Word: lasting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Until last week Firing Line was there to remind us that TV didn't have to be that way. The show was spawned in the earnest mid-'60s, before popular culture swallowed up the middlebrow and "educational TV" became a comical oxymoron. During last week's taping, Buckley told his guests about David Susskind, the talk pioneer from the 1950s who was host of a show called Open End. "Every night he'd go on the air with some guests at 9," Buckley said, "and he'd keep going--an hour, two hours, three--until he got bored...
...course there is Buckley himself, with his darting tongue and aristocratic drawl. The final broadcast shows clips of Johnny Carson and Robin Williams hilariously impersonating Buckley. But neither pretender could put an interviewee off balance like the Firing Line host, who at last week's taping leaned in to one of his guests, the liberal New York City politician Mark Green, and said, "You've been on the show close to 100 times over the years. Tell me, Mark, have you learned anything...
Buckley prized intellectual combat, but also the careful ventilation of ideas. Last week he cited with pride the fact that the philosopher Mortimer Adler used Firing Line to explicate his elaborate proofs for the existence of God. Somehow, it's hard to imagine Adler on the Jerry Springer Show...
...that TV could elevate its audience, and Buckley survives as a kind of monument to that goal. He will continue to write books and his popular newspaper column, in which he no doubt will stand against the coarser currents of popular culture. When the Firing Line taping was through last week, and after champagne had been served, Ted Koppel interviewed Buckley for Nightline. At the end, Koppel said, "Mr. Buckley, we have 10 seconds left. Could you sum up in 10 seconds?" Said Buckley simply...
...last two Ripley novels are slack, ungainly; Ripley is more prey than predator. But the first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon...