Now I'm a Bully
The Baton Rouge Business Report Topix forum post has heated up again and I have been dubbed "an out and out bully [who] is obviously eaten up with hatred and jealousy." Someone named Ellen Kennon weighs in with the following:
These posts are beyond rude! Why do you folks posting such hatred insist he wrote this book to make fun of you and the people in this town? I would imagine telling such an honest, raw story would have been very difficult for him. The book is getting rave reviews and help put this town in a good light with a true spirit of community. The person who writes that horrible blog about Rod is an out and out bully and is obviously eaten up with hatred and jealousy. What in the world ever happened to compassion? Surely, we can all agree to live by the golden rule? Good grief.
Then later...
I write with a sense of the friendship I have to date with Rod and feel I am a very good judge of character. I am not interested in predictions of Rod's downfall, but as a resident of SF for 23 years, it's fair to say I claim a certain level of observation. Putting these posts on the Internet for the world to see only makes us look like the "little people" you claim he makes us out to be.
For the record, I have never predicted "Rod's downfall", only that he would move his family again away from St. Francisville. Many others on that post have done the same. If we are proven wrong about this, I'll just shrug and say "I was wrong, we were wrong". I think the man is restless and craves the stimulation of the new and novel.
"Bully" is becoming a word like "racist" -- it is intended to stop the conversation. But of course it has a longer reach.
ReplyDeleteYes; and of course it always is used in lieu of addressing any substance. Billfr tries to set her straight with his comment in which he links to Kathleen's post about Dreher on 9/11.
DeleteThat's a great post to review from time to time, and it applies directly to his treatment of his sister's illness and the narrative discrepancies. She was a saint! Except when she treated people like crap. The community came together to raise money for her medical bills! Then we learn she had full-coverage. Etc. Also using the concept of an inoculation against criticism because of the disastrous nature of the subject matter.
Grand irony: Rod is the bullied kid who turns into a bully himself. He is the bully par excellence. But bullies cannot take criticism -- they can dish it out, but they can't take it, as we used to say when we were kids. Thus this poor deluded gal feels she must shield the bully from "bullying." Only in Dreher-World.
DeleteYeah, I saw that too.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the connection between this woman and Rod Dreher? Why has she got the hots for him?
Keith
I think she sold paint to him. She owns a paint company.
DeleteThis post might shed some light on the Kennon-Dreher connection.
DeleteI went to Ellen Kennon's paint site and after reading "About Ellen" I understood immediately why such a s'more-head would be swept off her feet by a Rod Dreher:
Delete"Her philosophy on color therapy is quoted alongside Johann Volfgang von Goethe in the critically acclaimed book Chasing Matisse."
Whoa...does that top my truck being parked right on top of the third planet orbiting the sun?
Speaking of which - Pauli, have you ever considered that atoms and molecules might be tiny little solar systems just like ours, except real tiny? And their atoms and molecules might be tiny little solar systems too, but even tinier? Think about it, dude. (*cough*) I'll bet Ellen Kennon has thought about it a lot, and would give anything to discuss it, alone, over wine, with Rod Dreher.
Keith
It's like the stoner conversation in Animal House about fingernail, atoms and giant beings.
DeleteBut, hey... sell the sizzle, baby. Maybe she'll get a Ruthie Leming color palette going and cut Dreher in for a percentage.
Oh my gosh! Who is this Billfr? He writes brilliantly, and his latest comment is just so perfect....pretty much says it all.
ReplyDeleteHe's from Grand Prairie, TX, which is in the Dallas area. So he probably caught on to Dreher's shtick when he worked for DMN. That's my guess.
DeletePauli, I have gotten about half through TLWORL, and already I am somewhat astonished, not at the book, but rather at why RD went so obscenely and relentlessly overboard on marketing it on his blog. But having gotten this far, it seems doubly strange to me that he had to do that. To me, so far, I think all that would have been entirely unnecessary. Is RD that insecure about his writing that he has to do that? I don't know. So far TLWORL has kept my interest, and it has been a better read than his previous "crunchy" opus (which tended to be a little long-winded).
