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Monday, March 14, 2016

The Ballade of Monsignor Douthat

D.D. Eisenhower and R.A. Taft at the 1952 Republican convention. Can't find a decent credit.
I'm not confident this poem is good enough to run without a lot of commentary, but just in case, I'm giving you a chance to read it straight and leaving the commentary for below. It's a standard ballade, with three stanzas and an envoi and pretty strict rhyme scheme, and the bolded bits are taken more or less verbatim from Ross Douthat's weekend column,  "The Party Still Decides", from which the piece is built, the way a paleontologist might reconstruct a dinosaur from a few random bones.

The Ballade of Monsignor Douthat
When men aspire to awesome power,
   An excess of democracy
Can turn their sweetest projects sour
   With a disastrous nominee;
   And this is why we all agree
The yahoos in their double-wides
   Must yield to high authority:
The Grand Old Party still decides.

Thus in our most exalted hour,
  We chose the path of victory;
Taft had to yield to Eisenhower,
   And principle to strategy.
   Conservatism has to be
Susceptible to overrides;
   The wisest of us must decree,
The Grand Old Party still decides.

Let not the brazen Trump devour
   Our sacred movement! Let him see
Conservatives need never cower
   Before the vulgar enemy!
   And even if it's on TV
His host of thralls and acolytes
   Will simply have to break and flee:
The Grand Old Party still decides.
L'envoi:
   O Prince, O Priebus, hear my plea!
Respect my faith and bona fides!
   I'm getting scared! Take care of me!
I hope the Party still decides...
Commentary:

The movement conservatives are really starting to panic, big time, and showing increasingly poor judgment; Reihan Salam went on New York City public radio this morning to explain why the National Review had endorsed Senator Cruz just before tomorrow's very big primaries, which seemed to be mostly because they will be very big primaries, and our host, Brian Lehrer, didn't have the heart to note that the primaries are ones that Cruz has no chance of winning, and that if anybody listens to the National Review at all, which seems hardly probable, their recommendation will simply harm the chances of Rubio in Florida and Kasich in Ohio and Illinois to stop the Trump momentum, of which the National Review lads profess to be afraid above all things. (As David Atkins was explaining, the National Review is literally worse than Donald Trump, hard as that may be to digest.)

And then over the weekend Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, published a column, "The Party Still Decides", declaring that if the Republican leadership were to mount a kind of convention coup against itself to prevent the Trump nomination that would just be the conservative thing to do, because conservatism and one-man-one-votemanship do not exactly go hand in hand, which I thought was very upfront of him, but I couldn't see how it was interesting enough to write about until I started noticing that his strained, sub-hysterical tone was strangely elevated, verging on the poetic, in some cases literally falling into an iambic tetrameter pattern. I don't know what made me think of a ballade (one of the three formes fixes of classic French poetry, and diabolically difficult to construct, with its standard 28 lines using just three rhymes), but once I found the column supplied a usable rhyme-set (including the somewhat false rhyme in the third stanza), I really had no choice. An Oulipian challenge from which I could not back down. That and the fact that one of my rhyme words rhymed with "Eisenhower".

The Eisenhower reference is for reals; in the 1952 contest Ike came out with 26.3% of the primary vote next to 35.8% for "Mr. Republican" Robert A. Taft (son of the 27th president and 10th chief justice of the United States), who wanted to abolish the New Deal, and the party bosses chose the General, because they thought they'd rather win. But not everybody was a conservative in those days, let alone a Conservative in the 2016 sense (in 1952 those were the people who were far too conservative for the Republican party, which they thought was completely controlled from Moscow). Something similar happened, as you probably know, when Ronald Reagan challenged Gerald Ford in 1976, but Reagan hadn't actually accumulated more delegates than Ford by the time the convention started.

Another thing I can't get out of my mind: On February 25 Monsignor Douthat added his voice to the chorus of concerned conservatives wondering when and how Marco Rubio was going to start taking an aggressive critical tone toward his biggest rival, Donald Trump. On February 26 Rubio made his rally remarks about the possibility of Trump peeing his pants (let the record show that the initial Politico report omitted the "short hands" jibe), and we know what happened after that: the party's proletarians hated his dick joke, but loved the one with which Trump responded, and poor Marco is now on board Charon's boat, halfway across the Styx, growing paler and paler. I don't know if it's possible, but I was wondering if Ross might feel he's to blame. It could be why he's so upset!
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