Buckley wasn't done there, now setting his sights on Newsweek itself: "No doubt your sleepy reporter, if he disdained the breed of combatants, would have reported a lawsuit brought by the Black Panthers against the NAACP as just another nigger-fight."

And when the New York Times makes the same mistake and hails National Review and the Liberty Lobby as "two organs of the conservative movement," Buckley's acid tongue re-emerges: "Think what you will of American conservatism, but pray do not confuse it with that pestilential sheet."

By the time of the last Notes & Asides column, on December 31, 2005, the feature had begun to receive too few fitting correspondences to continue regularly, and disbanded after a 40-year run, retiring from regular appearance at the same time as its creator and prime contributor.

Buckley's command of the language and the quality of his targets — presidents, editors, pundits from his era — makes Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription a worthwhile endeavor. But Buckley's newest effort has something more to offer young writers, artists, and journalists, and that's the idea that one must trust his own voice. Anyone who tries to do anything worthwhile in life will come up against his fair share of detractors. The truly successful push forward anyway. If Buckley had taken his intellectual ball and gone home after any of the various slights in Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription's pages, America would've lost a singular literary talent, and conservatism may well have been discarded to the ashbin of history.

The Buckley who gives as good as he gets is the Buckley that America has come to know and begrudgingly respect — and a different man from the Buckley that mainstream America has come to mythologize. Those who know the difference and prefer the former won't be disappointed by Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription — even if they decline taking its editor up on his advice.