Pretty Amazing
I woke up this morning determined to honor the promise I made over a month ago to post on the Brooks piece, which I did. After I finished I decided to read my email only to find the the ever-intrepid J-Carp had emailed me this bit of related news.
The former DMN editorial boarder and current American Conservative writer has cut himself quite a deal. The New York Post is saying that he landed an “estimated” $1 million deal to write a memoir about how a small Louisiana town supported his sister as she died from lung cancer. The book is titled The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, A Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life. It’ll come out in the spring of 2013.
I asked Rod about this $1 million figure (I’d heard it was slightly higher). He wrote back: “I’m not going to confirm a rumor, but I will say that the money will be sufficient to provide a college education for my sister’s children, provided they go to a state school and, unlike their no-count uncle when he was at LSU, stay the hell out of the barrooms.”
So the no-count uncle confirmed the $1,000,000.00 rumor. Gee whiz, you can't make this stuff up.
The Grandiose Way of Ray Dreher: An Untimely Death, A Cannibalizing Memoir and the Secret to a Big Payday.
ReplyDeleteAs I said in the thread below: It's his publisher's coin, so it's theirs to do what they want with. Good luck to them. Presumably they know "Crunchy" was vaporware for nearly 5 1/2 years before it went to print--this from a guy whose occupation is to do nothing but write. I do start to see why they will go down in flames to the Amazons on the world in the coming years if this their idea of a solid business decision.
ReplyDeleteSince 2006 of course, he's been hard at work on The Benedict Option, but a half-dozen years or more and it shows no more sign of appearing than the Loch Ness Monster. To believe that he can pivot and suddenly craft whatever "Dark Night on Walton's Mountain" the publisher expects within the remainder of this decade is a religious conviction to say the least.
The agents and brokers' pitch meeting in whatever Sixth Avenue publisher's boardroom must have been a hoot, though: "It'll be like Thomas Merton meets Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil meets Steel Magnolias! With more tits!"
-The Man From K Street
By the time they film the Lifetime movie Dreher will have been run out of town on a rail. Bank on it.
ReplyDeleteFor all of Dreher's sanctimony about his sister (and from his own accounts, she did not hold him all that close) there is the ugly sense about all of this that what we have here is Dreher parading around wearing his dead sister's skin as a cap and cape, for months now as a shield from any criticism of his writings because his sister had been sick and died (and how could you criticize a man under those circumstances?), now finally only in order to cash in on her. I can only pray I never resort to trafficking in my own loved ones in the same ways. I see Brooks enjoyed the morsel he took.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/2011/09/15/a-word-about-my-sister-ruthie/
ReplyDelete"often reducing our parents to tears of shock and awe"
"Tears of shock and awe"?
What in the world can "tears of shock and awe" conceivably even be if not a Madison Ave tag line coldly, cynically, and calculatingly recycled from the media babble of the Iraq war? There's no neighborhood in the world where you hear, "Un-huh, ma Auntie? Yeah, she shed tears of shock and awe when Unka Jarell died." Real human beings dealing in real human emotions just don't do this. Flacks create this stuff. Handlers and brokers create this stuff. Mad Men cynically looking to cash in create this stuff.
....a shield from any criticism of his writings because his sister had been sick and died (and how could you criticize a man under those circumstances?
ReplyDeleteYes, and how dare anyone point out the emperor is naked.
This does make anyone hesitate to criticize him, including me. But--my question is still... who else does this? Can you think of anybody else who has done anything remotely comparable? I've no doubt that Ruthie was probably a great person and her death a tragedy, but great people are dying all the time and doing so with courage and without anger. There's a saying "The good die young...." ever hear that one, Mr. Timeless Wisdom?
There's no neighborhood in the world where you hear, "Un-huh, ma Auntie? Yeah, she shed tears of shock and awe when Unka Jarell died." Real human beings dealing in real human emotions just don't do this. Flacks create this stuff. Handlers and brokers create this stuff. Mad Men cynically looking to cash in create this stuff.
I know! It's so transparent, but people seem to go along with it and don't really notice the bathos.
