When I got home (an hour late, as one of my carpool-mates got into a car accident pulling out of the parking lot), R— greeted me with a somber look.

“We have to talk,” she said.

I admit, my mind started racing. What had I done, or failed to do? As my mouth began to form generic excuses, she walked over to the table, reached into the pile of mail, and handed me an envelope. The return address said: “2006 Republican Party, Platinum Member.”

“I swear, I have no idea what this is,” I stammered, opening the envelope. Then, reading the letter inside, I began to laugh.

To a great nation, history has given great tasks. And throughout history, we’ve seen Americans unite to meet every challenge. Our nation has triumphed over adversity. We’ve defended freedom and promoted liberty and democracy around the world.

Now – in this hard-fought election year that will determine the course of our nation – our challenge is clear. We must give President George W. Bush the support he needs to do what’s right for America.

Mr. —, I believe your exemplary record of loyalty and patriotism proves you are a leader President Bush can count on in this important struggle.

It is therefore my distinct privilege as Chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) to present you with your 2006 Republican Party Platinum Card on behalf of President Bush and every Republican leader nationwide. I hope you will be as proud to carry this exclusive card as I am to have the honor of presenting to you.

Sure enough, tucked into a response card with checkboxes for donations from $25 to $1000 was a shiny card with my name on it.

I hate to break it to Ken Mehlman, but I think he might have gotten his enemies list and his mailing list crossed up.

I admit I’m especially amused by this bit:

I’ve asked my staff at the RNC to carefully track every card issued. If your confirmation is not received in the next few days, I’ll have to assume your Platinum Card was not delivered, and I’ll need to go to the extra expense of ordering and sending a new one. So please don’t forget to mail it right away.

Oh, yeah. I would certainly hate for the RNC to have to go to any extra expense.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been married for two years, not because it means we’ve been together a long time, but because I can’t believe 2004 was two whole years ago. Damn.

Still, every anniversary is a milestone. Marrying Rachel two years ago was (if I may wax earnest for a maximum of one paragraph) the best thing I’ve ever done, and marking it is fit and proper. Two years is, of course, just a drop in the bucket compared both to how long we’ve actually been a couple (nine years!) and how long we plan to be married.

Last year we decided that we’d establish a tradition of not giving each other gifts for each anniversary. We get each other enough presents throughout the year. Instead we thought we’d go in together on a treat: a trip, something new for the house, something like that. For our first anniversary (paper!) we got a hotel in Boston and tickets to two Red Sox games. This year was cotton.

Cotton sucks as a gift theme. I was not buying my wife a Happy Anniversary t-shirt in preshrunk cotton. We decided to ditch our tradition (of one year) and just go out for a very nice dinner. And then, we thought, wouldn’t it be more frugal and (perhaps) more fun to make a very nice dinner? Yes, yes it would.

The plan was a meal in three courses: a salad as an antipasti, a primi, and a main course. I conceived of all three independently, so I’m not sure how well they held together as a cohesive unit, but I think it was pretty successful.

First, the salad!

“Deconstructed” salad of tomato gelée, red onion, and cucumber with lemon vinaigrette

The salad was “deconstructed” in the sense that I didn’t mix all the bits together. I guess you could also call it “untossed” or, possibly, “lazy.” We eat cucumber and tomato salads all summer long; I got the idea for the tomato gelée from our favorite restaurant, Gracie’s. At the end of last summer, I took all of the tomatoes we had lying around, chopped them and suspended them in a coffee filter in a strainer over a bowl and let it sit overnight. The resulting tomato water ended up in a container in the back of the freezer until now. I heated it to a simmer, stirred in a packet of gelatine, et voila! Tomato jello. Deliciously tomato-y, and texturally surprising.

Once I’d thought of the gelée, the idea of doing everything in cubes just seemed to make sense.

The vinaigrette was equal parts lemon juice and rice wine vinegar, and then olive oil and dried tarragon. A chiffonade of basil and a pinch of lemon zest finished it off. Light, unconventional, and yummy. Next!

Homemade basil pesto and goat cheese ravioli in roasted pepper and tomato sauce

Making pasta just looks fun, doesn’t it? And since Rachel has pretty much an unlimited capacity to eat pasta, it seemed like it would be foolish not to serve some.

Making the pasta dough took, I confess, two tries, and even on the second batch it was a bit too sticky to the extent that I couldn’t roll it as thin as I’d have liked. The resulting ravioli was a bit chewy, but still delicious.

The filling was just pesto (basil, pine nuts, parmigiano, garlic, lemon juice, and olive oil) mixed with goat cheese. The whole ravioli assembly process was fraught with peril, but I was glad to have done it, and I plan to try again at the next opportunity. They apparently freeze really well.

The sauce was a straight food processor job: roasted red peppers, roasted tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, red pepper flakes, salt, pepper. I just simmered it to warm it before spooning it onto plates and piling on the ravioli. Shaved parmigiano seemed the thing to do, and I, uh, had some basil and lemon zest left over.

Pan-seared duck breast with red wine and fig reduction, gingered carrots, and kale

Well, obviously the duck is the main event here. The carrots are basically Alton Brown’s recipe for carrots poached in ginger beer, but I was making that before I ever saw the carrots episode of Good Eats, so nyeah.

Duck has long been my nemesis. I love it in restaurants but it always ends up over- or under-done when I make it. I once, to my enduring shame, served dramatically overcooked (as in gray) duck breasts to Rachel’s ex-boss, a man of exceeding taste. This time, I’m pleased to say, it worked.

