One Year Ago Today

Yes, Bubba's Pots & Kettles post. It's short, so read it. Now, the comments, first one is from Rayne:

Now this is rich. The rest of us are "soft" - but Dreher et al - padding about in their lesbian sandals on the cobblestone paths to their artsy-crafty bungalows fretting about their profiles in the Style section of the Washington Post - THEY are the poster boys for Alpha males. Is a Crunchy Con anything but a disaffected metrosexual with a ludicrous passion for food and an unhealthy preoccupation with home decor and ugly, expensive footware? I cannot wrap my head around Dreher hailing from Southern Louisiana - it just doesn't seem possible. No wonder those guys love homeschooling - they probably got the living crap beat out of them on the playground.

Oh, man, I'm remembering how hard I laughed during this whole period of time. You can't plan stuff like the concrunchy blog, it just has to happen. Anyway, Bubba continues with a comment:

It's all here: hippie mumbo-jumbo (with a Catholic [oops] twist), definitions that make no sense from people who make no attempt to communicate effectively to the unitiated, viceral hatred of the Enlightment and the free market -- which we all know are cancers on humanity compared to the Inquisition, Islamic fundamentalism, and socialism -- and the sort of rhetoric that makes people want to punch you straight in the mouth.

Italics mine above. That's always been one of my greatest irritations with these folks; do you speak newspeak? Casey's last comment highlights the poutiness which had set in near the end of the NRO CrunchyCon blog:

The crunchies are going out on typically sour notes. Stegall describes us as a nation of Prufrocks, which will irritate anybody who gets the allusion. Rod just recommended a book which dumps on the suburbs, where most people in the U.S. live.

Rest assured, the crunchies will never attract much of a following in this country which they love to hate.

And now it's time to say good night...with apologies to Ringo, it's been fun puncturing the stuffed-shirt sanctimony and laughable hypocrisy of the crunchies. See y'all.

I ended with a comment comparing the possibility of a liturgical city versus a more realistic potential for a Catholic city, i.e., the whole Ave Maria project just burgeoning at the time and well on it's way now. This I believe is a great contrast between the scrappy, git-r-done folks who build the world and the crunchy academic elites who complain about how nothing is right; it's the difference between the concrete and the vague, between having a metal thermos cup o' joe in the morning and the quest for the perfect latté, between lighting the candle and cursing the darkness.

It's also the difference between saying your prayers at night and complaining that no one else is saying theirs. There's a good story about that, BTW. I remember seeing an little outdoor shrine on someone's property when I was in Assisi and thinking that it really doesn't take much to make a city closer to God, at least not if you're Catholic. And whether you are or not, you can still listen for the "still small voice". Even in the suburbs.