ReplyDeleteI don't want to take too much credit here, but I noticed that after I sent my little note in his comment box a while back (the one not published, which I told you about earlier), it seemed that afterwards RD toned down, at least a little, his endless hawking of TLWORL. I told him that he was in danger of wearing people out, that he needed to give things a rest, and that if his book has any merit, it would last and would have no trouble selling itself. I don't know if what I said had any effect, one way or another. Or possibly some friend might have said something similar to him. Who knows? But I now think that, as badly as I might have expressed things in my exasperation, my assessment was mostly correct.
I'll try to write a little longer review later, once I reach the ending. For now I don't want to say too much.
Oengus, Dreher is known for going overboard on many things, so we shouldn't be surprised that he's gone full Gospel Blimp in marketing his book.
DeleteOkay, Pauli, I have gotten past the central crisis (or pivot) in the book. I am determined to keep an open mind and avoid the temptation of jumping ahead, as I don't want to read something without having the context of the entire story. It is easy to get the wrong ideas by just reading a bit or piece here and there.
DeleteSo far, I will commend RD for this at least: up to this point, he has managed to get me to feel like I have encountered (at least as well as one can through reading a memoir) the people he talks about, that they are real flesh and blood people, though I have never once met them, and they live in a whole different state. In some small measure, I have managed to care about them, at least as far as a reader of a book can care about strangers he has never met. I think that RD managed to convey that for me. What happens in the next few chapters, well, I will see. Maybe he'll end up just shipwrecking the book, or maybe he'll reach some kind of readable conclusion that has a measure of closure — a port where the ship can finally dock, so to speak. I don't know yet. In some ways, this is not an easy book. But from reading his book, I suspect that RD is not always an easy person to get along with. But who is?
There were a few spots where, at least for me as a reader, RD asserts something about his sister Ruthie's attitude, or thoughts, towards himself, yet he supplies no preceding material to indicate why his assertion is true to the actual situation. But I am not a member of the family, and I don't live down the street from Starhill, and things may be just as he describes for all I know. But as a reader of his book, I notice that some things just comes "out of the blue" with nothing to support it, or leading up to it, which just ends up makes it puzzling for me, and makes him sound (as a writer) a bit less than convincing.
I notice that some things just comes "out of the blue" with nothing to support it, or leading up to it, which just ends up makes it puzzling for me, and makes him sound (as a writer) a bit less than convincing.
DeleteOengus, your assessment of the book is more charitable than mine, for which I commend you. I commend you even more for reading the book critically and not just letting everything glide over you.
What you mention at the end here is how a book sounds when the author has an agenda whose rhetoric is alien to the story itself. Whether that is the case, or whether there is another reason for such injections of seemingly foreign material I'll leave up to you once you have read the entire book.
As you know, Pauli, I have been reading through TLWORL. As much as I can, I am giving RD's book a fair shake, because I still think that he has some potential to be a fairly good writer.
DeleteAs I explained, what I have read so far has been enough for me, as a reader, to feel like that I have encountered RD's family. The book made me care about his sister and what happened to her. If that is what RD intended to do, then he succeeded with me. And RD obviously had enough of a rapport with his relatives, and with his brother-in-law Mike Leming, to learn the details of what happened on that awful day, at least enough to write this:
"I'm scared," she whispered. Then Ruthie fell forward, into her husband's arms, and died.
As someone who has been present when people have died, I can say that all the confusion and panic and emotion and grief that RD described in Chapter Ten looked entirely plausible to me. (I even went on Google maps to locate the church where Ruthie's funeral was held, and indeed it was as RD described it, a small white church building nestled among some tall oaks.)
But when RD blogs stuff like this, I am exasperated with embarrassment — not for myself but rather embarrassment for him. It is clear to me that the poor man really does not comprehend that he is being plain silly. Like the emperor walking around in his "new clothes" when in fact everyone can see that he is buck naked. RD apparently cannot understand that he is spouting nothing but vapid nonsense, and that he is doing this at his deceased sister's expense. And since I now care, in some tiny degree, about Ruthie and her family, I am even more acutely flabbergasted at RD. What does Mike Leming think when he reads this thrash? What does the rest of the Dreher family think? I don't know. I hate to imagine, except that they must be the most patient and forgiving people to have ever walked the face of Lousiana.
