As far as I am aware, this video of the critic and
activist Dwight Macdonald debating William F. Buckley on an episode of Firing Line is the only video of
Macdonald on YouTube.
This is not so remarkable a fact that it demands an
intense analysis, but a few observations do I think follow from it (I won’t go
too deeply into the video itself).
Firstly, the fact that this forty-eight-minute clip from a
television episode first broadcast in May 1967 is available to view for free in
its entirety on a website known mainly for cat and prank videos, is remarkable.
It speaks to the surprising element of YouTube that among its line-up of
flashy-but-meaningless material, a great amount of serious intellectual content
can be found.
Speaking for myself, I’ve benefited enormously from the
hundreds of lectures, debates, conversations, interviews and documentaries
featuring scholars and academics uploaded to YouTube. These videos have constituted
an education in their own right, providing of course one does not make it their
only educational resource. I read somewhere once that while Noam Chomsky was
flattered by the attention he got in online videos, he found little evidence that
the same young acolytes ever followed up with any interest in his books (don’t
quote me on that though).
Secondly, it can be said that Macdonald’s presence on
Buckley’s show is underwhelming. Brought in to argue the case for civil
disobedience in the time of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement,
Macdonald can’t help but look like an errant schoolboy brought before an
unimpressed principal. While Buckley, who for some reason has a moderator on
set even though it’s his own show, projects an easy (but smarmy) confidence on
the screen, Macdonald barely gets a clean sentence out, mostly looks down at
his army of cigarettes and is always on the defensive.
It should be pointed out to viewers unacquainted with Dwight
Macdonald that on the page he was a completely different beast. As a critic of
just about everything – politics, philosophy, literature, cinema, newspapers, advertising,
his friends' wives – Macdonald had the kind of lucid and direct prose style
that was tailor made for America’s middle-brow magazine culture. Whether it was
film reviews for Esquire, social
criticism for the New Yorker, or polemics
for Partisan Review, few bested
him for the knock-out combination of cleverness and humour that is the bread
and butter of intellectual journalism.
Thirdly, the historical context of this debate is of
interest. I don’t mean the larger, world-wide context of the Vietnam War or the
Civil Rights Movement, which of course occupy the forefront of this debate.
What I mean is the narrower biographical context of the two participants. Macdonald
first had Buckley in his sights all the way back in May 1952, when he reviewed Buckley's God and Man at
Yale, a book which one can surmise even without reading it is about how Yale had neither God nor men in attendance. Macdonald wrote of the
young reactionary at the time: ‘He has the outward and visible signs of the campus radical,
and the inward and spiritual qualities of the radical’s wealthy grandfather’.
In 1954 Buckley had published another book, this time with his
brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, McCarthy
and his Enemies, a defence of the Wisconsin Senator against...well, his enemies I guess. Macdonald was
similarly dismissive: ‘Messrs. Buckley and Bozell will do very well as minor
comic characters in the mock-heroic epic of McCarthyism, an interlude in our
political history so weird and wonderful that future archaeologists may well
assign it to mythology rather than history’.
But Macdonald really took out the knife when in 1955 Buckley founded and started editing what would become the flagship publication of
American conservatism, National Review.
Writing in an issue of Commentary magazine (before it itself went conservative),
Macdonald indulged in one of his favourite pastimes of comparing and
contrasting the political periodicals across the political spectrum. The first
issues of National Review did not
stack up. ‘Journalistically, the National
Review actually manages to be duller than the liberal weeklies,’ Macdonald
opined. ‘It is even more predictable, much more long-winded, and a good deal
less competent’. Of the editing and writing Macdonald was scathing: ‘…an
article can be long because the writer has a lot to say, or because he doesn’t
know how to say it. Almost everything seems long in the NR, even the short pieces’.
This was for the most part the tone of Macdonald’s
piece, and Buckley did not forget it. A few years later (January 1958) the two
exchanged notes on the subject, with Buckley wondering out loud when Macdonald
was planning to apologize. The first words of Macdonald’s letter in response
were ‘You must be nuts’. From there on the insults came thick and fast: ‘APOLOGIZE????!!!!
Why you damned whippersnapper, you impertinent pipsqueak, what the hell should
I apologize for [?]. I gave your magazine hell, and it deserved it’. It gets
worse (or better): ‘Who do you think you are, you wretched solemn little
sectarian, a sovereign state? And you used to be fun to argue with’.
Viewers can judge for themselves whether Buckley seems
especially, or more than usually, hostile to Macdonald with this history in
mind. What is of immediate note is that Buckley did not threaten to punch Macdonald,
as he did with Chomsky and Gore Vidal. Given the absence of any shouting,
hectoring or insulting in this exchange, it seems to me that what provoked Buckley
to invite Macdonald to appear on Firing
Line was the tense political atmosphere at the time and not the opportunity
to settle scores. Having said that, it seems equally obvious that the whole
episode is structured around an interrogation of Macdonald’s views, with the
hope of exposing his inconsistencies in front of what I presume was a hostile
audience.
Considering Macdonald only gets one YouTube clip, it’s worth
pointing out that it would border on tragedy were YouTube the sole custodian of
his posterity. Far better are his many essays and letters which are among the
brightest objects in my library. My fear is that too many that might come
across Macdonald on YouTube will not have that luxury. So while it’s great of
the Hoover Institution of all places to upload this video of Macdonald,
its educational potential doesn’t come neatly packaged on its own. Like a lot
of what appears on places like YouTube, the usefulness of what we watch depends
on how we watch (following Neil
Postman’s critique of television).
Absent literacy, curiosity and knowledge on the part of the
viewer, even well-intentioned online content becomes a mere diversion. God
knows without these qualities, how could anyone possibly make sense of a man
such as Flighty Dwighty?
Comments