"You didn't see that coming?"
Dreher-fan Jordan Poss writes a generally positive review of HDCSYL. But it is also quite honest, and he can't help pointing out several things with which I heartily agree. Excerpts:
Despite returning home, Dreher recounts that his relationships with family—especially his father and nieces—were terrible. I like Dreher a lot and value his opinions, but having read his work for several years now, he strikes me as a classic oversharer. Reading Little Way, I could only wonder, despite being moved to tears, what his family thought of such a soul-baring memoir. In my experience, a tell-all—even an affectionate, nostalgic tell-all—alienates people. This book gave me an answer: “I showed Mike the manuscript of Little Way before I turned it in, and asked him to let me know if he wanted me to make any changes. He did not ask for changes, but as I learned later, the book displeased him greatly. He thought I had used his wife’s death to tell a story about myself” (30). As a reader, I too had had a hard time escaping this impression.
We told you so, we told you so. Of course we all had that impression. The reason that Mike Leming thought Rod Dreher had used his wife’s death to tell a story about himself was that Rod Dreher had used Mike's wife’s death to tell a story about himself.
I really liked How Dante Can Save Your Life, but I still wonder about the propriety of what Dreher has chosen to share with his readers—especially considering that one of the sources of strife within his family is his previous book. Dreher writes with great feeling and sincerity but, as another reviewer has noted, the narration sometimes comes across as self-pitying, even in the later stages when he has learned how selfish he is and is striving toward greater humility. Even as he learns to let go of his bitterness and anger, he reminds himself over and over again of the incidents that made him bitter and angry.
Yes; he seems to love being bitter and angry. It's as if I said to Keith, "Keith, I have totally gotten over the time that you made fun of the space helmet I made for Halloween when I was 27 years old, and I hope that nothing will ever, EVER remind either one of us how much I cried about that at the time, and then got drunk and broke up with my girlfriend. But now that I've read Dante's Divine Comedy, I'm ready to forgive you ONCE AND FOR ALL for that and I will do so right after I pass out and take a 5-hour nap."
Poss definitely sounds as if he's trying to thread the needle of Christian charity and human kindness here. What's interesting to me is that there is only one HDCSYL out there, so what Poss is bemoaning the other reviewers are clearly gobbling up.
ReplyDelete"Self help", then, may very well include some sort of very untough love group therapy for the walking wounds - not a typo, not the walking wounded, rather, those people who rub their open emotional sores on you seeking a proximate external cause for their self-cultivated pain.
This one and the 3-star review are the only ones that don't sound like complete shills to me. I am regularly "invited" to review books for free when they first come out (usually the type that no one reads) and my guess is that people like George P. Wood was "invited" in a similar manner.
DeleteIn that regard, George P is indeed a prolific reviewer, and a friendly one too (I had to go back to Jan 2014 to see one below 4 stars).
DeleteOf course, we all tend to read things toward which we are favorably disposed, so I guess we shouldn't expect a bell curve. And if we start off with a Kindle sample, the selection bias only increases.
Even with that, tho, I'll still get disappointed sometimes in a book I buy and read. I'd expect George P would too, especially with as much as he reads.
I'm so glad Mr. Lemming had his say.
ReplyDeleteI wish Mr. Lemming and the elder Mr. Dreher would have their full, unvarnished say IN PRINT about Rod and what he did to Ruthie. They both have it within their power to ruin what's left of Rod's career and Rod has to live in fear that one day they will.
ReplyDeleteYou have to understand that the deceased Ruthie and the not long from being deceased Paw only became Dreher's targets when his power relative to them became unequivocal. Rod Dreher is nothing but a passive-aggressive bully, only punching the powerless while crying out about his suffering or torture if anyone dares try to confront him. It's difficult to imagine a more despicable combination of human character traits.