I feel like I'm about to start reading the man's blog again if for no other reason than to expose this whole charade. You know that if Sis is smiling down from heaven that she is hoping he doesn't go through with the travesty.
Pauli, I wouldn't be too harsh on Rod Dreher. My wife and I have been through similar circumstances regarding family members. In Rod's case, perhaps this is how he emotionally deals with it, writing about it.
ReplyDeleteI read Rod's blog all the time. He's interesting in his way, although I admit I am often puzzled by him. For example, he currently has two articles out, "Signs of impending gay marriage victory" and "Obamacare vs. community". One thing I noticed in this case is that he doesn't appear to see any connection between these two stories. Or he doesn't choose to write about it. I don't know.
As for Rod's writing style, well, there's a saying that "even good Homer sometimes nods."
ReplyDeleteThe stuff about the one-legged stripper and tears of shock and awe are pretty wobbly, an indication of not being completely surefooted.
In his famous book, I immediately noticed the redundancies, the same ideas being repeated over and over but in different words. As an editor, I would have recommended that the book be cut to half its size, and the writing tightened up and made more concise. With the help of a good and demanding editor, I suspect he can manage to write very well.
Drehers a perfectly good writer, the problem is he has much less to say than he believes. He is in search of substance that would complement his facility with words. Thus he leeches onto ideas and events so as to bask in the penumbra of their gravity. But in doing do he reveals his own venality. That's why I predict this enterprise is not going to end well in terms of his relationship with his hometown. Personally I would resent this book undertaking (pun slightly intended) if I were a family member or a friend, but I'm sure the good people of his small town are less cynical than I.
ReplyDeleteThe Man From K Street obviously has the goods on Dreher's hypocrisy, but there seems to be more to it.
ReplyDeleteOccasionally it will finally dawn on the one of cultists that make up the guy's commenting pool, because it's hard to think of them as rationally distant or anything less than emotionally wedded to him, that Dreher, in pursuing his gonzo quests through various lifestyle alternatives, invariably becomes the Borat of everything he samples: communitarians, Catholics, conservatives, locavores, Orthodox, homeschoolers, etc. Occasionally, but not often. More often than not, being subtly and ironically mocked by him is a small price to pay to rub blog shoulders with someone famous and they seem to find a way to deliberately make that realization not happen.
So instead of leading a group of redneck bigots in a rousing chorus of "Throw the Jew Down the Well", like some Pied Piper our Borod first collects members of a lifestyle group begging for a greater vanity recognition in the blogosphere by pretending to be one of them, heck, maybe even believing it himself for a few weeks or months, before inevitably becoming an obvious, ironic, and unrepentent comic foil to their particular values. The one thing he seldom does is confess to his marks openly that he has long ago abandoned the values that sucked them in in the first place. That kind of honesty would kill the bit.
For example, as The Man From K Street reminded us, if you believe in the simple life, Borod believes in the simple life just like you, while going out of his way to highlight that he is phoning his belief in on a 4GS. The remote audience gets it: the joke's on you, faithful rubes. Sing us another chorus.
If you believe that contraception is anathema, Borod believes that contraception is anathema, too (wink, wink), while writing years ago on Beliefnet that he had a dream in which he dreamed of a nest with only 3 eggs in it, which he must think obviously explains to the credulous he is mocking the way in which God mysteriously worked His will to limit the Dreher family. A dream, a nest, 3 eggs, and it somehow just happened: only 3 kids. The remote audience gets it even more: the joke's REALLY on you, now, Catholic chumps - what, you thought Borod was regularly abstaining from sex with an attractive woman almost a decade younger than he is? Now we're in Benny Hill territory, complete with kazoo music.
You name it, whatever Borod writes about with great, moralistic solemnity he is now or soon will be doing just the opposite, while telegraphing to the remote audience with broad winks just how ridiculously gullible to his manipulations he really thinks his followership is.
In the end, what this seems to amount to is Dreher taking his revenge, in the same way a traumatized comedian does, on a world that was mean to him at a formative age, pulling his pants down when he was young and stepping over him indifferently as he screamed, by taking it apart one segment at a time, turning it inside out, and mocking it by rubbing the opposite of it in its face. As Kathleen notes maybe a little differently, the less able he turns out to be able to master one of his lifestyle gambits, to be a sexual Catholic, to be good, simple person like his sister, the more dramatically and flamboyantly he displays the mocking comic irony of being just the opposite.