Pauli, I was very tempted to write RD another very "tough love" note in his comment box, explaining as best as I can why in blogging the way he does it only makes himself look like a complete fool or worse. On second thought, I know that putting something in a comment box would probably be too impersonal and ultimately useless. In this situation, something more direct is what is needed to help the man. So how can a stranger like myself really say anything, or explain to him his inability to see that what he is doing is not profound philosophizing but merely exploiting others (his sister even!) to achieve some kind of worthless "intellectual" or "aesthetic" effect.
Whatever the merits of his book, when he blogs like that, it looks almost like an odd and zany kind of sociopathy. But to say that would be going overboard and exaggerating, and I don't want to hold to such a viewpoint. Rather, I want to think that RD does love his family, is talented in many ways, but he just has this peculiar blind spot in his personality; and that ultimately he means well and wants to help others in some way. However, I am still just a stranger and don't know RD personally, though I do want very much to think the better of him. Maybe I am crazy for doing that. I know what a total fool I can be. About the best thing I can think of would be to simply pray for the man, that the LORD would bring some kind of grace or someone into his life who can help him in the way that is needed. We all need grace.
Anyhow, I am still working through the book, trying to keep a level head.
Pauli, it's become apparent that TLWORL is really two books.
DeleteThe first eleven chapters could be called "The Book of Ruthie". The last three chapters could be called "The Book of Rod." And each one has to be judged separately on its merits.
The Book of Ruthie is memoir about his sister. However, strictly speaking, we cannot count it as a memoir in the sense of being RD's recollection of his day-to-day interaction with someone, in this case, his sister's adult life, because for much of that time he lived elsewhere and only visited on separate occasions. To write the Book of Ruthie, RD had to reconstruct the most of the details of her adult life by finding out from other witnesses what had happened. At the ending of the Book of Ruthie, he is very much surprised to discover what his sister was really like and the effect she had on so many people. In a manner of speaking, the Book of Ruthie is more a biography than a memoir. Or that is what it seems to me at least.
Now, is the Book of Ruthie a good book? I have to say yes, a fairly good book, because it succeeded in one very important thing: RD managed to convey what his sister was like, and I as a reader could walk away knowing that I had encountered someone, as if I had actually met her. Is the Book of Ruthie a perfect book, if there is such a thing? Well, no, all books have flaws. The Book of Ruthie had a few blemishes, but I think they were minor and did not detract from the merits of the book.
On the other hand, there is the Book of Rod, and this seems to be a different animal altogether. In it, RD talks about moving back to Louisiana, the course of which he will apparently use to start sharing with us his ideas about "the secret of a good life." Now presenting your ideas in this manner is not necessarily a bad thing. But the questions I will have to ask of the Book of Rod, as a reader, are going to be entirely different. And I have to take a different stance in how I approach what I am reading. The questions become different. For example, one question that can be asked is "does RD present his ideas in a understandable and convincing manner?" Do his ideas ring true? Do they fit reality? Are they clear? Does his moving back to Louisiana really illustrate his ideas in some particularly convincing and necessary way?
For me, the jury is still out on the Book of Rod. But I have to treat it much differently. So far, I have noticed one problematic passage in chapter 12 that bothered me a little:
"Without realizing what I was doing, I had given myself permission to live a life of restlessness and liberty because Ruthie chose to live within the limits imposed by life in a small town."
Unless I am missing something, this sentence simply does not ring true, because it is apparent, even from reading TLWORL, that RD's original motiviations for moving away from his hometown never had anything to do with his sister's decisions in life, one way or another. Here in this passage it simply made no sense at all for RD to say she gave him "permission" to do what he ended up doing, not in the way RD is describing. He stumbles very badly here because what he says here doesn't fit the facts at all, and it looks more like a case of RD "projecting" into his sister's life an aspect that really did not exist.
By the way, RD's blog entry the other day about "Burning down the big house" really flabbergasted me, for many reasons. Most of all, what he said there about his sister likewise did not ring true. It simply did not fit, not the Ruthie Leming that I encountered in TLWORL. I think that RD can sometimes be a interesting writer, but other times he can sound like he's indulging in ridiculous sophistic nonsense.
Well, what an eye-opener! Pauli, I finally reached the key paragraphs on page 236 in chapter 13 of TLWORL.