Flavor-wise, nothing too fancy, just a couple hours marinating in red wine, salt, and pepper. The cooking was a revelation for me. I patted the skin very dry, slashed it, laid it skin side down in a non-stick skillet, and cooked it over very low heat until most of the fat rendered out. (The fat was poured out to cook the kale in.) Then it was just a matter of peeking every minute or so to see if the skin looked brown enough, one flip to give it a minute or two on the other side, and done. I gave it a minute under the broiler just before serving to crisp the skin. Perfection.

The sauce was really simple, too. Chopped dried black mission figs in a cup of red wine, simmered for a good long while. Not long enough, since the sauce was a bit runnier than I planned, but it was damned tasty.

Oh, dessert! Rachel made the flourless chocolate cake from the Williams-Sonoma dessert cookbook. It was chocolate-covered chocolate, and it was delicious.

Anyway. The meal was delicious, the wine was spectacular, and Rachel is the best person in the whole world, and I’m the one married to her, so—again—nyeah.

A prominent libertarian blogger, who goes by the nom de plume “Jane Galt,” wrote recently about the notion of “redistribution of wealth:”

While I am much more sanguine than most libertarians about redistributing material wealth from the richer to the poorer … I cannot believe in this sort of redistribution—“cutting down the tall poppies,” as I believe the Australians call it. Perhaps a little thought experiment will explain why.

Beauty, like wealth, is relative—it benefits its possessor only insofar as they are lovelier than the women, or handsomer than the men, around them. Presumably, if we disfigured all the good-looking actors in Hollywood, and the models in New York, and … well, heck, let’s slash the faces of everyone who’s better looking than I am. I am younger and slimmer than the average American, and have good teeth, long thick hair, and all the other accoutrements of an upper–middle–class upbringing. So we know that this would bring happiness to far more Americans than it would distress. We don’t have to turn them into Quasimodo—just make them no more good looking than I am. Just think how happy America could be made if Cindy Crawford had saddlebags and a squint.

But wait! Americans could be made even happier if Cindy Crawford and her ilk had acid poured on their faces to turn them into a twisted mass of scars, and were inflated a hundred pounds or so apiece through gavage. Physical pain could be alleviated by judicious application of modern painkilling technology, providing a huge psychic boost to everyone else at only a mild psychic cost … to the pulchritudinous elites.

Can you imagine a more blindly privileged position than that the value of wealth is solely relative, that the wealthy are happy only because there are those with less and that the poor are unhappy only because there are those with more? Leaving aside the risible opinion that for the wealthy to lose some of their money would be akin to a woman being violently disfigured, one is left to wonder that it has never occurred to Ms. “Galt” that maybe the poor are unhappy not only because they see that there are those that have more money than they do. Maybe the fact that they can’t afford food and a decent place to live has something to do with it. Maybe the inability to provide one’s children with all they need or want would weigh more heavily than the sight of a Lexus driving down the street. Maybe, just maybe, there are objective downsides to poverty.

This particular bit of nonsense is just one example of a phenomenon I’ve seen quite a bit of: a noted lack of empathy from conservative and libertarian thinkers. This isn’t a particularly novel insight—after all, the stereotype is that the hearts of us liberal types simply bleed empathy—but I’ve noticed one particular strain of empathy failure has to do with what I consider to be an error in levels of abstraction.

Abstraction is important. It is by generalizing that we turn experience into prediction, examples into rules. The ability to see beyond one’s own circumstances is, itself, a kind of abstraction, and one that can lead to more, not less, empathy. And of course dealing only with specifics bogs debate down with anecdotes, and fails to address principles.

But discourse that occurs only at the level of abstraction runs the risk of ignoring that which was abstracted. When talking about unemployment numbers or casualty rates it’s important to remember that there are real people behind these numbers. Taxation, for example, is fairly universally unpopular, but it’s also widely acknowledged to be essential for funding the services on which citizens rely. In a discussion about a criminally under-funded social program, is it not a failure of empathy to gloss over pleas on the behalf of those who are not served to argue instead about the justness of taxation at all? Is staking out an abstract principle nothing more than avoiding the unpleasant reality?

When considering the merits of a proposition like universal health care, what do you consider? Do you believe that millions of children and adults without the ability to pay for doctor’s visits and medicine is a tragedy that we, as a society have a duty to confront? Or is your primary concern “moral hazard” – the idea that if a person has access to health care they might use it “wastefully,” getting tests and treatments that they don’t need. (Even if such a proposition isn’t ludicrous to you on its face, that is, even if you accept that it reflects a likely or even possible outcome of universal insurance coverage, do you consider this to be a worse outcome than the status quo?)

When a group of women tells you about their experiences in a decidedly male-dominated society, and about how their experiences have affected their relationships with family, lovers, and even their own bodies, and when they insist that there is a pernicious sexism even in today’s enlightened society, and that even well-intentioned comments can sometimes cause hurt, what do you say? Do you apologize for giving offense, if you have done so? Do you keep silent if you have nothing constructive to say? Or do you muse aloud that it’s an interesting proposition and wonder how such a hypothesis might be tested, as if we were talking about a thought experiment and not real people and their lives?

Political philosophy and economic theory are important tools. Debates about abstract concepts are often helpful and nearly always enjoyable, but a refusal to engage with those who are concerned about the concrete realities that underlie the abstractions is, to at least some extent, and abrogation of one’s moral duties. When debating the issues of our time we must not, in our zeal to see the forest, overlook the trees.