Civil Society Doesn't Necessarily Mean Uncombative Society

You know, before I head off to tomorrow’s book-related speech by Al Regnery (noted in my prior entry), I just have to note that I love the fact that Buckley’s last book before his death has the defiant and in some sense unconservative title Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription. The customer is not always right, as a teenage summer job as a supermarket bagger taught me, and sometimes readers need to be told to get bent.

Regnery is partly responsible for what (as I recall) was the only time I actually spoke to Buckley, at a gathering of the Phillips Foundation that Regnery co-chaired — and I got Buckley to autograph an anthology of libertarian sci-fi stories I happened to be reading in which he had a piece, a brief depiction of what it might be like if the Apollo-Soyuz spaceship docking of the 1970s ended with the Soviet cosmonauts defecting. Take that, commies!