Bread upon the waters
Frankly, this is an angle to save the dwindling The American Conservative (TAC) I would never have thought of: selling indulgences.
To be vague - or, in the how-to-blog-like-Rod-Dreher style we have all become rapt students of by now, UPDATE: - it's not clear whether TAC and Rod are actually actively selling indulgences or only that Scot F. Martin, claiming to have given money to TAC, would now like Rod to offer prayers for his business to be successful in the new year.
However this interesting venture potentially works out for TAC and its supplicants, I'd have to say it definitely fits TAC's mission to set a new (or, perhaps, very much older) and different course for conservatism’s next generation.
Since when are oysters "holy" and how does one "commune" with them?
ReplyDeleteThe title gets close to being sacrilege, but I guess it's just part of the Dreher shtick — say something that "sounds" like mockery but don't really mean it. And of course, it is about food.
On the other hand, habitually eating raw oysters is like playing Russian roulette with your life. One day Rod is going to get unlucky and eat that one contaminated oyster that puts him in the hospital in critical condition. I hope this doesn't happen, but if he keeps playing the odds, it is bound to happen, just as in Japan they eat those crazy puffer fish, and every once in a while, someone eats one that hadn't been prepared in the exactly precise and correct manner and the person ends up dead.
Some years ago, a co-worker of mine contracted cholera from eating raw oysters. Nasty business.
DeleteP.S. I'll have raw oysters once in a while, but only in a restaurant that serves a lot of them, and then only in months with an "R".
Unfortunately, I expect poor Rod Dreher to pass like Elvis, except sweating and straining at a stool so packed with unimaginable delicacies that anthropologists will still be teaching it long after I'm gone.
DeleteNow it just may be that oysters are a sublimation for a gift he simply can't stomach giving Mrs. Dreher, for whatever reason, but I don't think Dreher is pulling your leg there, Oengus. I don't see any reason to think he doesn't really mean it when he describes oysters as a sacrament.
If we know a man by his needs and his desires, what we know of Dreher is this. What he wants to be thought of, maybe even by himself, is as not just a strict Christian but specifically a narrow, clerically fastidious type of Christian, and the more, the better. If God had an opening for class-tattling-on Teacher's Pet, Dreher would be first in line to apply. And don't any of you with your less than wholly embodying liturgies or anything else forget it.
But what Dreher can't help but tell us all day in and day out is that what he plainly worships is food, as if his whole being were nothing but some sort of mutant high-sensory-vagina-alimentum, like one of these critters, periodically stood on end with a monkey mask so as not to frighten his human disciples. Food is what he dreams about at night and what he thinks about on waking: what will his next "mouth-feel" be, and will it be more exquisite than the one before?
He doesn't make his pilgrimages to holy sites, he makes them to the most Caligulan of eateries where The Tube can fill itself to satiation like "pigs in shit".
So he's telling you the straight truth about himself in that regard, and while everyone is discounting his words and saying, oh, no, Rod, you must be a better man, a higher order creature than that, Dreher is nodding absentmindedly and dreaming about what his lips will enclose next.
Keith
Keith: "He doesn't make his pilgrimages to holy sites, he makes them to the most Caligulan of eateries…"
DeleteI think you make a good point, Keith. In the past, I have said that as far as I could tell by what he writes, "RD doesn't actually believe in anything." But perhaps I should qualify that by saying there is one thing he does really believe in; that is, eating food and endlessly jabbering about eating food, as if it were a kind of epicurean religion.
Perhaps, he should have gotten a job writing scripts for the cable Food Network?
I like good food as much as the next guy, but for my part, I find that when someone starts endlessly talking about food, it gets to be insufferably boring.
Keith: ... not just a strict Christian but specifically a narrow, clerically fastidious type of Christian, and the more, the better.
DeleteBut most certainly not an influential one, or one that has any responsibility for what the culture actually becomes. To wit, Dreher fears what would happen should Christians "win" the culture war. Or, should they win the culture war according to the false assumption that there would be a Christian Sharia as a result.
But don't worry about Our Hero. Dreher will make sure that he is well insulated from having anything to do with changing the world. Other than patronizing Luke-with-an-umlaut and other fine restaurants.
Keith: And don't any of you with your less than wholly embodying liturgies or anything else forget it.
DeletePope Francis cautions against this attitude in a section of Evangelii Gaudium entitled "No to spiritual worldliness":
This insidious worldliness is evident in a number of attitudes which appear opposed, yet all have the same pretence of “taking over the space of the Church”. In some people we see an ostentatious preoccupation for the liturgy, for doctrine and for the Church’s prestige, but without any concern that the Gospel have a real impact on God’s faithful people and the concrete needs of the present time. In this way, the life of the Church turns into a museum piece or something which is the property of a select few.
If TAC is going to be entertaining prosperity prayer requests, they could get a few money-making ideas from the master. Gotta be more careful with processing the prayer requests than Tilton was, tho.
ReplyDeleteIn a 2009 DMN column, Rod claimed that a "sublime" meal he had was a sacrament. At the time, I pointed out that the "invisible realities" he said his meal was a sign of "are all subjective experiences of the diner in response to the food, not intrinsic qualities of the food itself." (That, and a sacrament refers to a supernatural reality, not a mental state.)
ReplyDeleteI also somehow dug up this quotation from St. Augustine: "There can be no religious society, whether the religion be true or false, without some sacrament or visible symbol to serve as a bond of union." You can decide for yourself whether "holy oysters" constitute a visible symbol as a bond of union for Rod's religion.
But wait! There's more!
ReplyDeleteToday Dreher is also soliciting donations for The Walker Percy Weekend.
That appeal could dilute the donation pool for TAC. If anybody cared, that is. There's not much traction in the comment box so far, with only two comments: one from a fan of the fest, and the other begging for donations to PBS (because it gets only 8% of its budget from the gov't, ya know).
Pik, instead of, you know, creating something worth selling, it looks like Dreher and TAC are falling back to that more obscure but more comfortable redoubt of Transfer Payment Conservatism - the TPCons.
DeleteWe have to wonder what could possibly have torn him away from that deepest and most limpid of pools of TPC cash, the Templeton Foundation. And yet, somehow, somehow, he cut himself a stick, tied his poke in a red bandana on the end of it, and, with a parting sneer, courageously left that sinecure behind for the cutting edge creative destruction of TAC TPCdom.
Thanks, I think I will have another...you?
And Happy New Year, all.
Keith