A dying breed

He is silent, too -- has always been silent -- about the carny barkers of the religious right who have spent the last three decades wrestling Will's Brahmins for control of the Republican Party. A glancing reference to the Rev. Jerry Falwell (defending him from Hillary), no mention at all of Pat Robertson or Ralph Reed or Gary Bauer or any of their yahoo brethren. So much silence from such a ready tongue, and herein lies the irony of George Will's situation. To maintain the aristocratic ton that forms the basis of his personality and his credo and his life's work, he must exclude from his field of vision large precincts of his own party, up to and including the president of the United States.

So where does that leave our doughty intellectual? Delivering his tart rejoinders to an increasingly empty chamber, like the professor of an under-subscribed course. God knows, the man still has his viewership and readership -- ABC Sunday mornings, Newsweek, the Washington Post -- but how many followers? How many hungry young Republicans will sit on their hands and listen to him hold forth one more time on Stonewall Jackson (what if he hadn't died at Chancellorsville?) or call up the ghost of Henry Adams or recount that awfully interesting lunch he had last week with Avery Dulles? How many of these Young Turks would do anything but gaze in bafflement at the tasks Will calls central to conservatism: "keeping government where it belongs, which is on a short constitutional leash, and politics in its place, which is at the margins of life." Politics at the margins of life? You might as well say life is at the margins of life.

Perhaps this feeling of being out of step with his audience accounts for the flagging one detects in Will's writing now. The high notes are still there: missile defense, school choice and school prayer, the natural aristocracy of baseball, the inanity of the NEA, the perils of political correctness and activist judges and the "therapeutic ethos." Will's pleasing vein of self-deprecation is still intact: "My friends, happily rooting for Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, and other great Redbirds, grew up cheerfully convinced that the world is a benign place. So, of course, they became liberals. Rooting for the Cubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I became gloomy, pessimistic, morose, dyspeptic -- in a word, conservative." But everything is shot through with elegiac threads: the remains of the columnist's day.

"Being sixty in Washington sometimes feels like having had one year's experience sixty times," he writes. "However, age can confer a certain calm about the passing circus, a preference for understatement and for people with low emotional metabolisms." One of those people, by implication, was Meg Greenfield, the Washington Post eminence who first launched Will into the national mainstream. Will's remembrance of her is warmer than anything else in this volume (warmer even than his memorial for his father), and while this partiality leads him, I think, to overvalue Greenfield's writing, it also inspires in him some of the most explicit renderings of his beau idéal:

"For years Meg and I and columnist Charles Krauthammer regularly met on Saturdays for lunch and conversation with a guest, usually someone newsworthy. We met at a greasy spoon on upper Connecticut Avenue in Washington. The name, Chevy Chase Lounge, was decidedly more upscale than the place. Meg's favorite moment -- how she savored such scenes from Washington's version of the human comedy -- was when a guest, a senator once considered a presidential prospect, asked the waitress if the tuna was fresh. The waitress said, sure it was. She meant the can had just been opened."

On one level, this is classic WASP reportage. Note how that musical line of privilege is ever so delicately sustained: the "greasy spoon" in an otherwise unimpeachable part of the District, Will and Greenfield and Krauthammer posed against it like slumming royalty, sniggering in each other's ear while Washington's elite ("usually someone newsworthy") stoops to kiss their collective ass. Asks if the tuna's fresh! What can the fellow be thinking?

We can do our own share of sniggering at this self-important triumvirate, but there is something quite touching about the tableau they form. Will seems to be openly hankering for a time -- before Bill O'Reilly, before "The McLaughlin Report" -- when people on both sides of the aisle could be counted on to set the right tone. When no one raised his voice or sawed his sentences down to a sound bite (the poor man's epigram) or did anything that could earn eviction from either a Georgetown salon or a Chevy Chase greasy spoon. "A little academe," to quote Shakespeare, "still and contemplative in living art." This is the past into which George Will is ceaselessly borne. May he find rest there.

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