Yet another really excellent essay. THANK YOU for the important intellectual work that you do. Your mention of Buckley and the damage he did hit close to home for me, literally. Buckley's lifelong sidekick and brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, was my mother's cousin - the two families were from the local gentry of Omaha; my grandmother's older sister was his mother. My father once remarked, acerbically, that my grandmother (his mother-in-law) "basked" in the Buckley connection. And I knew Brent Bozell, slightly, when I was a kid. He was "nice" to little-kid me on occasional family visits. His wife, Buckley's sister, was extremely nice, especially to my brother into adulthood, e.g. taking him to lunch when he moved to DC and comforting him in the failure of his first marriage. It fully dawned on me only in middle age how completely nutty that whole bunch was, politically and ideologically, in ways far from harmless. She was a true-believing right-wing, Opus Dei-type Catholic and edited books for the Regnery publishing outfit. The political harm that Brent did is a matter of extensive public record. All of which is nausea-inducing on a personal level, whenever I take a moment to reflect on it, as now. But what's really sobering is remembering that he, Brent, was, legitimately, mentally ill (long story). There were episodes in his life story when that impinged on the wider family, like the time he showed up unannounced at our front door in small-town Wisconsin. And it's fair to ask (as with, say, Herschel Walker): To what extent did his personal head problems also impinge on American public life and society, via his assertive celebrity and influence?
Yet another really excellent essay. THANK YOU for the important intellectual work that you do. Your mention of Buckley and the damage he did hit close to home for me, literally. Buckley's lifelong sidekick and brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, was my mother's cousin - the two families were from the local gentry of Omaha; my grandmother's older sister was his mother. My father once remarked, acerbically, that my grandmother (his mother-in-law) "basked" in the Buckley connection. And I knew Brent Bozell, slightly, when I was a kid. He was "nice" to little-kid me on occasional family visits. His wife, Buckley's sister, was extremely nice, especially to my brother into adulthood, e.g. taking him to lunch when he moved to DC and comforting him in the failure of his first marriage. It fully dawned on me only in middle age how completely nutty that whole bunch was, politically and ideologically, in ways far from harmless. She was a true-believing right-wing, Opus Dei-type Catholic and edited books for the Regnery publishing outfit. The political harm that Brent did is a matter of extensive public record. All of which is nausea-inducing on a personal level, whenever I take a moment to reflect on it, as now. But what's really sobering is remembering that he, Brent, was, legitimately, mentally ill (long story). There were episodes in his life story when that impinged on the wider family, like the time he showed up unannounced at our front door in small-town Wisconsin. And it's fair to ask (as with, say, Herschel Walker): To what extent did his personal head problems also impinge on American public life and society, via his assertive celebrity and influence?