Delete"It's a sibling thing," Abby said, trying to console me. Maybe so, but it stinks being the only guy in town who could tick off a saint.
What's on this page goes far in clarifying some of what RD does in the TLWORL, and you were right, the book very much helps me in understanding RD a little better.
One thing I would tell RD is that being around saints can also make a person very uncomfortable at times. Since they are very honest people, saints can recognize BS pretty readily and they don't hesitate to point it out when something is being precisely that. Maybe I am wrong here, but I suspect that some of what RD considers to have been "resentment" towards him on Ruthie's part really owes itself to her giving in to expressing her brutal honesty on a few occasions when she was seeing that her dear brother was being very full of it.
Siblings sometimes do that, you know, being honest.
And in a way, I am kind of writing my book review here, as I work through the book.
Even though RD sometimes blogs some really whacked out stuff, I have to say that so far his book has given me some measure of more sympathy for him. But like I said earlier, maybe I am crazy.
Speaking of bullying...
ReplyDeleteAm I detecting the shrill, nasal quacking of the untuned oboe in the hysterical finale of this posturing screed?
Keith
That is HILARIOUS
ReplyDeleteKathleen
Yes that is hilarious. Now he pissed off at Topix, and is pulling a typical Dreher. "I haven't been a bully! Honest! but, hey, I'll sue the damn bastards--let's do it."
ReplyDeleteCACHE THAT PAGE, Pauli, because it may be singularly embarassing to Dreher.
ReplyDelete"Has anybody been threatened with bodily harm? Loss of business? Any other substantive harm? If so, I want to know, because that sort of thing ought to be exposed and denounced, no matter which side it comes from, because it has no place in our politics...
"Sooner or later, the West Feliciana people who have been libeled anonymously on Topix [Dreher includes himself] are going to be able to find out the identities of those who have defamed them. And when they do, they are going to own those people, and their nice houses. If you know what I mean."
We know what he means, and it's bullying by his own strict definition.
We know what he means, and it's bullying by his own strict definition.
DeleteExactly!!!! Threatening lawsuits? WTH?? What's next? Sending Guido to break people's knee-caps?
The guy has made himself a public figure. He's fair game.. You makes your bed, you lies in it....
Oh, it's cached all right. I even added a comment, but I doubt that it will be published.
DeleteThe title "Bullying? Really?" should be taken to mean "I'll show you REAL BULLYING, buddy. We're lawyering up, dammit. Say goodbye to your nice life."
Someone should register on Topix as Muzhik and start posting stuff agreeing with Dreher. Don't forget to mention your friend, +Jonah.
You know it would be truly funny -- truly, truly funny -- if there was such an investigation (which there won't be) and the IP addresses pointed back to a public library or cafe with free wifi and they still couldn't figure out who did it. All the while it would remind Dreher of Muzhik and how he got busted by what's-his-guts from OCA News.
DeletePauli, your comment was there last time I looked!
DeleteAnd, oh, hey, didn't Dreher engage in anonymous commenting once or twice?
ReplyDeleteAnd between a book that's premised on the godless materialism of mainstream conservatives and a recent friendship with a blogger whose smears against Sarah Palin and the "Christianists" are legendary, how serious is Dreher in his opposition to libel?
He is not serious about his opposition to libel Bubba! With the exception of when he is threatened with loosing his money. Case in point, in 2008, Mr. Dreher accused me of calling him and harrassing him. I said he can print what ever he wants however I would sue him and his Employers at the time (Dallas Morning News and Beliefnet.com) if they allowed him to publish such tripe. After saying that, he sent me an email saying he should not be saying stuff like that and lets agree to leave each other alone.
ReplyDeleteJonathan Carpenter
Jonathan is right about this. He even sent me some type of email once when he got my address from something Jonathan sent and I was copied on. it said something like "We [Rod and Jonathan] need to just knock it off and leave each other alone." It's possible that this might have been a move to create a witness so to speak.
DeleteHere's my new thought -- and I'll do a full post on Bullying? Really? whenever I have a chance -- but what if these people with whom Dreher has sided with (DeLoach, Kennon, etc.) are starting to regret letting him into the "party"? He's got the bull-horn blaring whereas they'd rather be doing politicking with a lower profile.
