Peter Brimelow writes: Earlier this year, a mutual friend let me know that Joe Sobran, although ill, offline and p honeless in an assisted living facility, had rallied to the point where he wanted to express a more considered view of William F. Buckley than he had offered in his emotional obituary, which had apparently contradicted so completely the critique that he had developed since his firing from National Review in 1993. I was delighted to offer a venue, but I noted that VDARE.COM’s focus on immigration would require him to offer his views on Buckley’s adoption and then abandonment of the cause of immigration reform, and his purging the magazine of those of us who were associated with it, in 1992-1997. Joe agreed.
We sent him the books he asked for. Needless to say, he promptly lost them. We sent them again. But his article, when it came in, did not explain his obituary and completely ignored the immigration controversy. I complained and he wrote a little more, but then passed along word that he would not work further. By then we were embroiled in our spring financial crisis and, exasperated, I put the article aside.
Looking at it now, I wonder if I was too harsh. The article is somewhat off-topic for VDARE.COM, but at least it reiterated Joe’s very belated formal conversion, which he credited to the influence of Pat Buchanan, to the cause of patriotic immigration reform—something that some of his obituarists, for example Larry Auster, seem to have missed.
And above all, the article showed Joe’s great affability of heart. Dying, penniless, betrayed by his mentor, abandoned and shunned by his long-time colleagues, he still wrote of them, clear-sightedly perhaps, but with the generosity and warmth that Jared Taylor noted at the end of his VDARE.COM obituary.
Joe Sobran was simply not a hater, despite what Auster, David Frum and even some timorous admirers seem to think. The same orneriness that caused him to ignore editors led him to defy, and keep defying, regnant taboos. It’s not the same thing. I hope to finish writing my own reflections on Joe shortly.