DeleteFurther, the culture he comes from, that is, the culture Mike Leming, firefighter and Iraqi war hero, appears to be remarkably passive and timid with respect to the sort of soapbox Rod has available, and probably with good reason. The best soapbox a Mike Leming, a retiring man from all appearances, could hope to mount might be a limited Facebook feed, while Wick Allison cheerfully pays Rod Dreher to passive-aggressively malign his relatives in the guise of "culture".
So don't look to the frail and dying Paw or the retiring widower Mike Leming to try to assault Kim Jong-rod and his propaganda machine any time soon. Those of us on this blog will have to do what we can to speak out in their defense instead.
Someone needs to do an expose of how much less Dreher has in common with Walker Percy than with Percy's Uncle Will - the periodic "sausage-eating" trips with male intimates in Europe, etc, etc.
DeleteDarth Thulhu says:
ReplyDeleteMay 9, 2015 at 12:19 pm
It was totally worth it (says the person now working on 4 hours of sleep).
The speech was great. My favorite moment, by far, was when you recollected how Paw Paw pensively related to you one morning how he’d been talking to God the night before, praying about the ways he’d done you wrong at times, asking God for forgiveness for the trespasses, reaching a good place with God about it all … and never got around to apologizing to you for any of it, but he still sincerely wanted you to know all the other details. Delightfully adorkable, and one could almost see the wheels turning in the head.
Or maybe Paw Dreher did ask Rod for forgiveness, but Rod (conveniently) "never got around to" mentioning it....
Deletei'm willing to believe that Paw never got around to saying the exact, exact words Rod wanted. But so what? He had effectively apologized -- profusely, in so many words -- and only a moral midget could fail to see this. But nooooo, Rod wanted his pound of flesh, and it had to be delivered exactly the way Rod wanted it, cut and trimmed to perfection to Rod's exacting specifications, or else no dice.
DeleteGood grief. Is anything sufficient to slake this whining adolescent's thirst for revenge? Talk about the Grievance Mentality he professes to deplore.
My hyper-critical dad (the Italian Ralph Kramden) made much of my young life miserable, but I would never have dreamed of extracting an apology as if it were an abscessed tooth. He was what he was, formed by his own horrific childhood, and to tell the truth, I reached the point where I found his craziness kind of funny. I know that sounds weird, but when your dad is convinced that the Indian family living across the street from him is running a white-slave operation under the cover of their laundry business, what can you do but laugh? ;-)
Every family is different, and intra-family dynamics differ widely. I can't project my experiences onto Rod and his family, because all families are different, and the only people who know what's going on inside a particular family are the family members. Still and all, at some point, you come to terms with the fact that your family of origin is what it is, and you forgive, laugh, heal, and move on.
It's one thing if there had been outright abuse -- physical, sexual, or even verbal -- because that takes a long time to heal; but it sounds as if it was far short of that. Rod's family didn't understand him. Well, boohoo. My dad's siblings used to tell my mother that she had wrecked us kids by encouraging us to read books. Helloooo. Scratch a family, find dysfunction. It's the human condition -- Original Sin. But I forgot. Convertodox don't believe in Original Sin, so scratch that. (Not kidding. The anti-Western converts believe in something called Ancestra l Sin, which is very different and highly susceptible to Pelagianism; but let's not go there.)
At the local Celtic Festival yesterday, I spotted a guy wearing a T-shirt, presumably customized for his family's last family reunion. Its graphic message? "We put the fun in dysfunctional."
Welcome to the human race, Rod. That's why we are called to forgive each other without the passive-aggressive back-stabbing and "taking back with one hand what we give with the other." Because we are ALL a mess. And, if you think your own kids won't have plenty to resent, you're deluding yourself. So, be kind, with the help of Grace. And stop crapping on your family of origin under pretense of loving and honoring them.
I've read Rod for a long time, though I've backed off a lot in recent years because of obsessive pounding away on two or three themes, the increasing paranoia, the nuttiness of a lot of the comments that get posted, and increasing discomfort with the way the blog seems to have turned into a format for selling his books. I've poked around on this blog a bit and I think a lot of the criticisms, esepcially in regard to the books, are exactly correct.
