Rod Dreher burns his conservative card, annoints his forehead with its ashes
When ISIS Ran the American South
There are only a few plausible explanations for this bizarre attempt to out-Obama Barack Obama in morally equating the behavior of ISIS today with Western, particularly U. S. Western historical events, the least charitable being that what they say about black men is true and that Dreher simply could not accomplish his goal directly, on his knees.
However the more likely is also the more pragmatic. Because of the dismal sales of his last book about his sister, Dreher's current Dante book was born out of wedlock, with neither advance nor even publicity tour; the secrecy surrounding the publisher even suggesting Dreher himself may be among the investors foisting it on the unsuspecting public this year.
Accordingly, so as not to end up eating cat food in his twilight years, its author desperately needs every living creature on God's green earth which (unlike his family) doesn't already loathe and despise him to be primed and available to purchase whatever he happens to discharge in life from here on out, a population which logically includes every politically and sexually progressive mammal left of Ted Cruz, but in particular his employer TAC's target audience, the devout NPR listener and contributor.
The clue that Dreher has finally jettisoned any conservative testicular fragment still undescended to become an overt, eager NPR flack is the uniquely shameful blog post linked above itself, because it doesn't just casually reiterate Obama's shameful "high horse" rhetoric in passing but instead dives headlong into one of NPR's signature and most virulent themes: that only progressives born elsewhere or correctly schooled by them are keeping the U. S. South from imminently collapsing into its congenital norm, brutal racist savagery, why, yes, exactly like that practiced by ISIS right now.
But, miraculously if one is to believe it, such historical tragedies occurred nowhere else in America. This is the specific DNA signature of both the NPR meme and Dreher's self- and place-loathing embrace of it.
And of course it enables Ray Dreher, Jr. to take one more passive-aggressive smack at his father, Ray Dreher, Sr., an active, formative citizen of the "ISIS" South that Dreher urinates on about, without the risk that the frail old man still might have the strength to pop him one for such temerity.
Sadly, such is the risk, Mr. Dreher, Sr., when your son escapes, effeminate, resentful, and consumed with lifetime passive-aggressive revenge on you and yours in his heart. Surely you and your land deserve better. At least you still have the memory of Ruthie, the one good and undeformed child you managed to raise, the woman whose life's work as a dedicated teacher of children, unlike the narcissistic pursuits of her more notorious brother, represented the true moral values of the American South
If you don't believe me, read the whole thing.
Given this comment: Anyone taking bets on when he will write a column extolling the "virtues" of Roe vs. Wade? Jonathan Carpenter
ReplyDeleteComment here if you disagree with the equivalence.
ReplyDeleteFrom the Dreher piece:
ReplyDeleteWe all need to know these things, and face down what our ancestors did. These weren’t Crusaders sacking Constantinople. These were our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, doing it to the fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers of our black neighbors. Attention must be paid. That may be the only atonement available now, but it’s better than what we have had, which is nothing.
(emphasis added)
I'm guessing that Ray Dreher Sr. was not alive at the time that the lynchings mentioned by RD (who has now gone so far as to be citing the abhorrent Bill Moyers) occurred. So what is this "fathers" business all about?
Maybe we get a hint from Dreher's Big Essay on the main page of TAC (said essay, of course, about poor Dante, who must be tiring in his grave of being dragged out so often):
... I had made a Disneyland of “home” and “family.” I learned, only too late, that my late sister had raised her children to see their uncle as a dodgy character, a city slicker who had, as we Southerners say, “gotten above his raising.”
Now that I was home, my sister’s family didn’t want to have much to do with us, and my parents supported them in this. By having different tastes, and by moving away, I had shown myself disloyal and untrustworthy. Their judgment was final.
Wild speculation: I'm guessing that Rod Dreher's judgement is much much more final than his father's. And much more viciously expressed.
I guess the silver lining is that he didn't explicitly hang a lynching around Ruthie's neck (i.e., "our sisters, fathers, grandfathers . . . "). Except by association, of course.
Oh, what a relief it is
DeleteIt's so funny that he starts by praising Ross Douthat as the man who can do a great job of treating any issue THEN proceeds to do such a horrible job of treating this one with all the equivalence and emotionalism of a democratic convention. He might as well have written "Here's why Douthat writes for the New York Times and I write for AmConMag."
ReplyDeleteI haven't read Douthat on Obama's crusader remarks; I really don't have time to waste on that.
As we well know, kids, the Mormons arrived in Utah and the Cherokee in Oklahoma because both just loved a parade. Loved 'em. And, really, who doesn't?
ReplyDeleteBut as NPR* and Rod remind us it was only in Mordor - sorry, the The South - that any true horrors in American history too place. At least Rod didn't implicate my hometown and my ancestors as the epicenter of that holocaust.
