Word: buckleys
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What finally opened last week was two musicals lumped together, one compellingly written and overpoweringly performed, the other so ditzily conceived and garishly staged that it deflates the first. The scenes between Carrie (Linzi Hateley, 17) and her mother (Betty Buckley, a 1983 Tony winner for Cats) crackle with longing. The daughter is love starved and so innocent that she does not know what is happening when she menstruates in the high school shower. Her mother is aquiver with barely suppressed sexuality, yet ablaze with guilty memory. The conflict between the girl's aching to be normal and her mother...
...time Buckley founded the National Review in 1955, he had abandoned ambitions to be a political philosopher. The long scholarly pull did not suit his polemical talents and gregarious nature. His friend Literary Critic Hugh Kenner put the matter concisely when he said that Buckley "was simply moving too fast to think, by which I mean that thought had become reflex...
...started early. At age seven, in 1932, he wrote King George to demand that Britain pay its war debts. He named his first sailboat Sweet Isolation. After Stateside service in the Army during World War II, Buckley went to Yale, where he used the rostrum and the columns of the university paper to crusade against liberalism. He formalized his quarrels in God and Man at Yale and became an unexpected best-selling author...
Judis provides useful insights into Buckley's conservative lineage. One early influence, Albert Jay Nock, an anarchist and enemy of mass culture, had visions of an intellectual elite he called the Remnant. Another, Yale Political Scientist Willmoore Kendall, argued that the interests of the majority should always prevail over individual rights. A loathing of the left had already been passed on to Buckley by his father Will, a Texas-born oilman who made a fortune in Mexico, only to have most of his property there seized in the years after the 1910 revolution...
Judis, an editor at the leftward newsmagazine In These Times, fosters this and like assessments without endorsing them. He is more definite in his conclusion: since conservatism triumphed with the election of his pal Ronald Reagan, Buckley has lost his competitive urge. The last lap of the 20th century may provide a new liberal challenger, but until then we are left with a small irony. Reagan, the former actor, entered the White House at about the same time that Buckley, the political activist, began changing into an entertainer...