
134. Michael Moynihan and the Eternal Orgasm (updated)