Standing athwart history, yelling Stop

In what Armavirumque terms yesterday's other handover, the National Review's William F. Buckley has relinquished control of the magazine he founded a half-century ago.

The publisher's statement he included in the first issue remains as compelling today as it did on Nov. 19, 1955:

"I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater," said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does." We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything. (How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things…

Power Line reflects on the Buckley legacy.

I've been hunting for my favorite WFB pic, an image of him riding a Vespa through the streets of Manhattan that ran on the cover of his 1968 compilation The Jeweler's Eye. Anyone have a copy?