ReplyDeleteI'm really more or less suspicious of the whole genre of memoir writing, anyway--memorists tend to go towards maudlin, naive, sentiment, or bitter, petty, score-settling (or sometimes both). With the books in question here (which I've never been motivated to read, but which I have some idea of from comments, reviews, etc.) there's way too much of an attempt to make tidy endings. Thing is, unless you're old and awaiting the Reaper, life keeps going on, and unlike novels, there aren't tidy resolutions. You can see that on his blogs and in his books: "And I realized Dallas was a better place to raise my kids than the Northeast, because it's a place more congruent with my values. The end." "But I moved to Philly, and I think you can live your values even in the city. The end." "But I saw just how transcendently, reeeeeally good the simple folk back home were when I went to my sister's funeral, and so we moved back home. The end." (I really got tired of all the "they're sooooooo GOOD here" stuff) "But all the same problems with my family came back and it wasn't a happy return and I got sick. The end." "But Dante fixed it and I got well and reconciled with everyone. The end." "But I got sick again, but I'm still spiritually better. The end." And so on.
Anyway, as I said, I think there are a lot of valid criticisms here, especially re the totally-impossible-to-pin-down Benedict Option. Having said that, I guess there are a couple of things I don't get.
First, I'm not conservative, so I really have no interest in the whole "is he REALLY conservative" or "he's a turncoat" or whatever. The whole conservative obsession with taxonomy, RINO's, the "conservative communion in all its mystery" and such, never made much sense to me (similar phenomena in sectors of the Left make no sense to me either).
I think a more thoughtful person can write a memoir because they don't place themselves exactly in the center of every action in the book they are writing. If I wrote a book recollecting growing up with my brother and put his full name on the book cover but it was really all about me then everyone in my family would be confused, pissed off and just wonder what my real problem was. But if I tried to balance it all and make it all about events that happened without myself in THE starring role then it would make more sense to everyone.
DeleteI'm not a RINO-buster; that's for sure. Everyone here knows that I supported McCain in the primaries in 2008 as the best candidate and that I'm rather "lax" on the immigration issue. Dreher and the others at TAC have a completely different ideology than most mainstream conservatives. This is in part due to a general contrarianism, a reflexive anti-market mentality and a crypto-anti-semitism -- among other things. Art Deco could speak to this in more detail.
I agree with you on memoirs. They can be done well and thoughtfully, but the genre seems to be in the middle of a boom; and IMO, most of the memorists are not thoughtful and detached enough to produce books that aren't dreck.
DeleteAs someone more towards the socialist end of the spectrum, I doubt I'd agree much with you politically; but there are areas in which paleoconservatism has some appeal to those on the left: e.g. an "anti-market mentality", preference for a less hawkish and less interventionist foreign policy, etc.
On the other hand, the anti-Semitism (and to be fair, whatever else you say about Rod, I don't think that applies to him) is thick on the ground and not that crypto; and the racism abounds. That's the kind of thing that made me withdraw, along with the paranoia, book-shilling, etc. Not a good environment.
Oh, and my mistake re the other blog. There was a lot of member overlap and you linked from the "About" page, so I misconstrued you as having been the blogger there. Sorry about that--mea culpa.
DeleteSecond, I note the following from the penultimate post of the predecessor blog to this one, from 2007--eight years ago, my emphasis:
ReplyDeleteThough I have done my best to mock some of his most cherished ideals, I don't think Rod is a bad person or The Enemy. I have always believed in the honesty of Rod's intentions, and have always sought to apply the appropriate respect, particularly to him as a person.
I think the anonymous 24/7 echo chamber of teh intarwebs makes it too easy for people to shriek wildly at each other.
I have never had the pleasure of meeting Rod personally but if it should ever happen, I will gladly buy him a beer and greet him as a friend. And with that, the Contra Crunchy is hereby retired.
What happened?
