A Ghost in the Family
The ISSUU site has a new embed feature which I am using here so everyone can read the classic short story A Ghost in the Family by Rod Dreher.
I think this story can serve as a qualification which explains this comment from the other day. In it, Dreher claims to "revel in news about religion" to explain away his relentless Catholic-bashing noticed by commenter Chip. I would suggest that this statement needs to be qualified. It may not be true that Dreher only revels in bad news about the Catholic Church, but it is certainly true that he only revels in some news about religion. Other religious news which might be interesting to most religious people is entirely boring to Dreher and thus ignored. For example, I would have figured he'd have been all over this Eastern Clergy Can Marry Now story like white on rice, but he hasn't posted on it that I can see.
Here's the entire comment:
Chip says:
November 14, 2014 at 3:09 pm
Rod, am I wrong, or do you revel in bad news about the Catholic Church? I would say about 1 post a day is on that topic. Are you having a hard time letting go?
[NFR: You are wrong, and thin-skinned to boot. I revel in news about religion. The fast-changing religion demographics in Latin America is a huge story with global implications. Neither one is my church, so I don't have a dog in that fight. But the fact that you don't want to hear the news doesn't mean the news isn't there. Blaming the messenger is not a good strategy for dealing with reality. -- RD]
Chip's observation is the one we have made over and over again. The revelry is reserved for tales of paranormal activity or narratives which reinforce his own prejudices. In other words, the religious news stories which he likes best are ones which aim to stimulate the curiosity and not edify the soul.
Ouch.
ReplyDeleteThe irony is that Rod shows how thin-skinned he is in his response to Chip. It's the bloggy equivalent of a toddler's temper tantrum.
ReplyDeleteNeither one is my church, so I don't have a dog in that fight.
ReplyDeleteHow utterly disingenuous is this?
That was Chip's entire point: It's not your church, Rod; it's your EX-church; yet you just can't let it go. You obviously have several coon-hounds, a pit bull, and a nutria in this fight, in fact.
Typical Dreherrhean gratuitous insults, too: "thin-skinned"; "you don't want to hear the news." How can anyone take TAC seriously if it allows its writers to insult comboxers that way? What reputable publication, on- or offline, would tolerate this?
I hope the nutria loses big time.
DeleteThey are not a reputable publication. You would get better news from the National Enquirer. Jonathan Carpenter
ReplyDeleteHow utterly disingenuous is this?
ReplyDeleteOne of the things Dreher is quickest to ban commenters for is "psychoanalyzing him", and with good reason. Poor old Rod's psychology hangs out of his head like some horribly everted orifice for all the world to see, none more so than his reflex to project onto others the defects I suspect he clearly sees and loathes in himself.
You can just see Little Rod as a child (I can't help but imagine him as a Spanky/Our Gang character, complete with knickers), frequently screaming for attention now that baby sister Ruthie is on the scene to steal it, and constantly doing that thing that children who already know they hold their parents hostage to their spoiled natures do: explaining ever more violently to the parents that what is wrong with the parents is just what, coincidentally, the parents are trying to correct in the child.
But this only works in situations where browbeating works, which probably wasn't the case at The John Templeton Foundation.
I wonder... how many comments like this does Dreher have to delete/not approve? It's possible that there are many, and the reason Chip's was graced with a NoteFromRod rather than scrapped is that it's very tiresome for him to perform this housekeeping chore, so he attempts a "nuclear option". This entails his explaining in strong terms why he links to this kind of news so often and what is wrong with commenters like Chip. This flip-out is reminiscent of the one he threw at Tom Piatak.
DeleteOh my gosh, I'd forgotten all about the Piatak Thing. Yikes. Talk about thin-skinned/ Projection, thy name is Dreher.
DeleteAnd yes, I agree, Pauli: For every criticism Mr. Control Freak allows through, there are dozens (or more) that he deletes.
Control Freakery. The sure sign of profound insecurity.
Pauli, here's another example of what we're talking about. In a previous version (haven't looked for the cached version, although I saw the original) of this post, Dreher goes on an ecstatic romp beating up on this now-dead Lesbian chick, Leslie. Ashamed even of himself, he revised it.
DeleteA commenter, Colonel Klink, who if I'm not confusing him with someone else is a pretty staunch social conservative, peels back the gossamer veil Dreher has draped himself in with the O'Connor qualification and offers this
"Colonel Klink says:
November 18, 2014 at 3:21 pm
Rod, I can’t understand you sometimes. You say not to snark and take things seriously but spent the entire piece calling Leslie Feinberg a freak. I understand that you’re trying to use some alternate use of the word that has to do with Flannery O’Connor and the South, but I can’t help but read it as you consistently mocking and degrading Feinberg (or attempting to mock and degrade her, I’m sure she had heard that word hurled at her in hate and anger enough times that she no longer acknowledged it). I know that you don’t like the idea of people “policing their language,” but you might want to think more about the words you use because I can’t hear you call her a freak without hearing a bully targeting someone different."
Dreher's NFR:
[NFR: Maybe the problem is yours, not mine [as always, projection -KH]. I've told you the sense in which I'm using the term "freak." If you "hear" me saying something other than what I'm clearly saying, and explaining to you that I'm saying, then I can't help you, or worry about your opinion. -- RD]
Naturally, the rules do not admit casting Rod himself as any sort of freak "in the O'Connor sense", and those who want to keep commenting get the message tout de suite; see the second update from "Steve" with its obligatory fawning.