ReplyDeleteThink about it: Kennon might have found that one Topix post while she was Googling Dreher, she found out about me/us from that, and she reacted instinctively to defend him. She probably had no clue as to the existence of all the people he'd offended, insulted and antagonized over the years. She and DeLoach are business people and, while they have involved themselves in local politics, they haven't intended to have it done "Dreher-style" with a blog and a bunch of name-dropping and excess moralizing and rhetoric.
So I'm making sure I save all these great pages from the Bonnie Blue Review because I'm guessing Bonnie will soon be going tits-up soon.
Very interesting speculation! Of course, how savvy (or sane) a business person are you if you sell house paint that supposedly soothes the spirit, restores the balance of nature, and aligns the stars for harmonic convergence or whatever?
DeleteNah, you're right...she's probably a hard-headed business person. The fluffy-headed New Agey stuff is probably a front. ;)
I'm sure the sheriff is driving over to Rod's house right now to thank him for finally filling his empty, pointless days with something to do, like expose what could easily be the local DA so Rod can sue him.
DeleteI think you may be right, Pauli, these people have no real clue yet just what sort of spoon banging on high chair tray loudmouth narcissism they've bought into, but I think Dreher is about to bring them all up to speed real quick, especially the sheriff.
"What do you mean he hasn't done anything with it yet? Does he know who I am? Does he know what sort of audience I have?"
Whereupon the sheriff will call a guy named Cooter who'll call a guy named Earl who shows up at Rod's house in an expensive suit to suggest they take a ride, maybe just down to the local coffee house, you see, to discuss a major state tie-in for TLWORL involving Bobby Jindal, they thought he said.
Have him back in time for dinner, Mrs. Dreher, they thought he said.
Keith
Looks like Dreher not only deleted Pauli's comment, he disabled the ability to comment to that blog post and on the latest (unrelated) blog post.
ReplyDeletelol. It's sort of a bitch remember all those little things like blog security and administration when someone has been doing all that stuff for you for years.
DeleteDoesn't that whole bullying post itself seem odd and out of place, at least the part about suing? People have been bashing Dreher for years, but except for what Jonathan said I don't remember him ever lashing out like that. Usually he just does what he did with Pauli's comment. Could it be that that Topix place is just a little too close to home? Any thoughts?
DeleteKeith
Lashing out at Topix is classic Dreher messenger-shooting. Topix is merely a medium where anyone can start threads and anyone can add to them. It's obviously more "democratic" than his blog where the message is strictly controlled. He has always fared poorly in that type of medium. We score point after point when our shots aren't blocked.
DeleteHe's losing it. First he says the topix comments r no big deal, then the next para he's talking lawsuits!
DeleteI know, and he does it not once, but twice. First: If "bullying" means some anonymous jackass said slanderous things on Topix, then sorry, I don't count that. Then later: But if people are only worried that some idiot on Topix is going to say mean things about them, sorry, but I can't take that seriously.
DeleteAnd... get this line: "I'm told they trash me all the time on that site." Lol. It's like he's saying "Well, *I* wouldn't even read that stuff, but someone I know did one time and they said if was really dumb." He can't admit he reads it, meanwhile it's likely that CountryLad is actually him. Too funny.
He can't admit he reads it...
DeleteI know, I know. It's hilarious. Of course he reads it...gimme a break!
Oh the sweet irony if the sheriff pinned "country lad" to drehers
DeleteIP. Oh please please please mr sheriff, we must check all relevant threads!
DeleteWhat kind of reception do you think he'll get when he parades into his rural sheriff's office with this latest tantrum?
ReplyDeleteHah. "I am on my way to the sheriff's office to deliver this letter."
ReplyDeleteAs my Aussie friend would say, Rod has really "spit the dummy" now.
(Also worth noting that the case he cites as a precedent is a real case of criminal defamation, not - the HORROR! - a few people being snarky on the big scary unregulated internet.)
Oh. My. Freaking. Gosh.
DeleteYou can't make this stuff up.
Yeah, that case bears no resemblance to what is happening to him. They were accusing someone of real crimes (rape, sexual assault, etc.) also there were 25,000 comments involved which is an amount akin to commercial broadcasting in the world of the forum. It seems like the burden of proof would be easier to satisfy under those conditions. The best I can tell, some people accused Rod of the following on this 127 comment thread: 1) Not understanding the HRC thing, 2) being a "flaming asshole", 3) setting up a blog, 4) having a big ego.
