President Bush's recent bungling of a Supreme Court pick (which has since been corrected) prompted some to question Bush's commitment to conservatism. I think that was the wrong question to act, since the appointment of new justices to the Supreme Court is a question of law and not politics; we seriously undermine the independence and competence of the judicial branch if we decide on candidates based on the policy outcomes of their opinions, and not the opinions themselves.

Of course, it would be wise to not only pick intellectually honest and talented judges, but intellectually honest and talented judges that just so happen to agree with one's idea of proper jurisprudence. But I digress...

The episode was another episode that has prompted me to judge my own commitment to conservative. The short answer? I no longer think I have one. I remain a man of the Right. I remain a man deeply immersed in tradition. I remain, above all, a committed Christian.

But a conservative? It recently hit me: I am prepared to fight and die for a world I have never seen or felt. I seek to conserve nothing. Rather, I seek to overturn the established social order, which has only served to grind down the human soul and make it an unispired and libidinous cog in the mechanisms of the state.

I have never been led by a politician. More broadly, I have never been led by a man of the twentieth (or twenty-first) century. I dwell in the agoras of ancient Greece. I walk in the fields of Narnia. I will take Middle Earth over the Earth I have inherited, Sauron and all.

Some hardnosed "realists" may scoff. I live in a dream, they will argue. What of it? Alexander himself slept with the Illiad under his pillow. Herakles and Achilles were as real to him as his own parents. Yet, for all his "dreams," he was surprisingly good at understanding the world around him and conquering it at every turn, whether he dealt with the hearts of his men or the enemies on the battlefield.

When did realism become uninspired? When did those who drew strength from literature and music first become dismissed as unscientific fools who fail to appreciate reality?

For centuries now, the world has scoffed at those things that I hold dearest. What am I to conserve? I come with flame, to melt the cold iron fetters that have imprisoned the human imagination for so long.