Everybody knows this chickenshit little routine, no different than saying "Rod Dreher is a c*cksucker, that is, in the profoundly scholarly sense with which that term is sometimes used". Those that object too strongly never appear, so - presto! - there are no evident objections, while those that accept their dhimmitude get highlighted in updates.
Colonel Klink's later response.
The only word for this sort of sociopathy is psychotic. It's the bloggy equivalent of the Boko Haram leader who lures in a school full of children with promises of love and attention, then systematically disposes of all who do not worship him, leaving a population which has been culled and husbanded like any given herd of meat animals.
Dreher's life history as blogged by him shows fairly clearly an increasing isolation from the real social world ans an inability to function within any grouping not groomed by him to his needs.
Colonel Kurtz - Dante hasn't saved him yet, not by a long shot.
Let me put this in a final (shorter) perspective by incorporating Diane's observation: Rod Dreher is Christian in the sense of the little boy who sits on the floor and pulls the wings off of flies someone else has swatted for him.
DeleteHe really does this with every religion and every religious writer he soils: they all become weapons to his psychological needs, not paths to grace or redemption, but instead voodoo spells and curses to keep at bay and wound any person or thing he fears might threaten his delusional view of himself.
One thing (among several) that struck me from his out-of-the-blue uncalled-for swipe at the recentlydeparted Lesbian chick (about whom I'll bet he hadn't written a word previously) was this passage:
DeleteI posted something last night here about the death of a woman named Leslie Feinberg, but took it down because I didn’t want to appear to be snarking over someone’s passing [I was snarking over the obituary as a piece of hagiographic writing, but for many readers, this would have been a distinction without a difference, so I took it down].
So he starts out that piece blaming his readers for being incapable of distinguishing snark on the obituary from snark on the deceased. Bad enough, to be sure (one of Pik's Rules: never insult your customers), but then in the same piece he berates his reader for not distinguishing "freak" in the Southern Novelist sense from "freak" in the common usage sense.
We of course know, from past experience, that this is Dreher's M.O. Here, he's using Southern Novelist schtick is the mask behind which he can hide (wrapper) while dishing on the dead (payload). And of course, when called on it, we get nuclear projection.
I hadn't bought into Keith's theory that Dreher was spiraling toward a bad state, but now I see that there might be something to that.
P.S. I found it ironic that he used Fr. Neuhaus, on whom he also dished after his death, to dish on this poor soul's death.
This is so spot-on.
DeleteThat's why I get so frustrated when people like my friend John Beeler link to Dreher approvingly and even defend him ("we all have faults"). It has nothing to do with his "faults," finally. It has everything to do with the fact that he has a bully pulpit, from which he (a) relentlessly bashes the Catholic Church...how is this not problematical?; (b) censors dissent; and (c) bullies and harasses everyone who dares to disagree with him.
Sociopaths are dangerous when they have a bully pulpit. Then their "faults" are no longer private but, rather, very public and potentially very harmful. Why can't people see this?
This reminds me of the "ignatian sense of mongoloid" incident.
DeleteBTW, I vaguely recall another example, but I can't remember exactly when it appeared at TAC. Ooooh, oooh, I think it was in that infamous thread where he described his "Good Life" as a home-bound blogger, supported by his poor wife, who homeschools the kids, cleans the house, buys the groceries, and pretty much does everything else so that Rod can sit in his armchair with a cup of expensive tea and meditate / pontificate / whatever. A leftist-atheist-feminist female comboxer pointed out that it must be nice to have (essentially) slave labor handy so that you can live your idyllic Good Life. Rod responded with special viciousness, even for him. He ended his response with something like, "I pity your husband, if you can even get one." Yikes. Jonathan is right. That rag bears no relation to a reputable publication.
ReplyDeleteWow, Diane, do you mean he wrote "I pity your husband, if you can even get one" ? Do you realize that was what he excoriated Mark Levin for doing? Telling some woman basically that he pitied her husband! Just wow.
DeleteI remember that, Diane, it was really awful. And for all I differ with that commenter ideologically, she was spot-on. I wonder about poor Julie all the time but particularly in that post where he described himself as living the lifestyle of a gluttonous house-cat (Rodfield?) while she rushed around making everything comfortable.
DeleteHe is just plain immature. I am getting very tired of him taking jabs at Christian women who care about modesty under the guise of "critiquing feminists." He wants his wife and daughter in veils but any woman who objects to sexed up magazines displayed before children, or pin-ups in the workplace is a prude who needs humiliating...he's the worst kind of moral and sexual hypocrite.
I'd like someone to find that comment/post.
DeleteYour wish is my command! This didn't take as long as I thought it would to find. Thanks advanced search option on Google!
Deletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/still-life-of-the-good-life/
Scroll down to the comment by Naomi Cunningham, though another woman makes a similar comment earlier in the thread as well. I'm guessing those two weren't the only ones (the rest probably got deleted before publication) and he blew his top.
(one of Pik's Rules: never insult your customers)
ReplyDeleteHah. Yup. Just ask the former CEO of lululemon. Emphasis on "former."