Michael Moynihan, FIFTH COLUMN co-host and man about town, joins Nancy and Sarah to discuss The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, the new PBS documentary about conservative firebrand William F. Buckley. They discuss his eloquence, mistakes, and political evolution, and Sarah calls the old Firing Line episodes “a call to civility in a time of chaos.”

Also discussed:

* Sarah puts her vibrator on time-out

* The unfortunate rise of “churnalism”

* AJ Cowling? Tacos anyone?

* The Big 5-0 murder-suicide plan

* That time Tracey Ullman talked to Michael about Morrissey

* The affliction of presentism

* Ronald Reagan as “the pretty ship of ideas that Buckley could load up and push out to sea.”

* What did Hitchens think of Buckley?

* Gore Vidal, dragged

* James Baldwin, praised

* The Buckley biography 20 years in the making

* Are WE the new conservatives?

* Don’t cancel Milk Duds!

* “Free trade is a net gain for people, but there are going to be losers”

* “Technology made us rougher people when it came to politics”

* Who will lead a new campus movement. Could it be… Michael Moynihan? (If you let him do it over Zoom?)

Also, why we watch documentaries we disagree with, Nancy’s kind of town, and more literary and video links than you can shake a Rabbit vibrator at.

Also: CALL FOR LETTERS! You have questions? We have answers! smokeempodcast@gmail.com

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Episode Notes:

Japanese Maple, by Clive James

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.So slow a fading out brings no real pain.Breath growing shortIs just uncomfortable. You feel the drainOf energy, but thought and sight remain:Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever seeSo much sweet beauty as when fine rain fallsOn that small treeAnd saturates your brick back garden walls,So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?Ever more lavish as the dusk descendsThis glistening illuminates the air.It never ends.Whenever the rain comes it will be there,Beyond my time, but now I take my share.My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.What I must doIs live to see that. That will end the gameFor me, though life continues all the same:​Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,A final flood of colours will live onAs my mind dies,Burned by my vision of a world that shoneSo brightly at the last, and then was gone.--New Yorker, September 15, 2014

“Go Back to the Cold!” Clive James on John Le Carre (New York Review of Books)

Best of Enemies documentary about Buckley and Vidal

A Traitor to His Class by H.W. Brands (about FDR)

Letters to a Young Contrarian by Hitchens

Nearer My God by William F. Buckley

Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir by Christopher Buckley

Cancel Your Own Goddamn Subscription by William F. Buckley

Reagan in His Own Hand by Kiron K. Skinner

Overdrive: A Personal Documentary by William F. Buckley

Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America by Ted Morgan

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus

“Firehose #84: Did We Really ‘Mostly’ Endorse ‘The Fall of Minneapolis’?” by Matt Welch (Fifth Column Substack)

What’s in your hot box?

Sarah:

Nancy: A love of Chicago and, in anticipation of the 2024 DNC in that big-shouldered town, Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago, by Mike Royko

Michael:

“The Secret Army: The True Story of a Lost Documentary”

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and The Snakehead, by Patrick Radden Keefe

Unanimously chosen outro:

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