I mean, you said it was time to pack it in, seasons in the sun and all, and went back to it here, almost immediately. Moreover, there seems to be a lot of "shrieking" here, and the consensus view sure sounds like Rod now is the Enemy, is a bad person, deserves no respect, as a person or otherwise, etc. There certainly seems to be, in a lot of the comments I've read around here, a marked lack of the "Christian charity" and "human kindness" of which Keith makes note; and the idea that this blog will nobly defend Rod's family (and I'm not defending his attitude towards them) by calling the most horrible, awful, evil person in the world seems a paradox, at least.
At the end of the day, it's just the Internet, just blogs, and even if he is an Evil Threat to All That Is Good (which is kind of the hyperbolic way he portrays gay marriage), which seems over the top to me, I don't think he's that influential in the big scheme of things.
In any case, sometimes here it seems a case of the one who fights dragons turning into one himself, as Nietzsche would say. Those are my thoughts, in any case; take them or leave them as you will.
Kemetica, I didn't write that. That was written by a blogger who called himself the Contra-Crunchy at some points in his blogging career and The Snob at other points.
DeleteI completely dislike Rod Dreher because he portrays Christianity as a system with no internal consistency and somehow he gets a bunch of people to go along with him.
I left the Contra-Crunchy site mid-stream; I ceased to be listed as a blogger although I still commented because I received some of the most vitriolic nastiness in my email for doing so from someone who styles himself as a good Catholic. At the time I had a close relative studying theology at a major Catholic university and I didn't want trouble to come to that person because of me.
WRT Rod's family, he has dragged them into this whole thing and I really try not to drag them around any further. If I do mention them, it's usually in passing as I've done in this post.
DeleteKeith's speculation about the nature of Dreher Sr. and Mike is probably sound as a theory, though.
I certainly do not hate Rod. I pray for him and his family regularly. Do I dislike him, though? Yep. Why? Because of his relentless, hypocritical, double-standard-y Catholic Bashing.
DeleteI really don't give a cr*p how many oysters or snails he ingests or how often he abandons his long-suffering family to jaunt off to Europe. I find his treatment of his family of origin rather distasteful, but family stuff is weird, let's face it, and, in a real sense, it's none of my business. I don't even give a flip about his alt-conservatism. I vote Independent, and I'm softer on immigration (for example) than the GOP hardline is. Plus, most of my relatives and many of my friends are so far Left they're off the charts. So, yeah, I'm flexible about that stuff.
I just want Rod to stop bashing my Church -- unfairly, hypocritically, and often quite mendaciously -- at every conceivable opportunity. I want him to stop being the Professional Anti-Catholic he kept promising us he wouldn't become. I want him to lay off of my Church, and I want him to shelve his double standard. (E.g., he now belongs to a teeny-tiny Orthodox jurisdiction known for its cult-like batsh*t craziness -- rampant anti-semitism, unhinged anti-westernism -- and its relatively high percentage of abusive clergy; so yeah, the pot is calling the kettle black, and he knows it. Glass house, meet stones.)
That's all I ask. Let him wax rhapsodic over artisanal cheese and boutique religion till his eyes bubble. It's a free country. But just let up on the gratuitous Catholic-Bashing, already.
Kemetica, to reiterate what I said to James Kabala and to add something new, the second thing first.
DeleteStylistically, Dreher's modus operandi is to write provocatively in order to incite page views and commentary; that's how bloggers get paid. To respond passionately to originally provocative hyperbole is not to forsake Christian kindness, it is to forsake passive submission to would-be dominating speech. For the original provocateur - Dreher - to then in turn complain of uncharitableness, or viciousness, or lack of Christian kindness, or the now-popular "hatred" is to engage in what we refer to as passive-aggressive behavior: attempting to dominate another by aggressively playing the victim.
But, as I've mentioned numerous times, it is this conceptual, weaponizing perversion of both Christianity and conservatism by what a Nietzsche, to use your reference, would refer to as Dreher's pathologically slavish passive-aggression that remains my primary focus. The person who lives out this concept most loudly, most publicly, and most consistently just happens to be one Rod Dreher of St. Francisville, LA. If the person who did so happened instead to be one Todd Treher of Peoria, IL, I, at least, would constantly be criticizing him instead.
