Art Buchwald

From Philosopedia

Buchwald, Art (20 October 1925 - 17 January 2007)

In his syndicated newspaper column, Buchwald has humorously written that

• The new threat to this country, if you believe the Moral Majority and the television preachers, is not Communists or fellow travelers but secular humanists. The secular humanists are the ones who are brainwashing our children with books about evolution, sex, race relations, ERA, and naughty words. This means we have to get the books out of the schools and libraries. The book censors are starting to organize, the moral crusade has begun, and the hunt for secular humanists is on.

The problem, Buchwald continues, is that it is not easy to recognize a secular humanist. Not unless

• . . . he openly admits he thinks Darwin’s theory of evolution makes sense. Secular humanists are not joiners. They don’t have cells where they plot anti-American and anti-God propaganda. Most of them work alone, doing historical research, writing textbooks and novels, and explaining how babies are born. They pollute children’s minds with how the world is rather than how the anti-humanists would like it to be. What makes them so dangerous is that secular humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without your knowing they are humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food, and even watch football on television with you, and you’d never know that they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn.

A Pulitzer Prize winner in 1982, Buchwald indicates in his writing that he is not averse to the secular humanist outlook.

Writing from a hospice 19 March 2006, Buchwald told a reporter,

• The problem with thinking about Heaven is that you then have to think about Hell. The irony of our culture is people are constantly telling other people to go to Hell, but no one tells them to go to Heaven. The big question we still have to ask is not where we're going but what were we doing here in the first place?

At the age of 74, Buchwald suffered a stroke. Hospitalized, he had a leg amputated below the knee, and during a television show with Diane Rehm on 24 February 2006 he announced that he had asked to discontinue hemodialysis, that "If you have to go, the way you go is a big deal," adding that he was eating McDonald's fast food on a regular basis. He died at the age of 81 of kidney failure.

Ever the humorist, he was reported in his New York Times obituary,

• Across the world stage, he saw theater of the absurd, and he made an effort to immerse himself in it. He went to Yugoslavia to chase goats; he went to Turkey in search of a Turkish bath, writing that he was astonished when the Turks told him that they had no such thing.

{Free Inquiry, February 1981; FFRF, May 2006}