Less than Zero

This shot of Ronnie and William F. Buckley, taken in 1988, Reagan’s last year in office, fascinates me. Ronnie looks pretty much stuffed, ready for Madame Tussaud’s. But even though he may not remember what he had for breakfast, or the name of the dude in the cheap suit who keeps talking his ear off, he still remembered to button his jacket, which is what really separates the men from the boys. Buckley, on the other hand, while 15 years younger than Ronnie, looks half-senile, an old man stumbling to his feet with his belly hanging out, unable even to stand upright, knowing that he’s supposed to smile for the camera but not knowing why.

I’m not sure why Bill looks so beat in this picture. Maybe he was jet-lagged, or had had a bad night’s sleep before. Or maybe his life-long devotion to alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and uppers and downers¹ had something to do with it. But I wonder if the fact that Crazy Ronnie had been putting Bill through hell for the past two years with his glasnost and his perestroika, and his borscht and his total fucking surrender of the free world to commie domination might have had something to do with it as well.

The explosions of rage that emerged from Buckley and his magazine, the National Review, when Ronnie and Gorby were putting to bed the 40-year-old monster known as MAD are still echoing through the universe, Buckley at one point accusing Reagan of signing a “suicide pact” by agreeing to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty in 1987.² The treaty implemented the “zero option,” calling for the elimination of intermediate-range missiles from Europe, a proposal developed by the Reagan Administration when it first took office.

What’s “funny” about this is that the zero option was originally concocted by Richard Perle, a leading neocon, and enthusiastic opponent of arms control, to be so unfavorable to the Soviet Union that it would never be accepted, something that Perle ruefully admitted after the fact, when those devious bastards went ahead and signed it anyway.³ But what’s really funny is that Buckley et al. certainly knew this, undoubtedly chuckled about it at those cognac, cigar, and black tie get-togethers of which men of affairs are so fond. They were horrified when their supposed dream came true, because they didn’t want “peace,” on any terms. What they desired was “the struggle.”

Today’s Republican Party is in the same mode today as it was in the Reagan Administration, seeking struggle for struggle’s sake. Ever since the New Deal, Republicans have felt that it’s impossible to win a presidential election on domestic issues. Without an “existential threat” overseas, it’s Democrats as far as the eye can see. The zero option, obviously, couldn’t cut it. So from now on, the Republicans will be searching for less than zero.