*It doesn't take much listening to NPR to quickly understand the proper place, the only place of both African-Americans and the South in the lily-white NPR cosmology, respectively. Black people exist to create rap music that white NPR interviewers then gush over for 30 seconds to score street cred. And to be lynched and otherwise discriminated. In the South, which really has had no other function in the history of the human race than to discriminate against black people and lynch them.
Per Amazon, the publisher of the Dante book is Regan Arts. Which may provide further grist for the EQE mill.
ReplyDeleteIf you’ve read a literary novel, listened to conservative radio, or jacked off to your mom’s favorite erotica in the past 30 years, you’ve probably consumed media that’s passed through the hands of publishing legend Judith Regan.
DeleteOver the past three decades, Regan has revolutionized the book business. The single mother became the first publisher to transform popular radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh into best-selling authors while at the same time editing and publishing books by authors who would make Limbaugh squirm, among them Michael Moore, wild child–era Drew Barrymore, Howard Stern, and Jenna Jameson. In between sparking various controversies, she edited Douglas Coupland’s best-selling literary novels and Wicked, the novel that spawned one of the most popular musicals of all time, all the while acquiring a reputation for saying aggressive, blunt, often politically incorrect things and not being afraid of a fight.
Okie doke. If you can't get the monks of Athos to illuminate it for you, the house of Jenna Jameson is probably the next best thing.
Who is Douglas Coupland? And what on earth is a "literary novel"?
DeleteWho is Douglas Coupland? And what on earth is a "literary novel"?
DeleteDiane, I'm not a literary person but it sounds to me like a "literary novel" is an important word salad distinction like We are not all guilty. Almost no one alive today is guilty. But we are all implicated, one way or another. It’s an important distinction., like the important distinction "violent extremism", or like the important distinction "big giant" swords. As opposed to "small giant guilt implication literary novels".
Like, think about it.
Keith, I think you hit a bulls-eye with "literary novel" as a "word salad distinction". Dickens' novels were published as weekly installments, about the least literary way possible, yet are universally considered as "literary" today.
DeleteIf there is a meaning to "literary novel", I'd guess it might mean that some of the cool kids like it. You know, like the movies that NPR reviewers refer to as "smart".
P.S. Dreher's piece on guilt vs. implication is stupid. What does "implicated" mean, if other than "guilty"? I guess it means we walk around with sad face or use a knowing nod when we read a story about the bad old days.
Anyway, if there is such a thing as something that is both self-righteous and self-hating, that Dreher piece would be it.
P.P.S. Oh no!! I now learn that the no-doubt "smart" movie Redacted implicated us all!!
Pik, I usually make those sorts of distinctions when I eat eggs and jalapenos at the same time, but that's just me. And to think that all this time someone might have paid me for that production
DeleteI'd put it this way: a literary novel is more about the writing than the plot.
DeleteMy answer to "Who is Douglas Coupland": Oh, he's the guy who... wait, no, I know I've heard of him, he wrote... I mean, he's famous for... let's see, Wikipedia says... huh, no, I guess I just know his name. He coined (or at least popularized) the term "Generation X," and has probably been mentioned or quoted in a bunch of smart articles I've read over the years.
DeleteWhich probably makes me a philistine, but honestly, I got about a page and a half into The Crying of Lot 49 before deciding John Dickson Carr was more my speed.
Here's a nugget from 2002.
DeleteIt puts me in mind of the meeting I had in 2002 with the publisher Judith Regan to talk about the prospect of writing a book about the Catholic sex abuse scandal. “Forget it,” she said. “People are willing to read about that in the newspaper, but nobody wants to spend $27 to read about priests screwing boys.”
So he's known her for at least 13 years. I wonder how many books he's pitched to her in that time?
I read Doug Coupland's Gen X when it came out. It was a combination of poignant insights, about 90%, with about 10% utter nonsense. He had all these zinger sub-group labels which were spot-on, e.g., one I remember "Earth Tones", something like college-age kids into high-end stereo equipment and mild recreational drugs. I'd just split up with an "earth tone" at the time--that's why I remember it I suppose.
DeleteLater I read his book Life After God which I liked but it was very depressing. It was about a search for religion by someone who had dismissed all religion. A solipsists quest. The author would argue that he was searching for God, not religion. But that is what religion is; it represents the way that others have searched for God and found him. There only one way to find God directly and we call that death.
There only one way to find God directly and we call that death.
DeleteTell that to Rod the Hand. He nibbled his way through an animal crackers assortment of religion, but, to hear him tell it, the only way he finally found his way out of his "dark wood" was to create his own personal party dip recipe of one part professional secular psychological therapy, one part ROCOR religious calisthenics, and one part High Medieval Italian poetry read in the Cozy Corner over tea. I like to think of the formula as Dreher's response to the Shake Weight
On Twitter I got the following message from Comrade Dreher.
