While I’m not generally keen to shovel dirt on someone’s encomium to a dead friend, Brendan Greeley’s remembrance of William F. Buckley Jr. in today’s LA Times Opinion area doesn’t sit well with me.

(First things first: Because Opinion no longer has its own section — it’s the flipside of Book Review — it is now more properly called an area. Most weeks, the area is squirreled away inside a wraparound from Jennifer’s Leather.)

To Greeley, these are the charming traits evinced by the old nob:

1. He had money and wasn’t defensive about it. “To admit that wealth exists requires a kind of innocence, a sincere wonder that anyone might be offended by it.”

2. He “played poker with 19th century Spanish doubloons.”

3. “He had most likely never in his life picked up his own towel.”

There’s more along those lines, but the operant disquisition is into the source of Buckley Jr.’s wealth. His father was a lawyer and oil baron who made his money south of the border in Venezuela, where he struck it rich with Standard Oil, and in Mexico, where before he was kicked out of the country he worked to get the Mexican constitution changed so that he more widely speculate in oil and land. It doesn’t sound as though there was a lot of personal towel-retrieving there, either, but Buckley pere earned his fortune.

In some corners, there is still a notion that the better off should do something to assist the worse off, those without pricey Bordeaux and 36-foot sloops, those who can’t use 19th century coins as poker chips. There’s a sense that the world has helped make them better off, and perhaps they should do something to make the world better off. You see this expressed in the recent actions of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, who are placing billions of dollars behind curing diseases and providing people access to clean drinking water. What Buckley Jr. gave us is dozens of books dedicated to the idea that democracy is too freely given and that the rights of the patrician few outweigh the needs of even the most destitute and hopeless. He also gave us Ronald Reagan and, unbelievably, Senator Joe Lieberman. (Buckley actively campaigned against liberal Republican Lowell Weicker, endorsing and campaigning for Lieberman, who won in a close election decided in conservative areas of the state.) Don’t like the federal government you’ve got right now? It started with William F. Buckley Jr.

But his friend seems blind to all this, in the way of surviving friends. He lauds Buckley’s “luck in the world,” luck which comes of a massive inheritance and a scrabbling greed that never cares about others, and he praises Buckley’s profound interest in every single person he ever met. Didn’t he ever meet anyone who couldn’t afford a cup of coffee, and if he did and was profoundly interested, did he do anything about it?

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