If there's one thing that makes Dreher foam at the mouth it's someone trying to make him make sense of his behavior, "psychoanalyzing" him as he puts it, and with good reason: that's when, as Pauli put it, the emperor's pants really do come down, the curtain is pulled back, and the whole act is revealed to be the cruelest of jokes on those poor believers whose only fault was to blindly put their faith in him.
OK, I guess we have a new anonymous commenter. How about a short tag at the end like K-Street leaves? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteBut yes, that's a good analysis, New Anonymous. It is a good point that Rod resents being psychoanalyzed even though he puts so much of his personal material out there, including dreams. He's really asking for it, whether he knows it or not.
Finally getting around to my 2c on both of these posts. New Anon's comment will no doubt make this one seem pale by comparison.
ReplyDeleteI'll agree with New Anon that Dreher enjoys poking fun at us chumps. But I differ on the motivation.
I think Dreher suffers from "The Vision of the Anointed", as coined by the great Thomas Sowell (at the risk of a Dreher-like name-dropping -- bear with me, I read Intellectuals and Society last year and it influenced me).
The point is that the self-anointed pseudo-elites like to tell the rest of us what to do, but they have no accountability for the result (nor any real expertise in what they are telling us). The only accountability of the anointed is from other anointed. They pat each other on the back for "enlightened" and "fresh" ideas, regardless of whether those ideas are of any truth or worth. This view is opposed by the millions who are making daily decisions in fact have accountability for their own lives -- and are collectively wiser in the result. Such is the tension in our society today: the elite view vs. the rest of us.
Seems to me Dreher lands squarely in the "anointed" camp. He issues Crunchy proclamations on how true conservatives ought to eat endive from the local farmer, etc. But all such proclamations are squarely elite-friendly -- no progressive would feel out of place doing any of them (esp. the Nouveau Beaujolais and the vintage Mercedes). And by bashing some conservative ideas/personalities and faiths-not-his-own-any-more, Crunchy hopes to get a pass from the anointed for his own conservative ideas and religious practice. That largely works, as evidenced by David Brooks fawning over Dreher's move back to South Louisiana.
I think Crunchy's writings on his big move and the book about his sister are part and parcel of this. When he was in Dallas, the cool kids dug his bashing of the Hick Fundamentalist South. After going Back East, now he realizes that the Eastern elites enjoy a good sentimental tale of the South, in the same sense as a trip to the zoo to see the animals, or a feel-good fundraiser for the little folks. This one will have a bravely dying relative, a yes-you-can-go-home story line, and even a one-legged stripper just for local spice. Should sell like hotcakes on the coasts.
But I'll pass. Writing about his sister doesn't bother me; such stories can be nice if done tastefully and if making a true point. This one will come at the price of Dreher's lecturing, which is too dear for me. If he makes a buck or makes many from the story, fine with me -- there's no accounting for taste.
I think it's a stretch to assume that the guy has "followers". Does he? He'd obviously LIKE to...
ReplyDeleteAs I've said on previous occasions, Dreher's writing reminds me of Nancy Drew books in which every word is engineered to convey the message that Nancy! is the smartest, prettiest, most intrepid girl in the land. She has got life all figured out! All while enjoying a fabulous lunch...
What pikkumatti says only adds to my take, at least as I see it, I mean, it just adds the venal dimension Kathleen referred to. The succession of lifestyle chumps Dreher has successively mocked have only been rungs on a ladder to him as have his scratch-my-back & I'll-scratch-yours-relationships with people like Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks. If he had any intellectual consistency or honesty, any integrity (accountability) he wouldn't be able to play Twister with lifestyles and values like he does. But if your end is nothing but psychological revenge on the world and self-serving career gain, that's what you end up looking like, Rod Dreher.
