The Dish

"Right now, the defeat of the marriage amendment is a disappointment to opponents of gay rights. But someday, it will look like the good old days," – Steve Chapman on the slow, but unstoppable advance of tolerance in America’s treatment of homosexuals. The data supporting Steve’s analysis can be found here.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, dusk.

You’ll have to forgive me my Oakeshottian episodes for a little while, but his concept of tradition strikes me as very instructive about the potential and practice of the Internet. My Times of London column explores this today. In Oakeshottian conservatism, tradition is our complex and ever-changing cultural and political inheritance. It is what makes us human beings among other human beings – in whatever tradition we find ourselves across space and time.

But Oakeshott’s is not some reactionary or nostalgic view of tradition. It’s not one in which the past is always preferred to the present or future. He was a conservative but not a reactionary, a modernist in Christianity not an arid fundamentalist. The challenge for every person within a tradition is to understand and live it but also improvise and re-energize it. And the tradition itself is not just what it was an hour or a year ago, but a constantly rearranging, multiplying summation of what it is now and everything it has always been. And so parts of our tradition, our way of life, can submerge for a while or be in eclipse, and then return again. And every part of that tradition is always available to us if we can find it and reinvent it. In Eliot’s words,

"[T]he pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been."

[My emphasis]. And this surely is what the web does, in ways never before possible. It is both almost terrifyingly now, and yet through its growing and exponential archive of the conversation of mankind, and through its search engines allowing us to instantly excavate anything, it is also "all we have been." History is now and online.

This detail struck me as revealing in today’s rather grim NYT assessment of the "last chance" for Iraq:

The most recent official figures say that Baghdad is receiving at least eight hours of electricity a day, but Iraqis say that after a fleeting improvement earlier this month, they now receive less than that.

When Mr. Maliki visited the Baghdad South power plant earlier this month with his electricity minister, Karim Wahid, they acknowledged that three years after the invasion, billions more will have to be spent.

Mr. Wahid estimated that power output in the Baghdad area must more than double just to meet current demand, which was growing at between 7 percent and 10 percent a year.

The cost to satisfy those needs, he said, could run to as much as $2 billion a year for 10 years, requiring substantial foreign investment. "I will ask the government to correct the budget, and if it’s possible to add something else," Mr. Wahid said.

So there you have the two Iraqs. On the one hand, an infrastructure being constantly sabotaged by insurgents and billions spent on electricity leading to an actual reduction of the power available to Iraqis. On the other hand, you have the fact that life and the economy and population growth seem to be demanding electricity at rapidly expanding rates of growth. Something is being murdered; and something is being born. And this seems to be happening simultaneously. Will the U.S. be the midwife or the coroner? That has yet to be determined.

There are flops, almighty flops and then there are books by Mary Cheney. Despite saturation media coverage, network interviews, cable interviews, blanket newspaper profiles, blog support, podcast interviews, the book "My Turn" had a very low first week’s sales of 2,445. Last week, a grand total of 574 books were sold. Not too shabby for a first author with not a huge amount to say. But recall that this manuscript cost its publishers a cool $1 million. The publisher therefore spent around $170 for every book sold without even counting the marketing budget. In Mary Matalin’s case, it just confirms what we already know about Bush Republicans. Their greatest skill is in spending vast amounts of other people’s money on relatives or cronies.

Mike Crowley sees an anti-Iraq war alliance.

From "Under the Net" by Iris Murdoch, one of Michael Oakeshott’s many, many lovers. In the dialogue, Hugo is widely regarded as a fictional version of the great philosopher I’ve spent these last two days conversing about:

"There’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings," said Hugo. "All these descriptions are so dramatic."

"What’s wrong with that?" I said.

"Only," said Hugo, "that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt "apprehensive" ‚Äì well, this just isn’t true."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I didn’t feel this," said Hugo. "I didn’t feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards."

"But suppose I try hard to be accurate," I said.

"One can’t be," said Hugo. "The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you…"

"Touch it up?" I suggested.

"It’s deeper than that," said Hugo. "The language just won’t let you present it as it really was…"

I was puzzled by this myself. I felt that there was something wrong in what Hugo said, and yet I couldn’t see what it was. We discussed the matter a bit further, and then I told him, "But at this rate almost everything one says, except things like "Pass the marmalade" or "There’s a cat on the roof", turns out to be a sort of lie."

Hugo pondered this. "I think it is so," he said with seriousness.

"In that case one oughtn’t to talk," I said.

"I think perhaps one oughtn’t to," said Hugo, and he was deadly serious.

Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking of how we had been doing nothing else for days on end…

I want England to win, of course. But my longstanding policy every four years is only to watch matches after the quarter-finals, or matches where England is against Germany or and France. Especially Germany. Couldn’t give a toss about the rest. So let Frankie Foer be your guide. He cares, he scores, he gives you the impact on globalization and CO2 emissions. (Look, it’s about as butch as TNR can be. For the longest time in the back of the book, there was a very strict policy on reviewing sports books. As Leon once elegantly explained:  "if there’s a ball in it, we won’t run it." But Leon doesn’t run the blogs. He just hates them.)

Bellingham, Washington State, 4 pm.

One of my most trsuted sources in Iraq is a soldier actually commanding troops and filling me in occasionally (and taking me to task). Here’s his latest comment on the post-Zarqawi situation:

I really liked what you said today about being right (and wrong) on your views about the war. I fly about fifty hours a month in these Al Anbar skies and the first thing you realize here is that you have to be right 100% of the time. You must always correctly estimate the risks of the weather, the enemy threat and altitudes/airspeeds to fly. Now if you can multiply that by over fifty, you’ll understand what command is like. So, if you feel a bit of pressure to be correct, imagine if you were supremely responsible for fifty other bloggers who, if wrong, could lose their lives. Not complaining at all, really want to help you with some perspective as I would guess you have taken some very tough criticism recently (some from me).

I would say if I was to recommend anything to someone with a good amount of pressure, it would be the same as I recommend to my pilots. BALANCE! Embrace the pressure and the risk and go with it and at all costs, don’t let fear and emotions cloud your judgment.

You know as well as I do that Zarqawi’s death will not change things dramatically here as that is seriously a micro-event. The financial incentive to keep this war going – illegal corruption in the oil sector under the cover of chaos – is a macro-event that is so much larger that it trumps any desire to end this thing. The intensity, which most think has increased has dramatically decreased against US forces and turned toward the easiest means to keep this going, which is to have the Iraqis kill each other. Zarqawi was a master at stoking those flames so it will (already has) get very interesting.

More reason to hope, and to doubt. BALANCE!