Unfortunately, when one's life is dedicated, as Dreher's has voluntarily become, to narcissistically exemplifying a nexus of religious, ethical, and psychological pathologies, reflexive, rhetorical Christian kindness and humility may be harder to come by than for ordinary people. Sometimes it just sucks to be a Pharisee, a money-changer, or a Rod Dreher. But as his public life demonstrates, Dreher revels in inspiring and reaping the sort of anti-Dreher criticism that, say, a David Brooks would never dream of. Whatever a Brooks may be, he doesn't live for attracting negative responses, then whining about them in order to attract more.
So the truth very well may be that, having himself realized he is destined to forever be an exemplary human f*ck-up - go see, for example, what the community he grew up in and which knows of him most intimately thinks of him - Dreher has embraced that destiny and tried to make the best of it by raising it to a higher level of pathology. We, at least, I, in turn, are offered by Dreher's voluntary embrace of what he cannot help but explicitly understand he has become - remember, the currency of his life, unlike yours and mine, is commentary about his efforts - that same sort of unending series of teachable moments a similarly serial passive-aggressive animal or spousal abuser might provide in far more severe contexts.
For me, at least, Dreher offers the neverending example of how not to be a good Christian human being. I consider it a Christian kindness and charity toward the rest of humanity to make use of that teaching resource God has providentially provided us with in Dreher. And of course I do it for free.
Let's also make explicit what too often lies buried when we talk about Rod Dreher and what he does.
DeleteRod is now approaching 50. His education consists solely of a B.A. in Journalism from LSU. For the last 20 years at least his income has easily exceeded 6 figures.
Into what has Rod poured his adult life?
Into being a diligent, even pioneering journalist? No. 99.9% of his career has been snarky punditry, although he did initially try to pad his resume at the Templeton Foundation as a "Pulitzer nominee". But as atheist Jerry Coyne revealed,
Oh, one last point. The Templeton website says this about Dreher’s credentials:
A seven-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, Rod has spent most of the past two decades as an opinion journalist, having worked as a film and television critic and news columnist at the New York Post and other newspapers. He has appeared on National Public Radio, ABC News, Fox News Channel, CNN, and MSNBC.
That seemed odd to me. Seven-time Pulitzer nominee? That’s big stuff! But a bit of sleuthing showed that it’s not what it seems. Nearly any journalist can be a Pulitzer “nominee” for journalism. All somebody has to do is fill out a form, submit a few of the “nominee’s” articles, and write a $50 check to Columbia University/Pulitzer Prizes. As the Pulitzer website says:
By February 1, the Administrator’s office in the Columbia School of Journalism has received more than 1,300 journalism entries. Those entries may be submitted by any individual based on material coming from a text-based United States newspaper or news site that publishes at least weekly during the calendar year and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles.
Editors do this all the time for their writers, but you don’t have to be an editor to nominate someone: anybody can do it.
(continues)
He did fill some space with outrage at the Catholic Scandal, but as far as I know always relied on the factual journalism of others. Except, for, of course, "anonymous sources", which anonymity has of late come into question overall.
DeleteOkay, so he was never to be a factual journalist, interested istead in more cultural things like politics and religion. So what professional development in either has he pursued? Advanced secular degrees? Nope. A religious studies degree of some sort? Nope. Broad didactic reading? Nope; until Dante, Dreher himself repeatedly has mentioned being able to make it, at best, only halfway through most books. Instead, what he almost always tends to do is skim something topical, frequently getting wrong what the author actually meant or said, then arbitrarily mash it up in a kaleidoscopic fusion with something else indentically procured while troweling over the rough spots and downright absurdities with his gift for seductively smooth rhetoric. While his ideas frequently clank and even upon occasion thrust jagged ends of bone at the reader, his rhetoric consistently would make Khalil Gibran weep.
