INVEIGHING WE WILL GO

Buckley sallies forth again, mounted on a white steed, tilting his lance at Mao and Kosygin and Justice Douglas who should be impeached and William Kunstler who should be disbarred. And what with Nixon's recent defection on China, Buckley seems more than ever the Don Quixote of ideological anticommunism, keeping faith with the "pensive, literate, graceful" few, the "biblical Remnant" of true Conservativism. This most recent collection of National Review pieces, syndicated columns and other obiter dicta of the right-thinking Right also includes his Playboy interview of a couple of years past and is, according to the author, less guilty of "anfractuosity" than his earlier works — though we doubt that readers will notice any tempering of the silver-tongued malice. Foreign affairs is the chief preoccupation, with the domino theory prominently featured in support of continued "tenacity in Vietnam." Unlike his repartee, Buckley's reasoning can be awful, e.g. the absurd analogy between support for Thieu's freedom fighters in South Vietnam and de Gaulle's Free French forces in World War II. In the domestic sphere he favors repealing the minimum wage laws as a means of providing more jobs for black teenagers and urges a "full legal attack, with the passage of new laws, if necessary," against the Panthers. Buckley's delicate aesthetic sense is offended by John Lennon and men with long hair and he cites St. Paul and Thomas Aquinas in support of his revulsion at the latter. The biblical Remnant will no doubt cheer; the deluded majority will read it, if at all, strictly for the prickly entertainment value.