De Vomitus Non Est Disputandum
Got this from our correspondent and friend, Pikkumatti, earlier today.
Hey, Pauli. Thought you'd enjoy Crunchy's offering today in the Dallas Morning News. If there was any doubt that the man is a snob, this should put that to rest. I'd comment further on it, but you'll do such a better job than I would. ― Pikkumatti
Well, thank you Pikki, for the kind words, but commenter "Ironbruce" beat me to it:
I was just recovering from Mr. Dreher's repellent "Frugalista" Christmas column, when this piece of grotesque piffle comes along. I believe it is ethically irresponsible in these times to publish the musings of this man. He makes me long for Wiliam Murchison. He is a disgrace.
I could say a lot about this, but I think I'll do it in the comments a little later on. Suffice it to say for now that the restaurant owner made a good move by donating the gift certificates to the "lucky" Drehers. Cheap, targeted advertising designed and delivered by Mr. Foodsnob himself! "Generous friends", my rump roast!
For the record, I have no problem with this kind of quid pro quo. 'Swhat makes the world go around, baby.
Maybe, for the solipsist, every experience is a sacrament.
ReplyDeleteyou mean every experience *of his own*, of course. our experiences are so not sacramental.
ReplyDeleteLOL, Kathleen! Yep, per his bud Frederica, we Katolicks engage in nothing but business transactions.
ReplyDeleteFor the solipsist, there are no experiences but his own.
ReplyDeleteI love semantics.
ReplyDeleteHow, I wonder, does the black truffle risotto, Vienna sole, etc. experience goodness, truth and beauty as it becomes one with the mystical body of Rod Dreher?
ReplyDeleteif it's sacramental, why doesn't rod man go to the fancy restaurant every sunday?
ReplyDeleteI mean, forget the OCA, let's cut to the chase. Picture it: fancy restaurant with a bearded robed sommelier, waiters singing plainchant and icons staring down from the walls. lots of incense, but not enough to interfere with the aroma of the black truffle risotto.
PS Pauli we've got another "and me" post today on rodblog:
ReplyDelete"Neuhaus, me and too much truth"
Yeah -- I read the USA Today article & commented about how now that Fr. Neuhaus is dead we won't get a response with his thoughts.
ReplyDeleteHow convenient.
kathleen, this time it's your fault for steering me toward reading more of Dreher's fine work.
ReplyDeleteIf the Dallas Morning News (Crunchy's employer) is about one thing, it is about defining local news topics (for nat'l and world news, they just crib from the NYTimes).
A great example was the 100-0 girls' basketball game a couple weeks ago. The "story" broke in the DMN, and was the subject of "news" stories and editorial commentary for a full week. Then they ran an editorial telling us that we should get over it. Followed by, on the next day, yet another column on the topic. And then followed by, a couple days later, a "news" story on the next game that the victims played. I'm sure we'll get another followup soon.
Pedophile priests are the well that never runs dry for the paper (pedophile Orthodox, not so much). Periodic where-are-they-now followups, and then of course last week was the death of an old bishop, which unearthed the whole thing again.
So Dreher's piece on "too much truth" is a great window into how his paper operates. Plus, another chance for him to dredge up the pedophile-priest chestnut, so the cool kids will invite him to play reindeer games again.
"Too much truth"?
ReplyDeleteOy, delusions of grandeur, or what?
LOL, I just happened upon this funny and oddly relevant post:
ReplyDeletehttp://sawyerspeaks.wordpress.com/2008/01/30/economic-cleanup-in-aisle-3-a-fiscal-stimulus-on-the-rocks/
This guy, Jeff Sawyer, is the fellow I did a phone interview with back when I was being recruited by Lands' End (before they froze hiring, which was just as well, because my husband **really** didn't want to relocate to Wisconsin). Anyway, Jeff (a creative director at Lands' End) is a funny dude. I disagree completely with his politics, but, when he's not discussing politics, I think he's pretty entertaining. In any event, he's much more in touch with Real Life than our gourmandizing Working Boy is. And he takes himself far less seriously.
