The Dish

"Not all Republicans are xenophobic haters. Many of them could learn a thing or two from Jeb Bush," – Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos.

There is a world in Nietzsche. And he foresaw the theocons. In the same work, he wrote about the attempt to reverse what has evolved in Western consciousness:

"Whispered to the conservatives. — What was not known formerly, what is known, or might be known, today: a reversion, a return in any sense or degree is simply not possible. We physiologists know that. Yet all priests and moralists have believed the opposite — they wanted to take mankind back, to screw it back, to a former measure of virtue. Morality was always a bed of Procrustes. Even the politicians have aped the preachers of virtue at this point: today too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern "progress"). One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more."

And which of these options best describe Richard John Neuhaus? One suspects the latter.

I take an hour to go over the last edit of the book and I get dozens of emails rightly informing me that the millennial moment referred to below occurs every hundred years, not every thousand. I’ll still sleep through it. But thanks.

A reader informs me that on Wednesday of next week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. It will not happen again for a thousand years. I think I’ll sleep through it.

A reader sends me the following quote from Nietzsche about what he regarded as the collapse of marriage as an institution over a century ago. What strikes me is how theoconservative he sounds to a contemporary ear. His rhetoric is very close to that of Stanley Kurtz and other anti-modernists on the far right. The loathing of Western Europe, the elevating of more primitive, patriarchal forms of marriage, the celebration of manliness, the defense of torture, the insistence on marital procreation: all these are now integral parts of theo-conservatism, which, in so many ways, is an attempt to resurrect Aquinas in the light of Nietzsche. Here’s a quote that could well have come from Stanley Kurtz, as expressed in Nietzsche’s "Twilight of the Idols":

"Witness modern marriage. All rationality has clearly vanished from modern marriage; yet that is no objection to marriage, but to modernity. The rationality of marriage – that lay in the husband’s sole juridical responsibility, which gave marriage a center of gravity, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage – that lay in its indissolubility in principle, which lent it an accent that could be heard above the accident of feeling, passion, and what is merely momentary. It also lay in the family’s responsibility for the choice of a spouse.

With the growing indulgence of love matches, the very foundation of marriage has been eliminated, that which alone makes an institution of it. Never, absolutely never, can an institution be founded on an idiosyncrasy; one cannot, as I have said, found marriage on "love" – it can be founded on the sex drive, on the property drive (wife and child as property), on the drive to dominate, which continually organizes for itself the smallest structure of domination, the family, and which needs children and heirs to hold fast – physiologically too – to an attained measure of power, influence, and wealth, in order to prepare for long-range tasks, for a solidarity of instinct between the centuries. Marriage as an institution involves the affirmation of the largest and most enduring form of organization: when society cannot affirm itself as a whole, down to the most distant generations, then marriage has altogether no meaning. Modern marriage has lost its meaning – consequently one abolishes it."

Or reinvents it, as we have in the West – and long before gays sought to join it. I’m much more at home in modernity than Nietzsche was. In fact, I celebrate many aspects of it. And in that celebration of modernity lies the faultline in current conservatism. I’m for it, with multiple qualifications. They’re against it – with varying degrees of regret.

A reader writes:

"The person making a big stink over Pianka, Mims, is a creationist with an anti-science agenda. If you read the article, you’ll note that Pianka was basically presenting his research on dangerous diseases in a silly way, and not actually seriously advocating anything at all. But such goofy over-thetop hyperbole is no longer contextual: in a world of internet context-stripping it was ripe fodder for the latest faux outrage scandal. Please, step out of the chain, and take things with a few more grains of salt. Stop and think for a second: you REALLY think that Pianka or any of his students seriously wants the end of the world? Just like end-of-times people? Come on. Trying to find phony equivalences just to look more even-handed is silly."

More context here.

Drudge’s expose of a wacko environmentalist looking forward to the end of humanity through massive plagues was telling to me. In the long run, right-wing fundamentalism and left-wing fundamentalism end up in the same place. A core aspect of most such ideologies is their expectation of a moment in the future where all that they currently despise will be done away with and all will be well. So you have the eschatology of the early Christians, which eventually morphed into the nineteenth century doctrine of pre-millennialism, which is the forefather of the astonishingly successful dispensationalist fiction series, "Left Behind." You have Ahmadinejad forseeing the return of the Twelfth Imam and doing what he can to accelerate it. You have John McCain’s new best friends, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, seeing the End-Times approach, when every homosexual, feminist and Jew will be roasted alive by Jesus. You have Marxists expecting the Communist revolution when all alienation will be dispelled. And you have the fundie enviro-left eagerly anticipating species annihilation. To my mind, it’s a very good indicator of whether someone is worth listening to from a political stand-point. Those who expect the end of the world relatively soon should be kept as far away from public office as possible. They can keep their apocalypses to themselves.

My take on the GOP’s immigration bust-up.

There’s online footage. And there are Russian connections.

I’m glad that Condi Rice and Jack Straw went to Baghdad yesterday. Add that visit to the president’s remarks last week bluntly ruling out Jafaari as prime minister, and you can see how desperate London and Washington now are. They know that this is Iraq’s last chance to avoid meltdown, and yet the Iraqi elites seem unable to make the small compromises necessary to save themselves and what’s left of their country. Mohammed sounds ominous in his latest post:

"The situation at this point can be summed by the following:
There is a majority of politicians from various trends who want to avoid a confrontation and willing to reach a deal to form a government; those are not working hard enough though.
On the other side there are militias supported by some parties within their corresponding blocs who think they can enter an armed conflict against the rest and come out victorious.
Politicians recognize the great price that everyone will have to pay if such a terrible possibility becomes reality, there will be no winners in this conflict and every involved party will have to shoulder a share of the losses, the shares may vary though."

The civil war, in other words, has already started. There will be no political deal until that war achieves some results for one side or another. The politics and the violence will continue in tandem. And one mode of self-expression will eventually prevail.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti/Time.)