ReplyDeleteYes, Kathleen, he does have followers, of a sort, namely those same names still commenting on his blog that go back to his Beliefnet beginnings. I have to think of them more like the people who would call Art Bell in the overnight hours and I guess TAC wants them bad enough to pay for them. But it's also pretty clear his psychologically driven opportunistic twists and turns through lifestyle choices and deeper values like Catholicism which he has only treated as lifestyle choices, like a carnival huckster hitting a succession of towns to shake each one down for what it has to offer has cost him the big picture. Sooner or later people start holding him to account themselves. No real conservative still takes him seriously, nor does any real religious leader. He was a failure in New York, a failure at the Texas paper and the only people in Dallas who still talk favorably about him are other media insiders or wannabes he shared a back scratch with while he was there, a failure at that foundation even though he didn't have to make a profit, and now the only work he can get is at the TAC, a declining publication now throwing anyone of any point of view on board to try to keep a readership. Really, the biggest thing he has done now is returned home to inherit what his father built as a big fish in the little rural pond around St. Francisville. He has now become a pathetic prodigal character in an unwritten Walker Percy novel, as much as he has always liked to portray himself as the Working Boy from that other book. It's just sad that his brother-in-law, a decorated vet, and his nieces have now become the latest marks at the Dreher Bottle Stand booth.
New Anon
My wife and I have been through similar circumstances regarding family members. In Rod's case, perhaps this is how he emotionally deals with it, writing about it.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe that I'm being that harsh at all here, and certainly no more cruel than someone who makes references to the literary value of actual people who are unfortunate enough to have become strippers, crippled or not.
I question whether writing publicly about a family member's passing is a good way to "emotionally deal" with this very personal event. I think that saying that any person is beyond criticism because we should all feel bad that a family member died is simply silly. Most people don't make jokes and wise cracks while they are grieving, or make their plans to move aloud to their readers.
Remember, Dreher managed to make 9/11 about himself. His only possible approach to tragedy is emotional vampirism.
ReplyDeleteShould sell like hotcakes on the coasts.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't doubt it. One of the reasons I really don't begrudge the man his million-dollar payday (before taxes) is that, on a personal level, I am literally LMAO at the cosmic irony of Ray O. aiming his literary talents squarely at the Oprah Book Club demographic, and in so doing, embracing the "Moral Therapeutic Deism" that he claims to have been opposing his whole working life.
It's on a level with that ad campaign by McDonald's some twenty years ago, where the Golden Arches appropriated a Kurt Weill/Bertold Brecht tune to sell Big Macs. If ever there was mirth in Hell, surely those two poisonous old communists must have been beside themselves with laughter at the supreme irony of their work being used to advance the paragon poster child of American capitalism.
--The Man From K Street
Pauli: "I think that saying that any person is beyond criticism because we should all feel bad that a family member died is simply silly."
ReplyDeleteYes, I admit, what I said does sound pretty silly at first glance. However, by way of clarification, I think what I was trying to get at is that plain-vanilla harshness is probably very appropriate in Rod's case, but that over-the-top fire-and-brimstone harshness might be a little excessive. But I don't mean to imply things had reached that level. You certainly haven't reached such a level. On the contrary, you have been more than gentlemanly.
Reading some of the trenchant criticisms of Dreher I find here, I think I can summarize them as follows: Rod's writing can be diagnosed as a case of chronic insincerity and interminable vapidity. I say this by way of comparison with other bloggers who I consider to far more thoughtful and who often have have much weightier things to say that are worth saying (e.g. Richard Fernandez and Richard Goldman over at Pajamas Media). Dreher, on the other hand, is light entertainment at most. But Seinfeld, a TV "show about nothing," was light entertainment. And such things have their place, each in its own way.
It's hard to discern a person's motives over an routers and ethernet cables, so I don't pretend to understand Dreher's possible motives for producing a book about his late sister's situation. I think it might be more charitable to assume the best at first, at least until the deliverables prove otherwise.
Well you're more gentlemanly than I, Oengus. And you're probably wise in not trying to probe his motives. Your charge of chronic insincerity hits the mark in my opinion, and at least one deliverable that was discussed--"tears of shock and awe"--illustrates that well.
ReplyDeleteMary McCarthy once said of Lillian Hellman: "Every word she ever wrote was a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"
ReplyDeleteApplies to Dreher in spades, IMHO.