Do I dare to eat a buffalo?

Day 2 of my all red-meat diet. And yes, for those of you wondering, I am gorging myself on pastured, sustainably-raised, humanely treated cattle from a local producer who sells at my farmers' market. And yes, it does cost 8 times what meat at the supermarket costs.

Ari and I went on a pilgrimage to buy a pair of waterguns. He needed two, one for himself, and one for his new monster friend, whose name I can't pronounce or remember. We couldn't find them anywhere because it's not watergun season, it's notebook paper season. Finally we found them at an old-school toy shop in our neighborhood. (Actually, I figured that would be the best place to look to begin with, but by looking elsewhere first I enticed Ari to come with me to get other errands done.) Ari paid with his own quarters from his piggy bank. He is surprisingly wealthy, as he scoops up loose change all over the household and hoards it in his bank, which suits us fine, as then it's not all over the floor and our dressers and everywhere.

The buffalo regimen is having, at least, a temporary placebo effect on my ability to move, as you no doubt can tell by my actual having left the apartment today. I will probably crash tomorrow, when I realize I don't actually feel better yet, but have just been excited about the possibility that what I have can be treated, so I'm not doomed to another three months of lying in bed gasping for air like a fish out of water.

Oh right, politics. What a loser I am. All the torture news that's fit to print, and I can hardly bring myself to read the articles, much less post on them. Instead, I'm reading a book called The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk. This is cited by everyone on the Internets calling themselves a conservative as THE book to read on the "conservative intellectual movement". It is, however, published by the same press that publishes Ann Coulter. It's an old book, though, first published in 1958, so you can't really blame the author for the company his publisher currently keeps.

On the other hand, you CAN blame the author for a very long Forward in which he refers to himself entirely in a congratulatory third person, while explaining why his book is so very, very important, and quoting various reviews of the book that back up how great he is. Honest. Also, the Forward was written from a place called "Piety Hill". In Michigan.

Well, geez, Amy, why are you reading this freaking book anyway? asks the Internets. The Blogger has lately been wondering if perhaps she might really be, in some ways, a Conservative, at least in the Conservative tradition, though not what people who call themselves Conservatives today are. After all, she wants to conserve many things about this great country of ours: the rule of law, the separation of powers, respect for human dignity and human rights, the estate tax, the EPA, freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, the right to privacy, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. The list goes on. She is willing to postpone idealistic plans for making the country over as a Democratic Socialist paradise a la Denmark or Sweden, just as long as things don't go on getting worse. Because, as Paul Krugman noted in The Great Unraveling, and as has, hopes the Blogger, become abundantly clear to all and sundry in the last few years, the people running our country are not conservative at all. They are revolutionaries and demagogues and madmen.

The Blogger does not excuse those people who call themselves Conservative Intellectuals who now admit that the current Administration are not really conservative after all, which, as Digby likes to point out, is just their way of disavowing their mistakes so that they can continue to win elections. Oh no, they say, the problem with the Bush Administration is that they turned out to be too liberal. A real conservative administration would do much better. By which they mean whoever is the next person the Republicans decide should be President. The problem with the Bush administration is not that they are too liberal; it is that, as stated above, although in a slightly more genteel manner (Russell Kirk is way into genteel, which I guess is another thing the conservatives have failed to conserve, because, um, Ann Coulter), they are fucking batshit crazy motherfuckers.

Anyhoo, so the Blogger is reading this book that even the fucking batshit crazy motherfuckers insist is the most important book on their bookcases. And she is not sure how the batshit crazy motherfuckers could have read this book and be quite so batshit crazy as they are, but she has only read the first couple of chapters, because it's actually not very easy reading, and the Blogger is someone who slogged through a lot of poststructuralist mumbo-jumbo in college, so it's not like she's a slacker when it comes to these things, so maybe it turns out that Mr. Kirk is also batshit crazy in the end. It seems more likely, however, that the batshit crazy people have not actually read book in question, but simply purchased it and put it importantly on their bookcases next to their also-unread copies of Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Be that as it may, the Blogger has determined, even two chapters in, that in fact she would not be considered a conservative, in any sense, by the author of the book, despite her long list of things she would desperately like to conserve in America. The main reason she cannot be conservative is because she is not Christian, and only sometimes, when her brain's a little wacky, believes in god. And Kirk considers the belief in Divine Order to be an essential aspect of conservatism. The Blogger breathes a sigh of relief, really. She is not a conservative. It is possible, however, that she will read the whole thing and find that somewhere, genuine conservatives still exist with whom she might make common cause over things like the rule of law, human rights, torture, etc. And that having read the book, she might understand those actual conservatives a little better, and respect their positions, even if she does not hold them herself.

The Blogger heartily congratulates herself on her genuine and respectful interest in understsanding the conservative mind, and expects the Internets to rain accolades down upon her (very lovely) head.

Impiety Apartment
September 2006