Two that Mattered
Individuals make a difference. We lost two such folk this past week. Different though similar, their devotion to craft made them stand out from the crowd.
William F. Buckley passed at age 82, still working in his study. That is a deserved
passing for any of us that have spilled some ink trying to cast a better light on this world. Buckley was a first. He was the first to question academic liberalism in God and Man at Yale. Note his title was Man singular not village or multi-cultural man. I read it in 1966, if you have not you should. Or you might try one of the other forty books he authored. He founded National Review, a journal of conservative opinion when there was no other. He went on television in Firing Line. His debates reflected an academic tone, setting a standard for civility that sent shows like Crossfire, rather deservedly, finally off the air. Today talking head shows about right and left are common, they were not in the 1960s. His column continued to run in newspapers his entire life. He was an avid sailor writing about an Atlantic crossing and explaining celestial navigation in a video. Here is a renaissance man in modern times. His reverence, manners, and good taste set a standard sorely lacking in most of the attack dogs of politics on 24/7 cable tv. They are armed with talking points. Buckley was armed with a wit and intelligence grounded in a philosophy that never required a scripted presence. Take that Carville and Hannity, and try to do better by us.
Boyd Coddington was the modern incantation of the Big Daddy Ed Roth/George Barris 1950s California Hot Rod scene. Tom Wolfe gained fame writing about them in The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby. (Try that one for a look at the hot rod scene and an introduction to real gonzo journalism.)
And what is a hot rod but an individual expression of automotive art? Boyd creations can fetch five or six figure amounts at the Barrett auctions. He would hand craft a suspension piece from a solid piece of billet aluminum; art is as they say, in the eye of the beholder.
From his website, An unusual honor for Boyd was to have the only hot rod displayed at the Smithsonian Institution, when his '33 coupe was part of a 1993 exhibit titled "Sculpture on Wheels." Like Buckley this individualism ended up on the television as viewers tracked how he built some original creations.
These individuals were all about just that, being their individual selves. It is said that committees build giraffes but it took a daVinci to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The same is true here, no committee builds hot rods. Plymouth tried it and we got a six cylinder automatic named Prowler. Now the car and marque are already gone. Sigh, committees, no, individuals, si’.
We are going to vote for a directional leadership this year. We are told that change is in the air. I hope this leads to some serious questions about change. While many like to bemoan the state of the United States, everyone wants to come here. There is a reason for that. Let’s hope the two in the race can tell us what and how they would preserve that uniqueness of this place that produces Buckleys and Coddingtons. Achievement is about vision and purpose, consider Burt Rutan’s Spaceship One. Private initiative and ingenuity put a sixty year old in jeans and a ball cap to the edge of space for a mere $20 M. NASA can’t do that. Will we preserve the culture that produced such men?
Learn more about Spaceship One here. 
Read the reviews of this book here. I checked Amazon. While some of his titles trade for pennies, Buckley's God and Man still fetches twelve bucks, an incredible statement about a 1951 book re published and updated in 1977. There's that demand and supply thing. 
See more of his creations at Boyd Coddington's website
While Hunter S. Thompson gets credit for gonzo journlism he should really only get credit for whacked out drugged out whatever lifestyle which led to his suicide. Instead try this 1965 delight that got the real gonzo journalist, Tom Wolfe , rolling to be the best journalist of the post 1960s era. College has evolved to a sort of cafeteria style fast food drive by window experience. It wasn't then. And this book set the tone for others that followed including The Pump House Gang and Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers. His later Bonfire of the Vanities about a Master of the Universe bond Trader was made into a movie starring Tom Hanks. If your college English courses did not expose you to Tom, well, happily you encountered him here. 
