Two Poems

Conservative Intellectuals

Oh dear, just thinking about them,

It almost makes me cry!

Old Podhoretz –

What’s it for-etz?

Bill Kristol (a real pistol)

Bill’s father?

  Why do they bother?

David Brooks (he’s got the looks)

Wieseltier…

… Kill me now please-eltier

Oh I just want to grab them up in my arms and weep!

To be on the right, and therefore to be wrong

Not just extremely often, but every single time!

To err so unerringly, to be so wide of the mark

To fail in every prediction – and yet to have staked it all on being right!

Being right was all they had going for them, I mean

Some other kinds of wrong

Have some remedial quality of fun

But theirs was always, like: I know this won’t be pretty

But it is what’s got to be done.

And then we learn each time, it shouldn’t have been done at all –

It was a total mistake –

And it’s still ungenerous and ugly

A double whammy of wrong -- because

They lost in an unworthy cause – 

Oh the sting of it!

The only time they’re really in fine form

And seem most genuinely happy

Is when they adopt for one peaceful minute

A single left-wing position

Or when they can use some liberal value

To torpedo a liberal mission.

It’s almost as if even they do not want

To know that they went down fighting

Always on the side against the poor,

The prisoner, the outcast, the stranger

That they made their stand so bravely

On the backs of the already wretched

Might we not – they ask – have a taste of that stuff

That not-being-so-awful-for-once juice?

They are unwilling executioners.

  (Has there ever been a better time for them than now,

  for instance, when they can all take the stump

  And reassure us, over and again, “See –

  We, too, hate Trump)

Strangely for ones, though,

In so unwelcome a situation

They seem to convince the rest of us each time

To join them in their damnation!

It always seems so compelling in the moment

  Well, maybe the root of the problem is cultural, not economic

  To put personal responsibility at the center of our crime/

  Welfare policy

  And tighten our belts just till,

  Our economy’s back on track (and meanwhile invade Iraq), I mean, sure I don’t like it

But it is what’s got to be done. – Sounds almost reasonable, doesn’t it?

And every time they talked us into it

And we went right along

So you’d think we’d be their allies – no

That’s where you’d be wrong.

It is the thinnest kind of solidarity, this,

This partnership of the damned

 “Please, officer,” we say, “he

Tricked us into doing it!”

Much like a gangster’s moll.

And he is like the leering mug, who says: “Yuh weren’t so

Innocent when we planned it, doll.”

Why do they have this ability

To persuade us – is it

Because they’ve got the power?

Do they in fact, as Hughes implied

Control the bulk of the hour?

Or is it because it just seems too neat, too unlikely

To have all the right on one side?

One thinks it can’t really be like that,

The right must be right sometimes!

And one looks about, one opens one’s mind

Until – Here’s an issue, I find –

On which they and I can finally agree

See, I told you I could be kind!

But then one looks at the issue, one

Picks it up and drops it

One listens to the Buckleyan locomotor within

And straddles it, and stops it.

For even if you and the conservatives

Seemed to align for a season

You realize that -- and so brief it was – it

Happened for all the wrong reasons.

I admit it seems a little too fortunate a chance

That all their beliefs are false every time

And all mine happen to be true

It probably means, if I’m honest with myself

That mine are completely wrong too.

Mormons

Being oneself a product of

Some fraying secular civilization

One cannot help but envy one’s

Mormon contemporaries

When one sees them gliding past one’s eyes

Of a Sunday morning

They enter their ward so very plainly

Inhabiting a better plane.

In suits they are, or

Pearls and heels – One feels

Like one of Satan’s lesser imps

Forced to watch as the angels process –

One’s sulfurous name having wisely been

Struck off the immortal scroll;

One notes one’s own

Untucked shirt, and their

Estimably im-panted ones

One’s own lone untied shoe, and their

Eminently fastened ones

The fact that one’s morning coffee stains

The left half of the torso

Contrasts with their

Pristine fronts—

They never touch the stuff.

And then:

One wonders if it is not

After all so easy

To tuck in the shirt and find the mate

And birth the baby and bring up the child

And have the large family and build the large house

And make the large money and lay off the coffee

And quiet the large doubts and leave the large terrors

And maybe it is, but one knows the while

One would not do it if one could (and

Can); one recalls

A legend among some

Apologists (and anthropologists)

That the damned in fact desire

Their fate

Indeed they practically

Pray for it

And though one does not believe it, it seems

In one’s own case quite convincing.