Talk about your Stuff White People Like… the white folk LOVED William F. Buckley, who died yesterday. What better way to honor the memory of the founder of modern conservatism and conversational media than by imitation! Appearing on a panel last night (with Daryn Kagan) about new global media methods, held at the Southern Center for International Studies, I’m either channeling Buckley, who’s TV personna of louche chair-slouching always fascinated me as a child when I’d glimpse him on other people’s TV sets, or I’m morphing into Tom Baxter.
photo courtesy of Luisa Cuellar-Calad
Mostly Media 
If you were chewing on your glasses it would be Buckley. But with the peering over the rims you are most definitely turning into Tom Baxter.
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Well, shoot, I hope it wasn’t WFB you were channeling or I’d have to have you exorcised. I’m a bit put off by the hagiographic bio-pieces that have been besmirching my teevee and my ajc/new york times since Bill began his eternal dirt nap. The guy was brilliant, wordy, clever, adventuresome and rich. A philosopher for the Piedmont Driving Club set and a man without a soul. He believed (and wrote, so it was no secret) that Southerners were perfectly right to deny voting privileges to blacks, that AIDS patients should be identifiable marked so as to set them apart from the “clean” population. There is more, but I close with the thought that anyone who could bring tears to Pegga Noonan’s brittle eyes by passing on could not have meant much to the world beyond the boardroom and the yacht. He, through his patrician ways, gave legitimacy to a “conservative” movement that was just (and is still just) a social Darwinist cesspool masquerading as thought and purpose.
But don’t get me started…
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I of course meant “identifiably,” not “identifiable.”
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