ABA

My beloved wife taught me a phrase, among others, that resonated very strongly this past week with the passing of Conservative intellectual popularizer bar none, William F. Buckley. In obituaries Buckley is justly praised for being a man of ideas and eager to exchange them with those with whom he most disagreed. Checking out an epochal interview with Noam Chomsky from 1969 on Buckley's long-running PBS series, Firing Line, everything I love and abhor about him are on open display:



The good stuff is, of course, the massive respect for the audience. This model of long-form talk, thorough debates given the time and focus necessarily for actual substance, certainly lives on in Charlie Rose, but even there is more ameliorating, as Rose maintains a consensus journalistic impartiality, not there to challenge his guests to a duel. Then there's the high degree of language and rhetoric, the lack of a dumbing down. Most importantly, there's the way this comes together in Buckley's corner of the public square, his fearlessness maybe built on his arrogance, but nonetheless a real hunger for facing the opposition in broad daylight, democracy as it was meant to be, in the ultimate medium of his times.

The crazy-making stuff falls both under Buckley's idiosyncrasies and what you can see so obviously from the clip he gifted to contemporary Conservative discourse. As a proto-O'Reilly and Hannity and Coulter and neocon, that overly rhetorical tactic they all rely on of creating false comparisons and bullying hypotheticals when the reality of the argument isn't going their way, and talking over their guest as much as they have to to do it.

Then there's the under-the-breath dog whistling and assumption-dropping. The preening smile. The self-satisfaction. Most of all, it's that very phrase my wife taught me: A.B.A.

American Bullshit Accent.

This is when an American has or affects a slightly British inflection, common to some news anchors and celebrity academics. Buckley is clearly the most egregious example of ABA, but Conservative ABA lives on in rightwing celebutard Ann Coulter, who wraps her vile rhetoricisms in that, the most bullshit of vocal styles.

Buckley's saving graces are numerous enough -- his fiction writing (spy novels based on his nine months in the CIA right after school), his sailing writing, his capacity for self-effacement, his friendship with John Kenneth Galbraith, his turn against the Iraq War and the entire Cheney/Bush governance (betrayal of Conservatism), and his unequivocal condemnation of the outing of Valerie Plame by this Administration.

Can one forgive him his unrepentant promotion of Red Scare fraud Joe McCarthy, the Vietnam War or opposition to federal reform of Civil Rights?

If only for his unparalleled practice of the droll accent itself.