DeleteSigh...it never really changes, does it? Someone tries to pull Rod's pants down and the only move he knows is to squeal and cry for the grown-ups to make them stop. I feel so sorry for his wife.
DeleteKeith
This is really enhancing my vacation. I just wish I had a bigger screen than my phone to follow it on. Please provide links
ReplyDeleteCont. when possible
ReplyDelete1) If I were going to file a formal complaint accusing people of libel, I would have made sure to summarize their false accusations: if the details help my case, I mention the details. Dreher didn't.
ReplyDelete2) If the supposed defemation doesn't amount to much more than name-calling, I wouldn't engage in name-calling myself.
"...defending free speech requires policing the boundaries of debate to hold bullies like these defamers to account for their actions."
3) NR and Mark Steyn have recently been the target of a frivolous lawsuit by "global warm-monger" Michael Mann (not the filmmaker). I can't imagine that Dreher's former colleagues will think more of him for taking on a similar role in harassing commenters at a forum.
4) I also can't imagine that this will endear him to Dreher's new neighbors, and if the sherriff's office doesn't dismiss this as a waste of time, I think people would have good reason to suspect less-than-impartial treatment for Our Working Boy and their Returned Prodigal Son.
Going back to one comment Pauli highlighted: "If 'bullying' means some anonymous jackass said slanderous things on Topix, then sorry, I don't count that."
ReplyDeleteLooks like he's changed his mind on that.
If Dreher had been calling people out on their anonymity to challenge the worst of them to a duel -- or an arm-wrestling contest for charity, Stallone-style -- that'd be one thing, but seeking to punish mere critics with a civil suit is revolting.
What's kind of sad is that this will probably keep some people from speaking their mind about him.
DeleteWhat's gratifying is that people in the sheriff's office will take him less seriously now. He's got to be the boy who cried wolf at this point.
I want to do a whole post about this, but I'm crazy busy today. I'll try to tonight; my wife is out of town with 3 kids and I have the oldest, so we'll see what I can get done later.
Dreher's latest blog post is the definition of TL;DR (that thing must be 5000 words long), but I did read the last few paragraphs, about the loss of his Catholic faith. I have to suspend the usual diet of snark for just a moment to say that those paragraphs are tragic and, in a way, quite moving.
ReplyDeleteI've suspected for a while now that Dreher, despite all the blather about Orthodoxy and Culture Wars, was writing from a fundamentally non-religious perspective. Now I realize that's true.
He should consider taking at least a month's retreat at a monastery, COMPLETELY AWAY FROM THE INTERNET in all its forms, and try to start healing spiritually.
I agree with you, Andreas.
DeleteWhen I read some of RD's blogging it can be, well, exasperating, and even more so now that I have been reading his memoir about his sister.
I've come to the conclusion that the only thing I can effectively do is pray for RD and his family.
How does one explain? To me it seems like there is deep down in his heart some kind of running sore that badly needs healed, and he is looking to all the wrong things to find that healing.
May God grant him grace to have that healing.
I took a glance through that incredibly long and numbingly dull Dreher post you cite, Andreas.
DeleteMy first reaction is to wonder how he thinks that might be possibly interesting to a reader. Then I see that there are comments, so my question is answered in lieu of the new question: how can those commenters possibly be interested in that.
But I'm also starting to wonder if Dreher doesn't quite understand the concept of human nature. As in great art and literature being great because it teaches us something about the human nature that we all share. Instead, Dreher's self-centered output seems mostly to treat Rod Dreher as this singular being with no attributes in common with others, at least beyond those that he hasn't discovered yet by traveling to Europe or by reading someone's grad school thesis about a favorite author of his.
And he seems to treat Paw, Ruthie, and the others in his life as other singular beings, also with no attributes in common with other humans or with himself.
I haven't read TLWORL yet, nor do I plan to. But what I've read from the Pauli and Oengus reviews, it seems to be cut from that same cloth. In that while we might get a little human insight because we are used to looking for it, we mostly get insight about Rod Dreher and those who touched his life.
