I'll always remember Buckley as the guy who completely lost his temper on national television after losing an argument to Gore Vidal. As a devoted warmonger and an enemy of Constitutional rights he had nothing to recommend him except a seemingly cultured and erudite style, which strangely excuses his supercilious and sarcastic wrongheadedness to many people who should know better.

The first time I saw W.F.B. on TV, I had never heard of him and failed to catch the name of this talk host with an acquired Eastern prep school accent and a bizarrly argued advocacy of an American foreign policy just barely this side of Rule Brittania. Shortly afterward, I described his program to some friends as hosted by some "supercilious, ultra Catholic." In unison they cried out, "That's William F. Buckley!"

Once discovering his show, however, I rarely missed it. What a charletan! It soon became evident to me that Buckley, for all his erudition and pedantry, never gave his guests equal time to respond or rebut Buckley's initial assertions. What I observed was, while the camera was on the guest responding and building his/her argument, Buckley would very carefully place his hand behind his carefully coiffed hair and the camera would shift back to Buckley, who would then interupt. I doubt any guest was ever allowed to fully develop an argument on Buckley's program.

But for all that, what struck me then and remains with me now, is the extraordinary narcissism of the host. See how he wields that pencil; has he not lovely fingers, which he holds up on camera, though he never uses the pencil? See how he widens his lovely eyes. The affair between Bill and the camera was positively lustful.

I think that the Irish (Kennedy) and Scots-Irish (Jackson and Buchanan amongst others) might take issue with being lumped in with the Anglo-Saxons.

Then we should include another Scots-Irish president: Taylor.

Our daughter was born in Berlin when her father was in the military. She had dual citizenship until she was 18, when it defaulted to just U.S because she didn't declare for German citizenship.

The U.S./Canada customs officers occasionally have trouble with her passport every time she crosses the Detroit River to Windsor.

I knew we were in trouble clear back in 1975 when my daughter brought home her spelling test graded 100% At the top of the paper, her grade-school teacher had written, "Excellant".

Never forget. Iraq is not a nation. It is an odd little shape on a map drawn by Churchill and Co. in the wake of WWII. There is no Iraqi National Identity that is not superceded by the centuries-old cultural identities which are clashing in the streets of Baghdad as I write this.

I know you meant to write "WWI", not "II". It was after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire that Gertrude Bell,with a little help from her colleague, Col. Thomas Edward Lawrence [of Arabia], created a constitutional monarchy for the dashing and charismatic Prince Faisal. At the time, Churchill was Colonial Secretary; he was certainly one of the key players, but it fell to Gertrude to draw up Iraq's boundaries. As an Arabist fluent in Arabic, She had the bons fides for the task because of her intimate, first-hand knowledge of the area and tribal sheiks.

The idea was destined to fail from the start, but then the intent was never for the benefit or best interests of the indigenous tribes. Back in 1911, when Churchill headed the navy, he ordered the British fleet to switch from coal to oil.

They evolve out of their own saturation in theprinted text of their beloved language. I contend these are voracious readers who read at two levels: the substance of the text and its codified structure of puntuation,spelling, grammar, syntax. For some reason they have known - perhaps from their pre-literate years - that there is always more information than what appears at the surface. They read at the first level for information and/or pure pleasure, but at another level they are unlocking what makes it succeed for the reader as a comprehensive, influential message.

Admittedly, my assertions are anecdotal, being based on my observations as a teacher of secondary and college students, of discussions with colleaues and friends, and - in particular - my grandfather's jounals. He was born in 1878, educated as far as the eighth grade in a rural one-room school, and was working in the western mines by the turn of the century. I have been reading those journals recently, some four hundred pages covering twenty years. I have yet to encounter a misspelled word, a confusion between plural and possessive, a run-on sentence, a lack of subject and verb agreement, or lack of clarity.

He got to that place on paper because he read for all his life with a hunger to further his education, but he also must have been exploiting those authors as models of style and standard usage for what exemplified literacy - a desired end when mast of his contemporaries weren't literate, or wrote at the barest level of literacy.

He was not unusual. There were many like him then who, despite limited formal education, understood that written language had the potential for powerful and limitless range of expression, nuance and argument. They had witnessed it in the writings of the English canons as had Lincoln and Franklin. They strove to emulate it.

Acccording to surveys, this generation of youg adults is not one of readers. The consequence of that is manifest here among posters who claim that it doesn't matter how words or pronouns are spelled if the ideas are communicated.

It does. Caring about those detais in standarized, written English leads to better understanding of what one reads and what one can express when it becomes necessary - and it will - to speak out against injustices and iniquities.

Shades of Clauswitz!