Joseph Bottum on the Father Neuhaus Obituaries by Dreher and Linker

Joseph Bottum says he felt as if he needed to say something about Damon Linker's snot-nosed obit and Dreher's "attack", as he terms it. I'm glad he did. If you haven't read Linker's pitiful obit and don't want to, he basically calls Father a two-faced son-of-a-bitch. Here's what Bottum says about Dreher's:

The second consists of Rod Dreher’s postings over at Beliefnet. Again, if you’re interested and want to read a reasonable response, Alan Jacobs has taken on the burden. My own reaction is much like Alan’s: The duties we owe to the dead are different from the duties we owe to the living; if you’re going to attack someone with a personal story, you need to do it while they are alive. I made a parallel point about parents last year, in a long essay called “The Judgment of Memory,” which may be worth quoting:

Every memoir of childhood is necessarily overshadowed by parents, and I could find, were I to turn my mind that way, stories of my father’s drinking, his pretension, his bounce.

But my father, being dead, is not here either to be triumphed over by my telling of those stories or to defend himself against them. The death of parents leaves their honor in their children’s hands, and the cruel accuracies we might fling in anger against them while they are alive seem even more wrong to use against them once they are gone. “To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, only truth,” Voltaire once opined. It’s a good line: high-minded, confident, sententious in the way only enlightened French philosophes could manage with any aplomb. But it also feels exactly backward, particularly about those we knew and loved. To squabble with our vanished parents about how they lived their lives seems more than a metaphysical nullity. It is, in fact, a moral failing.

Rod and I were friends, I thought, or, at least, we spent some fun days together in Rome once. But then, a while ago, he used me as an occasion for an unpleasant column he wrote attacking Scooter Libby. I guess I should have understood, and, no doubt, he felt it all strongly. But, in truth, that cashing in of a friendship for the sake of scoring a transient political point was as painful an experience as I’ve had in public life, and Rod Dreher’s eagerness to do it weakened my ability to trust the kind of points he now wants to score by cashing in on his acquaintance with Fr. Neuhaus.

Whoa... I had to read that last paragraph a second time. Strong stuff. I wonder if Rod will go for a hat-trick with Bottum and say something about his mother.

But would Rod Dreher use people like this? Would he "cash them in for political points"? Ironically enough, Dreher wrote a rambling post yesterday semi-regretting what he called the "dust-up over my Neuhaus posting". You have to read it to believe it--he actually partially blames Damon Linker for his attack on Neuhaus. Then he claims that he has a sort of "writer's autism" which blinds him from foreseeing any of the consequences of his writing, then he compares himself to Truman Capote who lost friends by blasting at them in his gossip column....

Well, I just decided I'm not going to re-post any of it here, nor any of the comments which I found hilarious because frankly, and I'm completely sincere, it really made me feel pity for the guy. Furthermore I think I'm done with the man for awhile. That post was written after Bottum's; perhaps the Capote remark was occasioned by his reading it. And maybe he's realizing that you can't just write or say whatever you want whenever you want, something we should all take to heart.

I'm turning off comments to this post, something I rarely do.