Imagine that you are Rod Dreher, and you have one life to live...
In a post entitled What Would Flannery Do?, Rod Dreher muses
Imagine that you are Marc Juris, and you have one life to live, and you get to the end of that life, and you survey what you’ve done with what you’ve been given, and you see … Sex Box.
Certainly a fair question from someone who has made a professional career out of minding other peoples' business, particularly if his bloodhound nose picks up the prurient tang of sex. But, surely, turnabout is fair play, and so it's imminently fair to muse in turn
Imagine that you are Rod Dreher, and you have one life to live, and you get to the end of that life, and you survey what you’ve done with what you’ve been given, and you see …
Well, what do you see? What has Rod Dreher done with his life?
Because my co-bloggers here have far better archives than I do, I'm going to encourage them to take the lead in filling in the timeline for our new anonymous fan Anonymous.
I will kick things off, though, by starting arbitrarily somewhat in the middle and asking, how did that Templeton Fellowship turn out for you, Rod? People do recall that Rod did win one of these rare opportunities, don't they?
Most people would kill for the chance to score one of those research fellowships. What became of your Templeton-Cambridge research, Rod? Was it notable? What was it even about? Did it lead to further career opportunities, perhaps with the John Templeton Foundation itself? How did you leverage that even more rare gift in turn?'
As I said, I jumped in somewhere in the middle. To be scrupulously fair, though, we should start at the beginning and see what Rod has done with what he's been given and then judge, as he himself feels free to do, whether he has managed to turn his God-given apples into apple pie or whether he has somehow lost them on the road of life as just so much squandered applesauce instead.
I skipped that piece of drivel. But I did step into the piece he wrote about Rotherham.
ReplyDeleteThis may be the most disgusting thing to escape his computer, ever. The piece is just a particularly awful specimen of the "Yes we are all to blame" variety.
He always seems to work Catholic perfidy into his stuff, even when the topic is Muslim defilement of young girls.
Dreher's problem is that he is weak and a bit childish. Not to get too Freudian here, but he impresses me as someone stuck in an 11year old mind. He's childishly idealistic, eager to share his precious thoughts with us. But he is not mature enough to actually face the things he writes about. Like all weaklings he camouflages his lack of grit in a philosophical smokescreen.
Dreher's problem is that he is weak and a bit childish. Not to get too Freudian here, but he impresses me as someone stuck in an 11year old mind. He's childishly idealistic, eager to share his precious thoughts with us. But he is not mature enough to actually face the things he writes about. Like all weaklings he camouflages his lack of grit in a philosophical smokescreen.
DeleteI find a disturbing number of similarities between Dreher's approach to the world and Obama's.
Thomas, you should write a book. Not about Dreher, but about stupidity in general.
DeleteIndeed, imagining that you have one life to live and you get to the end of the life, and you survey what you've done with what you were given, is a good exercise when one applies that to oneself.
ReplyDeleteBut it sure seems that Dreher has been doing a lot of that imagining relative to others' lives lately. Just off the top of my head, he's done that lately for Frank Luntz and John McCain. Wouldn't take long to find several more, I'm sure.
Says more about Dreher than it does about Luntz or McCain, IMO.
P.S. I haven't read TLWORL, but having read more words about it (mostly from Dreher himself) than are in the book itself, it sounds like Dreher took a stab at examining his own life under the guise of describing his sister's, and concluded that his own ills are all someone else's fault. (Except for that virus which, judging from how often we are told about it, is a holy affliction he bears for all of us ...)
More and more, I can’t imagine anyone I admire wanting to have anything to do with contemporary American popular culture, except to warn people off of it.
Deletesays the guy who has fed his family most of his life from the fruits of that most pop-cultural of literary forms, the provocatively polarizing (Web)log. No trashy pop culture for him, nosirree.
(In that sense, Anonymous, we are aiding the great man in his work by warning others of the trashy nature of his pop culture contributions.)
Dreher's latest twitter page features him slinging around a bottle of Maker's Mark. He has a pair of shades on and sort of a grumpy squint on his face. The thing looks uncomfortably staged; doesn't he have friends to tell him not to do stuff like this?
ReplyDeleteMaker's is a fine bourbon (see how I called it "Maker's" instead of "Maker's Mark"? That shows how comfortable I am talking bourbon), but it's a bit... bourgeois for a foodie. It's a bourbon for people who drink bourbon instead of Jim Beam. Too upscale for common folk, too common for upscale folk.
DeleteIf Rod actually drinks it, it would be because he likes it, not for it's cachet. Which would be encouraging.
...doesn't he have friends to tell him not to do stuff like this?
DeleteNor does he have an editor to tell him not to write about his own illness, post videos of his daughter crying or photos of his kids' written work, write about saying "I love you" to women not his wife or his randy past, etc.
As I (think I have) said before, Dreher writes about things that most of us share with our buddies (who sometimes tell us that we're full of it). Over-sharing to a controlled audience makes me think that he is really lonely. For his own benefit and ours, I hope he can find some good friends, including some who can tell him to stuff it when he starts taking pictures of them using that damn hammer.
Another Matt says:
ReplyDeleteJune 6, 2014 at 9:53 am
Thanks for the recipe, Rod. What’s your bourbon of choice?
I’m sorry I won’t be there. If you’re ever in Rochester, though, let me know and I’ll buy you coffee.
[NFR: Thanks, AM. Lately I've been drinking Woodford Reserve, but Bulleit is fine too. I'm not actually a big bourbon drinker. Absolutely love the taste, but whiskeys of all kinds give me a bad headache. Not to say I won't drink it, though! Anyway, I'm abstaining from spirits this weekend, because I have a festival to help run. Heroic asceticism! ;) -- RD]
However frequently Rod does in fact drink Maker's Mark (the bottle he is holding may be a gift, or one of the choices offered at the WPW bourbon tasting, or, as it appears to me, only a prop), Rod is hoisting the bottle in the Twitter photo to show the audience he is Naughty Weeskee Boi cantankerously drinking a recognizeably named whiskey impossible to confuse with, say, a gentle port.
"Luuke at me as I pose for yuuu. I am manly Naughty Weeskee Boi, cantankerously drinking a fierce and naughty weeskee! I am the male Whore-Madonna church ladies everywhere swoon over while secretly me reading late at night after their husbands have gone to bed, your Manly-Godly Naughty Weeskee Boi!"
Ah, I suppose if whiskey gives you a bad headache, why sweat the semiotics of brands?
DeleteI couldn't resist posting about Dreher's awful take on Rotherham, over at my blog.
ReplyDelete