The second anniversary of Bill Buckley’s death (Feb. 27, 2008) sparked a few interesting commentaries, some worth sharing. Over at the Yale Daily News, staff columnist Matt Shaffer wrote “Death of a Yale Man.” A taste:
He was morally serious without being humorless, moving smoothly from irony to gravity. Irony is the mode of our generation — the way we avoid moral commitment and cover the nakedness of our real belief. It’s fun, but a vice when indulged (as I do). Buckley could do irony well, but did so as an earnest, a serious man. He published, for the world to see, “Near my God: An Autobiography of Faith.” And he spent more time exposing his beliefs than ridiculing others’ gaffes.
And over at Big Journalism, blogger Rich Trzupek writes that WFB’s message lives on:
Buckley spawned and inspired a new generation of conservative and libertarian thought. Today, intellectuals like Thomas Sowell and Bill Bennett carry the conservative message forward with devastating, well-researched analysis. At the same, brilliant writers like Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin and Charles Krauthammer, to name but a very few, have built upon that work in terms accessible to everyman. And let’s not forget Mark Steyn, who falls into a category all his own. Steyn is equally at home crushing progressive dogma under the weight of polysyllabic verbiage that sends readers scrambling for their dictionaries as he is employing locker-room humor to undercut their message and he generally employs both techniques in the space of a few paragraphs, sometimes in the same sentence. He is the intellectual’s anti-intellectual.
All of them, indeed all of us here at the “Big” sites, owe a debt of gratitude to the erudite, charming conservative warrior from New York. Buckley wasn’t only successful in yelling “stop!” to history, he jump-started a movement that – in the long run – is unstoppable. Two years after his death, his ideals and ideas remain as powerful and relevant as ever. We miss you Bill and, on behalf of conservatives and libertarians everywhere, allow me to say it once more: thank you.