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In Memoriam: William F. Buckley
By Riverboat in Flotsam and Jetsam
February 29, 2008

One of the nicest things my wife ever did for me, besides letting me give her my surname, was to obtain tickets to see William Buckley debate John Kenneth Galbraith here in Victoria. The topic was Resolved: That Ronald Reagan Should Be Reelected To a Second Term.

He was a towering figure for me, encompassing all the qualities I wanted to imitate, the laconic polymath with a happy talent of decimating his opponents with satiric barbs like fishhooks that hurt more pulling them out that going in.

I became a Buckleyphile as soon as I discovered National Review. When I learned that the founder of the magazine also had a talk show on PBS, I began watching Firing Line regularly. From then on, most of my reading consisted of writers and authors mentioned/featured in his publication and show. He was my touchstone for politics, literature, philosophy, vocabulary, and even the Church. He made the defending the Church, Western Civilization and the American Way of Life easier for the rest of us because he articulated volumes of information with erudition and passion. Not only that, he gathered about him other towering figures and gave them a platform. Reagan defeated Communism, and we owe a great deal to him for that, but we also owe a great deal to Buckley as well for educating us on a fortnightly basis about the true nature of that Workers' Paradise conceived in Hell.

I saved a little article from one of those issues that I want to pass along here. It made me roar with laughter then, and still does.

Q: Mr. Buckley, your supporters regard your style as epideictic, gnomic, perhaps even profluent, or perspicuous. Your detractors, however, might contend that your approach leans toward the pleonastic, periphrastic, or euphistic and, in any event, is obstruent to luculent communication. How do you feel about that?

Buckley: I’m not sure what obstruent means.

[Michael Rose interviews William F. Buckley
3/4/83 – National Review]