ReplyDeleteRod Dreher
Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher
@roddreher
User Actions
Rod Dreher
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Jonathan Carpenter
But you can still respond to his tweets, as Pauli mentioned. The dood does not own Twitter.
DeleteYes, what it requires is another account where you are not blocked. Then you can click on the time marker which lies to the right of the account name.
DeleteI wouldn't rule out his ending up like Franky Schaeffer. As things are, he might be a false flag to try to get conservative Christians to surrender the public square for escapism, his Benedict option.
ReplyDeleteTrying to win by outprogressiving the "progressives," by letting the left set the frame, doesn't work.
I wouldn't rule out his ending up like Franky Schaeffer. As things are, he might be a false flag to try to get conservative Christians to surrender the public square for escapism, his Benedict option.
DeleteTrying to win by outprogressiving the "progressives," by letting the left set the frame, doesn't work.
There's no question that he's taken his signature stance of passive-aggressive revenge against those unchanging conservative persons/perspectives (I'm thinking of Jonah Goldberg's smackdown of him, among others) who have refused to continue to love him just as much even as he's "evolved". The result displays itself in such areas as, say, gay marriage, with Dreher playing all sides for his solely personal gain: Rod Dreher and Rod Dreher's Benedict Option being the only thing, the only thing, standing between you and the loss of your religious liberty (how could you possibly stand up for it yourself?) to the barbarian hordes, hordes somehow uniquely following Rod Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility, while the liberals and gays that keep him afloat receive the Sad Face of Fate from their Lucky Pierre.
As a sort of universal arms merchant supplying all sides, he's become the Acme Social Conservatism warehouse a Wile E. Coyote might naively turn to.
Well, Dreher's entered a whole new chapter today. To prove that he takes his implication more seriously than you do, he posted a photo of his check contributing to the Islamic center in Houston that was on fire today.
ReplyDeleteTo Stamp Out Bigotry, you know. Well no, not really, as there will still be bigots -- but to show . . . well, you know.
I came over here after reading that because I was stunned. Yes, Dreher's inanity has managed to surprise me somehow. Especially his edit where he explains it doesn't really matter if they turn out to be the kind of Muslims who are involved in shady enterprises and overseas finagling, because something something kids and a school and it's only fair. What?
DeleteBetween that and the photo of his wife doing jello shots and the naked pope "art" I feel like the man is finally coming off his last hinge.
He doesn't even make sense by some Rod-specific compass. He just randomly spews out stances and actions and opinions based on whoever looks chic at the moment. The closest analogy I can think of is if Bertie Wooster were suddenly forced to take up political blogging. Without Jeeves to edit.
And today, on the same day that Dreher preens over mailing his check, this happened.
DeleteFighting Religious Bigotry, indeed.
And today, on the same day that Dreher preens over mailing his check....
DeleteWhoa, whoa, whoa...hold yer horses, Pik. What I saw was a closeup of a check #1601, with "Islamic Institute" in the butt end of the name, dated "14 Feb 2015", for $50.
That's all.
Let me repeat: that's all.
No Rod Dreher name on check. No Rod Dreher signature. Certainly no cancellation by any Islamic institute which received it.
Except for the check number, 1601, and Dreher's fractional banking routing number right under it, 84-269/652 (where 84 is LA, 269 is the ABA identifier for his bank, and 652 part of his checking account routing number) I can produce, shred, and void as many of these as you want myself one after another all day long.
So let's recap the stupid on display here:
Did Dreher prove he sent anybody anything? No. Whoever believes this sort of 10-year-old's magic show deserves what they get, frankly.
Did Dreher publicly broadcast some essential elements of his bank account for anyone to trace? Yes.
Yes, neighbor, this is the genius you want guiding you on the path to saving your life.
Indeed so, Keith (and if these are "the kind of Muslims who are involved in shady enterprises and overseas finagling", I hope he didn't -- it would be that many fewer rounds of ammo in the hands of the bad guys).
DeleteAs usual for a bullshitter, it doesn't matter whether the thing said is true, it only matters that he said it. Or posted a photo of part of it, in this case.
It's sort of a new way to do hashtag activism. Show that you care, without doing much if anything about it. Only thing missing is #weareallimplicated.
Pik, people may think I'm obsessed with Rod Dreher, but the truth is I'm obsessed with Rod Dreher's world, and the larger part of that universe, really, are these sorts of people who can be manipulated so easily.
DeleteIt is one thing to have faith in God, quite another to have such blind faith in a brightly colored image of a part of a check.