When Harold J Murray set out in 1897 to write his 900-page “History of Chess”, he decided to learn Arabic in addition to the 12 languages he already knew (which included Icelandic, Old Middle German, Early Anglo-Saxon, Medieval Latin and Sanskrit).

Don’t you just hate people like that?

How does one do justice to the pleasure and even the need for fantasy in a world of cruel political reality? How do you defend intellectual awareness while defending dreams? How do you respect the dreams of a child, and the child herself, while taking seriously the obligations of adulthood?
Guillermo del Toro reminds us that there’s no answer.
It’s the only fantasy movie I’ve seen recently, and definitely the only one full of special effects wizardry, that’s actually made for adults.

But I bet people laughed just becuase of the simple unexpectedness of it. There are surprising continuities between what is funny to adults and what is funny to a 3-year-old (i.e.: surprise!).

This is one of the most interesting extended discussions of a joke I have ever seen.

As one of the prototypes for the Kirkpatrickian “authoritarian” dictator whose country transitioned fairly smoothly to democracy, Franco would have been viewed with some sympathy by an early-nineties conservative audience. Buckley surely knew this, as he surely knew that his audience would have more than a few Rush Limbaugh fans. Hence, it would have been perfectly natural for him to equate Limbaugh and Franco, in that setting, as two leaders who were bitterly despised except among those unfashionable people wise and farsighted enough to appreciate them.

The surreal part of this story is, to me, why the majority of the audience would laugh spontaneuously if Buckley were equating loving Rush to loving Franco.

Possible answers:

(1) They didn’t get what Buckley was trying to say, but laughed anyway.

(2) They really believe it’s obvious, in a contrarian and politically incorrect way, why someone would love Franco (i.e., his status as a pillar of anti-communism, his support of traditionalist Catholicism), just as it is obvious why someone would love Rush.

(3) They think Buckley is appropriating liberal stereotypes of American conservativism (i.e., “crypto-fascists”) in order to mock them and that this mockery is both obvious and funny.

I vote for (1).

This says two things about the state of Spain in Franco’s last years: firstly, that it was taken for granted that anyone without a vested interest was opposed to the regime; secondly, that the state had given up on even trying to control low level disaffection, reserving its attentions for active opponents.

What Buckley thought he was saying remains a mystery to me. Probably he just didn’t get it.

That’s the point of the joke: it doesn’t follow that it was true, especially as it very obviously wasn’t literally true.

I have to think that you are not aware of the Catholic conservative take on Franco

Living as I do in a Spanish town that survived a very long Republican siege, I have to say I’m not unaware of it.

A similar joke, related by Freud: at a formal dinner party, a man was passed a bowl of Hollandaise sauce, dipped his fingers in it and ran them through his hair. Noticing his neighbors’ dismay, he apologised, “I’m so sorry! I thought it was mayonnaise.”

As to what Buckley had in mind, who knows? I suspect that he told the joke to avoid an uncomfortable question. Such a famously sesquipedalian snob may not have enjoyed Limbaugh, and may have considered him a competitive threat, but he wouldn’t have wanted to alienate the enthusiasts.