Urgent Letter from an Unconcerned Alumnus

More than forty years ago, a lifetime

And then some for far too many poets,

My pretendy-radical young friends

And I thought it was nihilistic fun

To get paid to sit and forge signatures

For the Concerned Alumni of Princeton,

Nicknamed the Conservative Alumni

Of same, at the bottom of form letters

Soliciting donations in the name

Of alumnus and columnist George Will.

George Will, George Will, George Will, George Will, George Will,

We signed in ballpoint ink, penny per line,

Or something like, and sometimes improvised—

Gorge Will, God Wills, George Dill, Gord Shill, Forge Will—

Giggling at such sheer stupidity.

Were alumni really so gullible

And attentive that they would think ballpoint

Signatures meant George Will wrote in person?

Probably those most conservative,

Well-off, and anxious would have donated

Anyway, and those who wouldn’t didn’t.

Who knows what they were even conserving

Back then. Investment in South Africa?

Privileged alumni’s sons admissions?

Long time gone. We had our fun. Now we’re old,

Older than George Will was then, old or dead.

Safe bet some of those erstwhile radical

Friends have voted Republican since then.

Nihilism itself, of course, endures,

Pointlessly, which is at least half the point,

As does George Will, who has come to suspect

His Republicans are the nihilists.

They don’t seem true conservatives to him.

An essential conservative insight

About everything, George Will now writes, is

That nothing necessarily endures.

Let’s say he’s right. That’s a conservative

Insight, stress on the necessarily.

Things can endure, the conservator thinks,

But only if we trouble to save them,

Salvation being the project of all

Conservation, whether of politics,

Traditions, buildings, languages, species,

Or ecosystems. Would it follow

That an essential radical insight

About everything, then, is that nothing

Endures? Oh, not radical in the sense

Of paradigm-shattering or novel—

Radical in the old way, at the root,

Said a thousand different ways but always

Turning out, granted some twisting, the same,

Suggesting that nothing we do saves things

From changing the ways they change, until none

Remain to argue the rules of the game?