LOL, I commented at the USAToday piece, too. Rod's not in his own playground there, so he can't bully his comboxers. Woo-hoo!!!!
ReplyDeleteBTW, did you see JemHem5's comment? Was that great or what?
ReplyDeleteAnd did you get a load of how Rod claimed that the OCA's problems have all been solved by ONE freakin' SPEECH given by the new metropolitan? WTH??? One speech? A speech solves problems now?
No matter what the Catholic Church does -- zero tolerance, seminary visitations, Protecting God's Children, yahda yahda yahda -- it's never enough per Rod. But ONE SPEECH does the trick for the OCA. Ohhhhhhhkay.
Tom's take on the sublimities and excellences of fancy-pants food.
ReplyDeleteTom's take is spot-on. I couldn't put my finger on what was so very wrong about the whole gourmet-meal-experience-as-sacrament thing, but Tom explains it clearly and fully.
ReplyDeleteThat Dreher column was so profoundly bad in so many ways and on so many levels. It was almost self-parody.
Diane:
ReplyDeleteI have in the past given you some grief over your repeatedly pointing out Rod's hypocrisy in continually bashing the Catholic Church while acting as a man without a chest regarding his own Church. It's a valid point, but I saw it as chiefly reflecting on Rod's character, and I think all that needs to be said about his character has been said.
Having read some of the comments on his USA Today article, though, I'm more sympathetic toward your position. His own anti-Catholic bigotry calls out to and confirms the bigotry of others, and when he's done practicing it in the little closed system of his blog and gives it a go in the real world, it truly does damage to the Church and her mission of evangelization.
Thank you, Tom! Yes, that is precisely what bothers me. Do I care whether he pursues Orthodox scandals with the relentlessness he expended on Catholic ones? No. He can ignore the whole topic, and that's fine with me -- AS LONG AS he also stops publicly bashing the Catholic Church. His claim that he cannot investigate OCA scandals because he wants to protect his family's faith rings rather hollow in the light of his continuing public preoccupation with Catholic scandals. OK, Rod, so does obsessing about scandals threaten your faith, or doesn't it? If it does, then shouldn't that mean you shut up about (the largely resolved) Catholic Scandal as completely as you are shutting up about ongoing Orthodox scandals? What's good for the goose....
ReplyDeleteGetting back to your point: Yes, indeedy, Rod is throwing chum to the anti-Catholic sharks, justifying and inflaming their anti-Catholc bigotry. He's like a male Maria Monk.
Like Tom, I've busted on Diane in the past, too, because at some point the rhetoric becomes useless. I have become more and more able to sympathize with Diane's position as of late because it's like he's doing his best to prove her right.
ReplyDeleteI will say this, however. I believe that it's possible that everything Rod does is out of complete invincible ignorance. In other words, he is a totally uneducated moron about religion. In America you don't have to know anything about religion to become successful in the field; Rod's no different than this guy, for example, who made millions spouting platitudes he picked up from various sermons.
My position at this point is one of "hoping without hope", IOW, I don't think Dreher will ever quit his Catholic bashing, ever, unless he comes back to the Catholic Church hat-in-hand. He has discovered a manner in which to express his anti-Catholicism which doesn't show up as such on the radar of many of his readers. Outrage at the many scandals in the Catholic church seems to be a great cover for him at this point, and his personal experience with some of them are almost assuredly inflated for that purpose.
And of course he loves speeches—it’s the drama he relishes, not the repentance or any subsequent positive course of action. You have to be able to easily trumpet things in the media for Rod Dreher to approve. I'm glad God is different or else I'd have to cry in the confessional every time and tear my clothes–I'd run out of clothes.
