Orthodox ethics in St. Francisville, LA

If your ethical compass developed growing up in St. Francisville, LA and is regularly calibrated by a ROCOR Orthodox church there, you, too, may want to learn to daisy-chain tax-deductible organizations to serve your personal interests the way Rod Dreher demonstrates for us.

You first use the money you're paid by the magazine funded by The American Ideas Institute, a nonprofit, non-partisan 501(3)(c) organization based in Washington, D.C., money you yourself have solicited on one occasion after another, to write a post, not on American Conservatism, but rather to promote another, different tax-deductible foundation in your home town, the Freyhan Foundation, the organization you're using to fund the literary festival you decided you wanted to create, promote, and spend other peoples' money on in ways you're not revealing but in which you'll play a substantial role. Funny, the Freyhan Foundation's tax-deductible objectives, as shown on its Web site, seem to be a bit different from tax-deductible-funded whiskey tastings ostensibly in the name of some author. Though, come to think of it, I took a couple drinks while talking about author Mas Ayoob just the other night. So it's a thing, and, anyway, what's a tax expenditure other people have to make up for with their personal income taxes between friends, eh?

And then, because that slides through your conscience like grass through a goose, you immediately turn around and use that same original tax-deductible organization, The American Ideas Institute, to promote the ongoing marketing and sale of your book by private publisher Grand Central Publishing. Why fight with your commercial book publisher for a larger marketing budget to push your book when you can use a wholly-unrelated tax-deductible organization and the innocents foolish enough to trust it with their dollars to do the job instead? After all, "American ideas" is a pretty broad umbrella, with plenty of room for you to snuggle yourself under it if you've a mind to.

Alabama-born Walker Percy, of course, was a resident of Covington, LA in St. Tammany Parish on the other side of the state from St. Francisville and set his writing, not in the real West Felicia Parish or the real East Feliciana Parish but in a wholly fictional "Feliciana Parish", in the same way that Willian Faulkner created his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, MS. This fictional Feliciana Parish, though, stretching "'from the Mississippi [River] to the Pearl [River], from the thirty-first parallel to...Lake Ponchartrain'" dwarfs anything possibly real in Louisiana and would be far more at home in a much vaster state like Texas or Alaska.

Unless, of course, you desperately needed a far-up-list writer to hopefully have others compare yourself to during the period in your life while you have a Feliciana connection handy for manipulation to that end. Couldn't hurt your local deeper pockets/political/social dinner party cred either. You can even use the tie-in that Percy was buried nowhere near your West Feliciana Parish festival home but instead just up the road from Covington in the St. Joseph Benedictine Abbey in St. Benedict, Louisiana - why, the very same St. Benedict who's your patron saint! And even though you probably haven't thought of it yet but inevitably will, you still have time, to borrow from a joke our regular commenter Diane gifted us with, to arrange to serve Eggs Benedict to your Freyhan Foundation-funded Walker Percy Festival goers while you chat them up for any publishable interest in your long-promised Benedict Option book. That's a three-fer, dude!

But...if your ethical compass didn't develop growing up in St. Francisville, LA, where "conflict of" and "abundance of" seem to be nothing more than synonyms when modifying "interests", and if that ethical compass is not regularly calibrated by the tiny ROCOR Orthodox church there you were instrumental in establishing, then you'd probably find it a little hard to sleep at night if you tried to hustle yourself through life in this way.

So never mind. Instead, treat people you know with money to give and handle the institutions you have access to the right way, the way your parents and your own church taught you to. That's what the orthodox in the subject line refers to, at least ideally: the customary and proper way things should ethically be done.

UPDATE (as they say)- how Louisiana back-scratching works: One of Dreher's festival sponsors (near bottom), Kevin Couhig is the new Parish President Dreher promoted and helped elect by serving as his unpaid political publicist, the option we're left with after Police Juror John Kean laid out for us in withering detail why Dreher could not possibly have been functioning as a journalist.