If I'm on the right track here, this might inform the incoherent nature of his countless blog posts -- they are all over the place, as mentioned above, but for the unifying theme of Rod Dreher himself.
Do any of the rest of you have this sense?
Well, I try not to read Rod at all if I can help it. But yes, based on what Pauli and Oengus and others have said, I do get that sense.
DeleteFrom his lawsuit threats, I also get the sense that Rod is losing it. I am seriously starting to feel sorry for him, and I am thinking I should maybe stop commenting about him and just pray for him.
Of course, if he launches another anti-Catholic hissy fit, I'll go back to commenting, LOL.
Diane, here's what I as a non-Catholic have learned from Rod Dreher's recent posts invoking Catholics:
DeleteJuly 9 - Catholics are tired of Pope Francis' show of austerity in deference to the poor. They want him to "throw me some brocade, mister".
July 8 - In the private circles of their close friends, Catholics talk about others like this: “Well, he’s gonna be smokin’ a turd in Purgatory.”
July 6 - Catholics embrace gay rights, which can only leave others concluding that Catholics must be a massively confused lot, particularly with respect to how they view the interactions of their religious teachings and society in general.
What is the reader to conclude from all this but that Catholics must be a strange, quaint, befuddled lot, but good to steal a vulgar line from when you need one? Surely there must be a more rational and aesthetically seemly religious choice, but what could that religious choice possibly be, I wonder? Maybe something equally ancient and definitely pre-Enlightenment? *cough* Oh, look: following those posts is a whole series of others about just such a choice, one that might leave you free of those defining Catholic qualities we've just examined. *cough*
Pik, you may not realize it, but I think you're just seeing your previous insight about Dreher not doing anything from a different angle. Dreher is sort of like a giant garden snail, he hides in plain sight by living as much as he possibly can in the alternative world of his writing, the alternative world he generates himself, the mucous trail he exudes to separate and protect him from the world and within which he travels protected by a gooey, separating, filtering force field. If he had any other sort of ordinary job this wouldn't be possible, but he doesn't, and his recent couch fainting from mono has now taken the simple interaction of mowing the lawn and transferred it to his wife or sons. He seems to live almost exclusively in the blogosphere, and as much as he possibly can only within an even smaller bubble of the blogosphere inhabited only by those who like to ride within his slime trail with him, because they also find it protective, or delicious and nourishing, or for whatever other reason.
Needless to say, there's probably precious little correcting negative feedback in such a universe, and almost certainly just the opposite: when he starts screwing up it only gets positively reinforced, with not much to ever keep it from oscillating wildly out of control.
So prayer probably is a very good response, but maybe so is the sort of ongoing analysis Pauli offers here which might help others like Oengus or Andreas or others like them in their efforts to get through to him.
Keith
I feel bad for him at one level, but on another level I look at everybody who still takes him seriously -- even somewhat seriously -- and I don't feel guilty for continuing to state how silly he's being. I continue to point out inaccuracies, inconsistencies and absurdities in his words and actions; after all, words are practically equivalent to actions for a writer.
DeleteI think part of why he seems to be losing it is that he continues to assign absolute cosmic relevance to places and things which are relative, transitory and ultimately irrelevant. His continued belief that it's possible to experience fulfillment through food, the "Platonic Ideal of Chickenness" (Google that phrase) leads him to take pictures of his meals and share them publicly; his belief that it's possible to find a perfect church (i.e., one where the members never annoy him) in this world has led him to build his own church in his backyard, etc. These examples represent ridiculous notions and for some reason many Catholics are still gobbling up this crap.
I've suspected for a while now that Dreher, despite all the blather about Orthodoxy and Culture Wars, was writing from a fundamentally non-religious perspective. Now I realize that's true.
Sure seems like it. I don't know anybody who purports to be so concerned with religion and morality behaving so hysterically about criticisms of himself and his ideas, and going so far as to issue threats to suppress them. Maybe the next time one of his chickens is assaulted by the neighborhood feline he'll buy a grenade launcher.
Wow. I go away for a few days, come back and now I haven't a clue what the hell is going on--incoherent rants about Walker Percy, this business about libel suits and sheriff's investigations, tedious local politics...it's all just a blur of incomprehensibility.
ReplyDelete- The Man From K Street