William F. Buckley hosted the TV interview show Firing Line for 33 years of often-pretentious speech and pontification. He sounded eloquent, at least to those easily impressed by excessive syllables, but if you listened hard enough and could figure out what he was saying, it always struck me as shallow and selfish. There was this odd subtext that the world should be run by smart (by his measure) and wealthy people and that the poor and stupid should just do everyone a favor and comply or, better still, disappear. That's an exaggeration on my part but, at times, not a huge one. He was also darn good at over-intellectualizing topics to the point of missing the entire point. The first few minutes of a 1967 interview with Groucho Marx, which is our video embed below, demonstrates this.
I remember one time on his show Buckley really lost whatever remaining respect I had for him. It was a discussion about capital punishment…and I must admit I've never fully understood the Conservative point-of-view on the topic. It seems to be that though the government is always inept and that it should have as little control of our lives as possible…we can trust and even encourage it to execute people. That is, as long as it executes the people "we" (i.e., the upper class) know should be executed. In one discussion that amazed me, Buckley said he wasn't concerned about innocent people being put to death. We just needed to make sure we had smart jurors because, after all, any intelligent person could hear a case — or even just read the newspaper accounts of a trial — and know for certain who was guilty.
Mr. Buckley lived well into the time when efforts like the Innocence Project were using DNA to free (to date) 258 people from prison, many from convictions for First Degree Murder. To my knowledge, he never commented on this.
The Groucho excerpt — which I'll warn you ends abruptly — is from a new series of manufactured-on-demand DVDs that have been issued of Firing Line episodes. It's one per DVD for ten bucks and you can order the one with Groucho or ones with Ronald Reagan or Norman Mailer or Muhammad Ali or Hugh Hefner or dozens of others. I may get around to ordering the one with David Merrick. Here's a few minutes with Dr. Hackenbush looking like he's not entirely sure why he agreed to appear…
