Salutations

I have been posting at various weblogs for several years now, beginning with Slate.com, moving through The Belmont Club and Little Green Footballs, and although I feel no particular inspiration at the moment I thought I might fulfill a natural ambition and begin my own weblog - or web diary, really, since I entertain little hope that it will be read by many.



First, the name: "The Pentaverate" is meant to announce the character of this site, at least vaguely. In the movie So I Married an Axe Murderer, Mike Meyers' character has a Scottish mother who is utterly persuaded by grocery store checkout aisle tabloids (e.g. "Batboy") and a father whose imagination is preoccupied by the doings of "The Pentaverate," a secret society running world affairs and comprised of "The Queen, the Vatican, the Getties, the Rothschilds - and Colonel Sanders before he went tets up..." The scene is hilarious, but its hilarity depends largely upon acknowledging the absurdity of this perspective.


Prior to 9/11 (the movie was released in the mid-1990s), I had no idea just how prevalent this perspective was. In fact, it seems almost to be the default position for the majority of intellects. I suppose this should not be surprising, given the apparently unkillable human impulse to rely on supersitition - partly for explanatory value, but more for aesthetic purposes - but it is in fact surprising. It is also depressing. When exhibited by a large portion of your nation and your friends, it is vaguely humiliating. "The Pentaverate," then, is meant as the only sure antidote to such nonsense: it is meant as mockery of it.


Second, this blog will serve as a forum for my and my commentors' perspectives on history - intellectual, military, political, economic. The study of history has ripened in the last century or so to a reasonable claimant to the mantle of Science, and provides the basis of an institutional refutation of these persistent superstitions. History, then, broadly conceived, will be the focus of the blog.


Third, I am a proponent of the Afghan and Iraq Wars, a proponent of the simple Islam-is-jihad conception of our enemy, and an advocate in general of the plain picture view of geopolitical conflict. I do not support President Bush so much as I support him against the probably unprecedented onslaught of his critics. More importantly, though, I loathe politics. I am not a registered member of any party. I voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000, but because of the positions taken by and the conduct of the Democratic Party since then, I voted for President Bush in 2004. I still do not feel the need to join any political party.


Lastly, I believe the United States of America is the most perfect - however short that falls of actual perfection - incarnation of the long effort to realize a just and effective political order among men in general and the noble English tradition in particular. Our institutions are the most philosophically sound from the point of view of natural freedom, the most supple where appropriate, and the most reasonable in their relations. And yet, I do not subscribe to the rationalist view of political order: for me, government stands in close proximity to the state of nature, indeed it is simply one of its products. Consequently, national feeling - patriotism - can never in the final analysis be simply rational. National feeling, patriotic feeling, is therefore fundamentally familial, with all the unreason that may entail. I will leave it to subsequent posts to demonstrate the consequences of such a position.


And so, with these necessary disclosures duly disclosed, welcome to The Pentaverate!