On the Dante Trail trail: Selfiepalooza
H/T to cailleachbhan for our latest beating: "Florence Diary", which has that journalistically important sound like Berlin Diary but in reality is more the sort of thing your great aunt with the enormous bosom used to abuse you with as a child.
Four, count em', four Rod selfies, each more oleaginously self-indulgent than the last.
This brings our filosofia di suini tote now to:
Total pics: 13 - 100%
Selfies: 7 - 54% of total
Things Rod Ate: 2 - 23% of total
More if anything worth reading breaks, like Rick Steves dropping a Twitter scolding on Rod for cutting in on his action.
(A correction to our previous tote: selfies were 38% of the total, not 25%.)
My takeaway from that dull post is what Dreher considered to be his takeaway:
ReplyDeleteBig cultural-political takeaway from that conversation: that a growing number of smart young politically and religiously engaged people no longer believe that there is no conflict between being a faithful Christian and living within the American system. We are going to be seeing more and more of that.
I guess so, if one hangs out with American PhD students studying overseas -- who could possibly think that ex-pat academics could think such a thing unless there were a larger political movement on the horizon. We've never seen that before, of course. /sarc
Unstated, of course, is the TAC context of the past few weeks -- leaving the implication that there is in fact no conflict between being a faithful Christian and living within the Putin system.
The first thing I thought of when reading the "big cultural takeaway" is the Die Hard quote from Bruce Willis, noted here:
DeleteFarrell describes a time when he thought it would be cool to see America's "system" crash, and McClane counters, "It's not a system, it's a country, a country full of people who are home, scared."
My second thought was that this is so vague that it could mean anything. Does "living within the American system" mean working for a company owned by Americans? does it mean voting for American politicians? does it mean being an American citizen? does it mean living in America?
And if it means anything more insidious than those possibilities, why is the word American even in this "takeaway" in the first place?
My second thought was that this is so vague that it could mean anything.
DeleteThe reason Dreher's writing so often resembles a Three Card Montescheme is that, like Barack Obama, Dreher learned early on that, if you can find the right needy audience, style was enough to rub their tummies and substance never even need show its face: your stylistic siren song would allow the marks to project into you the imaginary substance they wanted to find there in the first place.
So that's why the art of the Uffizi is so indescribable, why his only real stand on gay marriage is sad face, why he never can quite say what his Benedict Option is: because he is a scholar and tutor of the accent, not the language.
So that's why the art of the Uffizi is so indescribable, why his only real stand on gay marriage is sad face, why he never can quite say what his Benedict Option is: because he is a scholar and tutor of the accent, not the language.
ReplyDeleteBingo. Keith, you rock.