Category: The Dish

"All conservatism begins with loss.

If we never knew loss, we would never feel the need to conserve, which is the essence of any conservatism. Our lives, a series of unconnected moments of experience, would simply move effortlessly on, leaving the past behind with barely a look back. But being human, being self-conscious, having memory, forces us to confront what has gone and what might have been. And in those moments of confrontation with time, we are all conservatives…

The regret you feel in your life at the kindness not done, the person unthanked, the opportunity missed, the custom unobserved, is a form of conservatism. The same goes for the lost love or the missed opportunity: these experiences teach us the fragility of the moment, and that fragility is what, in part, defines us…

Human beings live by narrative; and we get saddened when a familiar character disappears from a soap opera; or an acquaintance moves; or an institution becomes unrecognizable from what it once was. These little griefs are what build a conservative temperament. They interrupt our story; and our story is what makes sense of our lives. So we resist the interruption; and when we resist it, we are conservatives," – "The Conservative Soul," Chapter One.

Well, I asked for it. I now have well over a hundred 80s videos to sift through. (And a book to promote; and a blog to write; and two columns due.) Thanks much. But I can’t watch any more! Results as soon as I’m able.

Instapundit is making the right enemies.

"I remember a time when, following an event of international significance, the world would wait to hear what the president of the United States had to say about it. In Britain we would have an impatient few hours before America had woken up. Because until the President had spoken, you couldn’t be sure of even the shape of what might happen next.

On Monday we woke to the news of North Korea’s nuclear test, and to a banal commentary of people who didn’t really know what to say about it. Just when you wanted some real insight and even facts, the [BBC radio] Today programme again indulged its tiresome obsession with Iraq, focusing upon whether Tony Blair’s actions there had made this move by Kim Jong Il more likely blah blah. That didn’t surprise me. What did was my instinctive reaction when George W. Bush did speak much later in the day. There he was gravely intoning on one or other news channel that this "constitutes a threat to international peace and security", and "Oh sod off" I heard myself muttering, with no desire to hear any more. It was as much ennui as irritation: I didn‚Äôt believe he would have anything useful to say and found it faintly annoying that he spoke as though the world would care.

One reaction from a completely insignificant voice in the political process. Yet it reveals, I think, a sad truth: the 43rd President of the United States of America has squandered the political authority of a great country," – Alice Miles, The Times of London.

Mike Allen explains it all for you.

He wasn’t obsessed with it, as a reader reminds me:

Note one important corollary [about Lewis’ distinction between civil and religious marriage]: Lewis wouldn’t have regarded such a distinction as permissible if he thought that "non-Christian marriage" and relatively easy divorce was a really serious sin, any more than he regarded, say, murder or thievery as morally permissible for non-Christians. The same thing is true of his attitude toward homosexuality – as far as I can determine, he mildly disapproved of it but was simply too morally sane to regard it as a serious sin:

"I have never been able to understand how sexually normal people can regard homosexuals with anything other than a kind of bewildered pity."

We don’t need the pity, but this is certainly infinitely more agreeable than self-righteous hatred. And in the chapter of his autobiography dealing with the year he spent in a horrendous private school that he calls "Belsen", he notes that the top-ranked bullies had an accompanying set of catamites – and then talks at some length about how this was the only sign of genuine human affection that existed in the place, and points out that there are infinitely worse sins.  (He wrote this in the Britain of 1958.)

Hold the vapors. And watch the swoon.

Here’s a graph that helps illustrate the astonishing leap in federal spending under the Bush Republicans. It’s from the conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. There are more helpful graphs here. Note that in the 1990s, spending plateaued and even fell slightly. As soon as Republicans controlled the White House and the Congress, it took off. Whatever else these people are, they are not fiscal conservatives.

It’s South Park’s version of the anti-immigrant campaign ad I posted yesterday. "They took our jobs!"

A reader writes:

I saw your interview with Brian Lamb on C-Span last night. I think if Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were alive to have seen it, they would have been cheering you on. They would have been saying, he has got it. He understands us, in contrast to President Bush who does not. In fact, they would be saying George Bush is not even close to understanding what it means to have a Conservative Soul.

There are more anti-Bush conservatives out there than you’d think. At least judging from my email in-tray.