Dear Mr. Holt:
I’m indebted to you for finding me out in the worst fault a conservative can commit, which is to fail (sloppily) to draw crucial distinctions. In my interview with Mr. Strong, I used the term “post modernism” in the sense of its appropriation by the left wing to signify all the cultural calamities (from our point of view) that have been visited upon us, since, say, the 1970s. This meek surrender to popular, though mistaken usage, is akin to submitting to the heist by homosexuals of the word “gay,” a lexiconic high crime. “Gay” for centuries denoted sweet and youthful merriment as in the Gay 90s or in the Cornelia Otis Skinner book, Our Hearts Were Young And Gay. There is nothing “gay” in that original and time-honored sense about being homosexual; tragic would be closer to the reality. (If anyone should harbor the least suspicion that I am homophobic, see my pamphlet called “The Ambiguous Realm,” P.E.N. Press, or wait and see the book Broken Lances, Tilted Windmills, A Sojourn in Spain, ETA April, 2011).
Nevertheless, I stand by the judgments reported by Mr. Strong: We as a nation are gone so far down the road to Leviathan, and we as a people are so corrupted and so paganized, and also demographically so critically (as in the “critical mass”) alienated that the hope of recovering the spirit, the patrimony of intellectual assumptions, and the default civic attitude is fatuous; moreover, the conservative establishment has so fallen prey to outdated slogans and has become so smug in its arrogance that it is doomed to political irrelevance. The conservative political establishment of these times are the Nelson Rockefellers of the 1950s.
Sincerely,
Reid Buckley
Reid Buckley is the author of The Idiocy of Assent and the founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking. He is the brother of William F. Buckley, Jr.