Diane, "self-parody" was the exact thing that comes to my mind as well. One of Tom's commenters tried to defend Rod yesterday with the "what I think he really means is" line. But no, what he really means is what he wrote, i.e., pure incoherent theologically heterodox goop. Happily, we can me 100% dismissive of this Let Us Live Sacramentally By Eating Fancy Food concept; by definition it has nothing to do with Christianily or living the virtues.
Also: The greatest irony of Rod's column is that its entire thesis is completely overthrown by the fact that it's godawfully written.
ReplyDeleteIt's been four days, and "what that combustible sorcerer drew from his cauldron on that memorable night" is still stuck sideways in my throat like a braised lamb shank bone served with organic baby peas and a miso-pineapple reduction.
LOL. Hopefully the peas had room to make it down your throat into your stomach.
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me of a dude I grew up with and his reflections on fine dining. "Man, I took my lady out to Red Lobster and he had shrimp and lobster and then we went to such and such bar and I had a beer and some wings.... Then I got home and I shit it all out, man." That was about 15 years ago. I suppose this would be an example of reducing dining to Keynesian economics rather than over-spiritualizing it.
But he did end up marrying that chick. And marriage actually is a sacrament. Hmmm.....
LOL, I'm glad someone else has noted Rod's bad writing. IMHO, his thinking's sloppy; his writing's sloppy, sappy, and overwritten; and, well, what does he have to offer JQ Public these days, beyond the crunchy shtick (already passe') and the anti-Catholic thing?
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, at Mark Shea's blog, Mark has graciously, charitably, and completely gratuitously described those of us who commented at Tom's blog as a bunch of rabid obsessed Dreher-Haters. Gee, it must be nice to be able to psychoanalyze people you've never even met, without having had the slightest training in psychoanalysis. So Christian, too. :-O
ReplyDeleteHere's the post.
ReplyDeleteWRT his comment, I've noticed that when dealing with us, Mr. Shea abandons his usual incisiveness and trades it for vague generalities and unsupported assertions; he seems to equate the ridicule of Dreher's novel ideas with some sort of hatred of Dreher.
I think this is a disappointingly faulty line of reasoning from our dear friend, Mr. Shea. After all, he is renowned for brilliant ridicule on his website with famed lines like "If only public school teachers could marry they wouldn't sexually abuse their students," and suchlike. But I would never claim that Mr. Shea hates people pushing for allowing priests in the Latin Rite to marry. He is merely providing the ridicule their comments deserve, thereby deftly exposing their silliness to all.
The evidence I would offer that I don't possess hatred for Rod is that I've defended him in the past. E.g., recently he rightly and expertly ridiculed the Demi Moore & company's "I wanna be Obama's Servant!" video. He was getting savaged in the comboxes by the angry uber-liberals who infest it and I was adding my angles on how absurd it was, reinforcing his point. Would I defend him if I hated him? I don't know; I really can't claim experience with that emotion, to be honest.
On the positive side, Tom should be relieved to discover that he has been pronounced "sane." Kind of puts me in mind of that scene from Amadeus where Salieri has an I'm-OK-You're-OK moment and "absolves" his fellow "mediocrities" in the lunatic asylum.
LOL, Pauli, thou hast touched it with a needle. Here's Mark Shea, the Sarcasm King, berating other people for sarcasm and ridicule. Ah, the irony.
ReplyDeleteYou are quite correct, of course. We do not hate Rod Dreher any more than Mark Shea hates the war-mongering neocons he constantly savages. Speaking for myself, I hate what Rod is doing -- viz., bashing the Catholic Church publicly at every opportunity and thereby inciting his fellow bigots to fresh anti-Catholic fury. As this happens to be a detestable action, I have every reason to detest it. But Rod Dreher himself...don't know the guy from Adam (even though I chaperoned his prom :D) and don't particularly care to. Hate? Hardly. I'm not particularly inclined toward hate. I'm too blissed out on Luvox. :)
Perhaps Mark gets his jollies from misrepresenting us contra-crunchies as fire-breathing hate-meisters. Oh well...chacun a son gout. Me, I'd rather watch *Guys and Dolls.*