Francophilia on the Right

I would have said that the joke about Franco was:
no matter how many precautions you take, it is never safe to say anything bad about him.

You go through all of this rigamarole, but at the end of it, you are still talking with someone who could get you killed if you say the wrong thing.

That’s how deeply insidious the fear can be under totalitarian regimes.

And I would say that’s what Buckley meant, too: you may think that this is a safe audience in which I can tell you what I really think, but I’m no fool, and I know it is not safe.

Whether the audience’s laughter meant that they understood that message from him, or just laughed because the ending was unexpected, I cannot say.

Given that it was an audience of conservatives, I would imagine they probably did not understand him.

and there you have it:

with three replies in, we have cleared up the riddle pretty conclusively.

I mean, why did you even think it was open to any ambiguity?

2 would work, except in the Limbaugh context — I don’t see how to map it onto Buckley’s attitude about Rush. (Is the idea that Buckley’s so afraid of the totalitarian control liberals have over him that even in a safe space he’s still going to say he doesn’t like Rush? Maybe, but it doesn’t seem to fit Buckley’s tail-twisting personal style.)

So, Buckley is insulting the audience, by saying “I don’t like Rush, but I’m afraid to say so even in front of an audience that invited me to speak, because you dittoheads are so powerful and in such lockstep that you’ll hurt me for saying so”? Mmmmmaybe.

“…the last living member [sic] of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade”

Well, no.

But you thinking Pan’s labyrinth had a happy ending is even more odd.

All of you are wrong. Buckley is saying that he likes Rush Limbaugh _because_ Rush is just like General Franco.

Chicks dig jerks, and Buckley digs dictator-wannabes. QED.

I am less interested in Buckley’s professed view of Rush than the fact that he was doing his usual job of providing cover for the haters.

Lars-Erik Nelson said it best:

Bill Buckley exists to wrap up peoples’ base, greedy, low-life, mean and nasty views into high-faluting language so that they don’t have to go around thinking they are just mean, stupid and nasty, but instead have a philosophy like Buckley’s.

My reading of the joke was the same as #2.

But you thinking Pan’s labyrinth had a happy ending is even more odd.

I saw it as a happy ending (if somewhat ambiguously happy). The girl passes the test and takes her place as a fairy. (Of course, this only works if all the fairy stuff is real and not a product of the girl’s imagination.)

I concur with dr’s reading of the joke. The “funny thing” about totalitarian regimes is that they not only ruthlessly suppress any sentiment they don’t like, but that their likes, and especially their dislikes, are fancifully arbitrary.

That said, I suspect a great number of the people who laughed at Buckley’s joke didn’t get it either, but figured since he told it, it must be really, really witty.

I suggest the point of the joke is that if the person just said they liked Franco out in public, the listener would likely believe he was just saying that because he had to say that with all these people, including possible secret police, around. It was a fascist country after all. It is only after taking all these elaborate precautions to make sure the speaker will be heard by no one but the listener is the listener prepared to believe what the speaker says. And then the speaker says he likes him. The joke is funny because the set-up makes you think, of course, that the speaker is going to say he does not like him.

And for the people who have posted that the point was that Franco was so unpopular you had to hide favorable feelings for him, I have to think that you are not aware of the Catholic conservative take on Franco, which Buckly shared, and which was … shall we just say not very negative. Buckley would not be telling a joke with the point that Franco was almost universally despised.

And how it fits in with Rush is that this is Buckley’s way of saying, I know since he he is conservative, I am conservative, and you are all conservative, you expect me to say I like him, and I am; but I want you to know that I am saying it because that is how I really feel, not just because it is expected of me. There ya go, the whole thing explained :)

Well, if the concern against #2 is
“but surely Buckley couldn’t be such an arrogant, condescending bastard as to mislead the audience and talk over their heads while actually despising them–”

then, res ipsa loquitur, baby. This is Buckley.

And I completely agree with 14. He’s a vicious piece of work. He is always happy to use people who advance his ends–whether Limbaugh, Limbaugh’s audience, Reagan, or Bush–but the agreement on points of policy (e.g. no taxes on rich people) never gets in the way of his certainty that he is above them and they are below him.

And, yes, it is only too perfect that the Red-Stater still doesn’t get it.

Moving remembrances from Knox. Which brings to mind how Jessica Mitford used to describe herself, when pointing out that she saw (and said) that Howard Fast was a hack even before he left the Party: she was a premature anti-Fastist.

As for the joke, I agree with 4.

A similar Stalin-era story (that I assumed was an urban legend) was where everyone kept clapping and clapping, afraid to be the first to stop. Turns out that Solzhenitsyn relates it as true in Gulag Archipelago. I’m still somewhat skeptical that it happened, it is too pat, but it is a story in the same vein of the jokes above.

Then after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel.

That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”

Sorry, should have inserted based on the title I thought you were talking about right-wing lovers of France.

Counterfactual (20) is of course correct. The point of a joke is to make people laugh.

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.

How old is the joke? I seem to remember reading it in Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin (1964), with Walter Ulbricht going around in disguise, testing his popularity. (KGB Colonel Stok, who fancies himself as a comedian, explains to the Michael Caine character that he gets his material from the arrest reports of the unfortunate jokers.) Any earlier references?

I’m with # 1 and # 11.

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).

The context of this anecdote is important. Buckley is speaking during the early nineties–a time when conservatives were feeling vindicated, not just about the Cold War in general, but more specifically about the Cold-War policy of supporting right-wing third-world “authoritarian” dictatorships. Many of these (Argentina, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan) were rapidly democratizing while their Marxist counterparts (Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Zimbabwe) sank deeper into repression and squalor.

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.

Meaning 11 sounds right-ish to me — possibly meaning 11 with overtones of meaning 38.

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.

37. In English. The guy who told it speaks 5 or 6 languages fluently and others less so, Català is his first language, Castillian is his third or fourth (I forget which), and English his fifth, although he says it’s by far the best language to swear in.

Don’t you just hate people like that?

Another great joke about Franco concerned a Spanish Cabinet Minister being awoken by a phone call one night at 3 am. He answers it to hear the Principal Private Secretary to General Franco calling to say he has “bad news” and “even worse news”. The Minister asks for the bad news first. Well, says the PPS, the Generalissimo has just died! After responding with shock, the Minister asks what news could possibly be worse. The PPS replies: “The Cabinet has just met in emergency session and they have chosen you to be the one to tell him.”