I don't think I've ever been so transfixed by anything like I was with James Baldwin's speech. His incredible power as orator is barely contained by the grainy footage. He makes Buckley look like a little child with nothing to say. A stupid little child playing grown up.
I watched it all, from the point where the Oxbridge twat opposing the motion refers to the "negro problem" and makes a spurious comparison between US wages and UK wages, to the point where the audience collectively kill themselves rather than be patronised to death by Buckley. I don't know whether the negro problem remark was deliberate or not, they're very slippery these debating types, but I can't see the problem he's referring to. At that point black people were kept in place by Jim Crow and where they objected they weren't asking for anything that wasn't taken for granted by the white folk. This isn't a partisan point, Britain was doing little better in 1965.
Baldwin was magnificent, just as I was thinking he's taking it slowly and that the internet has dulled my capacity to appreciate oratory like this, he positively took off. His restraint speaks of a kind of strength and dignity that has no resonance with a privileged white man like me. I've had most things just handed to me.
I used to work with a black woman in a large organisation with excellent liberal credentials and all the right policies. Most of the black faces there were behind brooms or the counter in the canteen. The woman I worked with knew many of these people and made a point of exchanging more than the few words needed to complete a transaction with them. She never spoke of it but I came to realise she was a member of a very special club whose members stuck together because they'd been on the shit end of history practically forever. Whatever their degree of success they never lost touch with their brothers and sisters.
As to Buckley, I'd been led to believe he was on the thoughtful end of American conservatism; imagine my disappointment. He was absolute proof of JK Galbraith's contention that "the modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness". His grandparents worked too, indeed! Yes they did, at paid jobs that enabled them to buy vast tracts of Texas where oil was discovered. It went downhill from there. The strangulated patrician tones didn't help. I'd normally not be sniffy about accents but I suspect an element of his was pure affectation.
I could go on but I'll restrain myself and comment briefly on the man who introduced the debate, Norman St John Stevas. He was a conservative politician, of the old school, who lost favour after 1979. He was one of Britain's stately homos, though he never came out. As the obituarists put it (and did in his case, he died last year), he never married.
After elevation to the peerage he took to wearing a lot of purple and writing in purple ink. When shaking hands he would offer his in the manner of a cardinal expecting his ring to be kissed. He was a devout catholic and the go-to man in matters of etiquette to and the constitutional position of royalty; in short an old queen. A harmless one, he never spoke out against any gay issues and was socially liberal. So along with Baldwin that's two gay lives fucked over by social convention..
I love that Buckley was complaining about the liberalness of universities in the 1960s even. The rhetoric of the conservative movement hasn't budged a bit in 50 years, still spiteful and evasive.
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