Non-Fiction
 Enlarged, this is the paper delivered by Reid Buckley before the
January 06 meeting of The Awakening Conference, in a panel with Hollywood
producer Ron Maxwell. In this pungent attack on American culture and
on the Republican party, with which he is plainly disgusted, he writes
“And about the third question, what that culture is going to
be? I have no didactic response to offer…except that maybe the
happiest prospect for the United States—this dawned on me recently
in my bed at night, when I had brushed my teeth and thanked my God
that I was not younger, slipping me into the happiest of sleeps—the
most blessed prospect for the United States is that soon, soon, the
baby boomer generation is imminently in extinction.”
This essay comes as a companion to The Future of American Culture.
It consists of a bi-partisan rant against the political hegemony of
our times, attacking establishment Republicans and Democrats for their
inability to think things through and for their duplicity and cowardice.
It proclaims that the era of small government is indeed over, just
as President Clinton proclaimed in his 1996 State of the Union address.
Further, it suggests that there are grave structural problems making
our republican form of popular government unworkable in this age of
the mega-state. In passing, it is also a savage attack on Hillary
Clinton, whose presidential pretensions may not survive.
"USA
Today is
the lament of a truly wise patriot with a broken
heart. No American who loves his country will read
it without sharing
the author's profound sadness at our national failings.
Reid Buckley is an 'other Isaiah' crying out to the
people for repentence and reform. If we heed this call, surely
the God
who has for more than two centuries so richly blessed
this land will not turn His face away from us."
Robert P. George, McCormick
Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison
Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University
"Throughout USA Today, Buckley drives
his readers along a lexiconic highway of thought-provoking
tales gleaned only through a classical education. Darker
images are drawn from personal life experiences. Referring
to the recent spate of high school shootings and child
molestations, Buckley points to a new 'bloodless species
of human being, Frankenstein's monsters of our own society's
creation."
W. Thomas Smith, Jr., Free Lance
Journalist
Mr. Buckley documents with forthright honesty
that we are [as a people] “vile” because we have lost
our virtue; and, he contends, many Americans who still
prize and attempt to follow
and attain virtue do so without remembering the foundation
of faith from which all virtue comes …
His convictions, devotion, and rhetoric remind one of the lines
of Matthew Arnold, the great critic of Victorian England:
Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find the body by the wall.
Just as Jacques Maritain lambasted western culture two generations
ago in The Peasant of the Garonne, so also Buckley bears witness...
… he provides terse, laconic, colorful, summary
proverbs: “[W]hen
our young can express themselves only through grunts or
their gonads, it’s a high crime against civilization…We
like potage. We like licking those greasy fingers, the drippings
off federal
and state spoons, the greasy soup bowls…When one is a gadfly,
one either gets swatted or brushed off…Bad taste, though socially
a curse, is an affliction for which no one may be held
morally culpable, because it can’t be helped…No-fault
insurance has spilled over into no-fault morality; or maybe it’s
the reverse…Let’s
not forget, this is a society that can’t define the present
tense of the verb ‘to be.’” At Christmas, “we
no longer send pictures of the Madonna and Child; we send
pictures of ourselves and our children.” Such morsels and
jewels are generously sprinkled throughout the text…
Mr. Buckley may be no professional scholar
or historian, but he is something equally (or more) valuable---a
well-read, well-bred
scholar-gentleman who will brook no moral or theological
or intellectual laggards …Mr. Buckley declares his thesis
near the beginning of the book. However, his presupposition,
his assumption, his basic
principle, appears near the end: “human intelligence (with
its inspired properties) may penetrate the last biological
and astronomical riddles of the universe without rendering
the essential stubborn
and unanswerable last question, the that which of the Big
Bang that believers ascribe to Him who …And if faith in God
is necessary to our survival, as our guts tell us, and
as historical experience
tends, it seems to me, to teach us, then belief in a Supreme
Being must be (1) that which distinguishes the human being
from the rest
of Creation, (2) in itself evidencing the existence of
the Supreme Being…Since we are able to conceive of Him, He
is;…Deny
Him if you wish, but try to get along without Him.” And he
undertakes his argument from this principle by describing,
analyzing and criticizing our corrupt culture in the following
areas: honor;
values; manners and morals; sex; law; religion.
A review by John S. Reist, Jr., Professor of English,
in The University Bookman, A Quarterly Review of Books,
November 1, 2003
Credo:
A
Reflection
on
the
Republic
"In this astounding and iconoclastic essay, the author analyses
what he calls the growing incoherence between republican
principle and republican practice, and wonders whether
the American people
retain the moral stamina to wage a war against terrorism.
He examines the myth of democratic equality and concludes
that without Christian
support equality is bunkum and all advances made by women,
blacks, and other minorities in this country are in peril;
calls for open
borders yet argues that immigration from cultures that
are “alien” to
republican practices should be subjected to strict indoctrination
in the charters of American liberty; chastises American
conservative leaders and public officials for being faithless
to “first
principles” and calls for a rupture in the alliance between
conservatives of the “Bill Buckley stamp” and neoconservatives
descending from Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol (the most
successful political alliance of modern times, he acknowledges);
lambasts President
George Bush for being insufficiently serious about the
war against terrorism, calling for nationwide mobilization,
including a standby
draft; examines fanatical Islamic irredentism and finds
common spiritual ground between the terrorists and Jews
and Christians; and, among
many other startling deductions, defines secular liberalism
as the principal enemy of the American republic, the West,
and mankind, proposing a coalition of Jews, Christians, and Muslims
to combat
it in order to avoid the tragedy of a hundred years’ war.
Witty,
funky, mordant, playful, tender, dark, passionate, and
soul-shaking, this analysis of the state of the American republic
will
take your breath away and make you fighting mad, either
for or against. It
will not leave you indifferent, and you are unlikely to
view America, Islam, and the War against Terrorism in the
same way ever again."
–The
Editors
"For once, whoever those abject publicity hounds
are who write puffs for publishers have got it right. This
essay is guaranteed to knock
mildly liberal, mildly secularists folk like me off the
stools of their complacency. I wished to engage with Reid
Buckley in hot debate
on almost every page, but there is a powerful residue in
his general argument that makes me incapable of rejecting
it, though I would
dearly love to deny it."
- Edmund L. Zuckerman, President,
Permanent Ad Hoc Committee Against Boring Authors
Teaching
Reid Buckley's techniques for winning arguments and getting
your point across. Now out of print but still available
through the Buckley School.
Available on tape and CD
Narrated in full on 7 one-hour
cassettes by Reid Buckley
Principles
of advanced public speaking, including Reid Buckley's special
techniques for organizing the mind more quickly and efficiently.
Available exclusively through the Buckley School.
"The Dale Carnegie curse of
affability and annecdotes that hangs over American
oratory has turned
us into a nation of speechmakers who think all we have
to do is relax and be 'natural', but Reid Buckley will
not
let us go gently into the dark night of just-plain folks.
His Sex, Power, and Pericles is a timely and joyous
reminder that rhetoric is the domain of thoroughbreds who
are unthreatened
by tension and understand its uses. Aided by his vast erudition
and his knack of marshalling the fragmentary reflections
of his well-traveled life (he's the Marcus Aurelius of
the canceled flight), Buckley has written an expert how-to
manual on podium performance that's also a wise and witty
cultural essay demonstrating that the art of speaking and
the art of living are one."
Florence King
Available on tape
 Learn to organize your thoughts and speak eloquently
by analyzing some of the great speeches of all time.
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An Amazon Reviewer, Hong Kong
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