Dale Nelson sent me this link to a London Telegraph list of “50 Crime Writers You Should Read Before You Die.” It’s been linked at other blogs, but I think it belongs here too. Without doing the actual math (which would tire out my brain muscle), I think I’ve read something by about half these authors. I’m not sure I’m all that keen to check out most of the remainder. They seem rather dark and nihilistic and “significant” to me.

In regard to the title of this post, OK, I never actually met William F. Buckley. Or corresponded with him. Or with anybody who ever met him, as far as I know.

I can’t even say he brought me into conservatism. To be honest, although I’ve ready many of his essays, the only books of his I’ve read have been some of his novels. (Which are very good.)

But he was part of my pilgrimage.

I first became aware of him in Green Bay, Wisconsin, one evening around 1970 when I was making a brief visit to the home of a friend. As is my wont, I was checking out the bookshelves, and I saw a book entitled Up From Liberalism, by William F. Buckley.

What a great title, I thought.* So I pulled it off the shelf.

You must understand that I was a Democrat in those days. My dad had always been a Democrat, and a few years of college had managed to convince me that if you were a serious Christian, you had to be a Democrat, because the Democratic Party was the party of compassion (this was before they nudged all the pro-lifers out). So sneaking a peak at a politically conservative book had something of the same shameful thrill as sneaking a look at a copy of Playboy.

I was amazed by the back of the book jacket. You know how most books have a series of quotations from favorable reviews on the back?

For this book, Buckley chose to list a selection of the nastiest things that had been written about his previous books by liberal reviewers.

I realized that I was looking at sheer, unalloyed brilliance.

In a conservative. There was a little cognitive dissonance there.

But that impression and that memory remained with me over the succeeding years, as I slowly realized that the Democratic Party was no longer tolerating my beliefs, and that some of my political beliefs were fatheaded anyway.

Rest in peace, Mr. Buckley.



*For those of you who suffer from a contemporary education, and therefore know nothing of American history, Up From Liberalism was a take-off on Up From Slavery, the autobiography of Booker T. Washington, whom you probably heard about during Black History Month.

I’m getting another cold. This winter has been essentially wall-to-wall colds. I don’t recall such a bad string since I was a kid, and had adenoids.

For some reason I woke up this morning when my renter got up (about 5:00 a.m.). I never do that.

Then I checked my alarm clock. In the dark, instead of hitting the light bar, I knocked the thing clear off the bedside table. When I found it again, I discovered that it had decided that the year was 1997 (it’s one of those atomic clocks, with a brain of sorts), and that I wanted to get up at 2:00 a.m. I spent about fifteen minutes getting the thing re-set.

And then I forget to turn the alarm on.

When I got to work (I made it on time), I found that the atomic clock I keep on my desk (love those things. What could be better than having an Unseen Servant automatically re-set your clock every night?) had suddenly decided that it was in a different time zone.

And the cash register neglected to figure sales tax on a purchase.

I think my machines are conspiring against me.

Speaking of the sales tax, our honorable state legislators just voted to raise ours. The governor vetoed it, but they overrode him.

In the last election they regained control of both houses, running on the promise that they’d “give a break to the middle class. Make those rich folks pay their fair share.”

So they raised the sales tax. Because—you know. The middle class doesn’t buy—you know… stuff.

And they raised our vehicle registration fees. Because the middle class doesn’t own cars.

And they raised the gas tax. Because those middle class folks never buy gas.

This will be a wonderful opportunity for the Republicans in Minnesota this fall, if they have any brains.

Which, this being Minnesota, is problematic.

Doug Wilson talks numbers in a post today about an ugly part of our modern culture.

Numbers about this kind of thing, taken out of context in this way, are weapons. Consider Kinsey’s infamous lie about 10 percent of the population being homosexual, and that figure, apparently immortal now, is routinely used to make the rest of us “face facts,” and come to terms with what is obviously a fact of nature. It is in fact lying propaganda. In the same way, the raw fact that American has a 10 billion dollar a year porn problem is used by friends and foes of porn alike, the former to tell us, “resistance is futile, you will be assimilated,” and the latter to tell us if we don’t get off our keisters now, we are all going to be living in a seedier section of one of the Cities of the Plain in about three weeks.

From my point of view, our problem with this vice has more to do with the free and publicity side than the pay-per-view side. Why shouldn’t the current issue of Sports Illustrated and some celebrity gossip mags/pages considered part of this $10 billion industry?