So what has Rod Dreher pursued most diligently and assiduously over the arc of his life to date? Why, the same as any other even-toed ungulate of the family Sus: eating and drinking as well and as comfortably as possible.
Over multiple changes in career, domicile, even religions, in the pink of health and in the dark wood of depression and mono, this one constant has shown like the polar star: what pleasure did Rod Dreher achieve in eating today, and what pleasure in eating might Rod Dreher achieve tomorrow?
Dreher's whole life to me appears to be a mobile, nihilistic philosophy of pigs, snarkily resentful of whatever taste or principle he happens not to occupy at the moment, phobic against any sort of real career or other effort other than the limited prescriptions of ritual religious ascesis and particularly phobic of any sort of personal criticism while at the same time tropic toward physical (other than sex) and aesthetic pleasure the way a plant seeks sunlight.
In short, this giant, fraudulent, consuming gullet of a caterpillar, big hole on one end, little hole on the other, doesn't seem to me to be in any position to lecture any human being on anything.
Diane, I see your point. However, haters gonna hate, players gonna play, bashers gonna bash. Why not just pray for him and stay away from his blog and forget about it? I've had issues with certain blogs where I got so caught up in the discussions and so indignant about what the bloggers and/or commenters were doing and saying, that it really was having a bad effect on my offline personality. I just had to go cold turkey and stay away. I had to get it through my head that nothing I could say or do was going to stop so-and-so from saying nasty things. My reactions were just giving them control of my emotions. So I stopped. It feels much better.
DeleteKeith: To respond passionately to originally provocative hyperbole is not to forsake Christian kindness, it is to forsake passive submission to would-be dominating speech.
Yes, in principle; but that's a very, very fine line, and IMO you step over it a lot. That's not personal, but just my impression. Impressions via blog, of course, are notoriously inaccurate. I could very well be totally wrong.
Anyway, if he wants to draw the hate, as you say, why give him what he wants? Why invest so much emotional energy in it? Isn't there a danger of teachable moments turning into invective for its own sake and borderline obsession?
Once more, nothing personal or negative intended. I've pretty much quit visiting Rod's blog, and actually most other online discussion formats except one with some of my friends on it. It just doesn't seem worth it to me; and I think, for me, anyway, focusing on more offline things has been a good thing. All one can really do is pray for those in cyberspace whom one dislikes (I spent one Lent doing that)--and yes, that includes even Rod Dreher--and aside from that, going on with one's life. That's my preferred strategy, at least; YMMV.
Oh, rest assured, I very seldom go near his blog. I can't stand his writing style, for one thing. And yeah, I don't need the aggravation. But I hear about the Catholic-Bashing from friends hereabouts. And I object because I think it does real damage. It fools the gullible and the easily persuaded. That in itself means Dreher must be opposed.
DeleteKemetica, if you haven't realized it before, Christian kindness and charity toward passive-aggressive bullies is not even on my radar, much less among my priorities. But I am good with animals.
DeleteFor Dreher, any attention at all is what he wants. What I hope to supply is alternative perspectives on him. Anyone who finds my style alone sufficient to avoid me won't bother with chewing my criticism; they'll just shriek "hater" and flee into Dreher' soft, stroking rhetoric anyway. Those not so easily put off will do one or both of two things: try to prove me wrong, and thus refine both their and my perceptions of Dreher and what he does, or find themselves possessed of a new consideration of Dreher's offerings they would never get from his or his carefully "curated" commenters and maybe not elsewhere.
In the meantime, I bask in the sheer joy of using a congenital bully as a speed bag. I'll concede some might not understand that.
God point, Keith.
DeleteYep, I have a low threshold of tolerance for bullies, I must say.
One thing that many don't realize is that Rod Dreher has worked extensively to squelch negative opinions of him being expressed. There are many examples of this; here are a few.
Delete1) A guy named Tom who sometimes comments here was savaged by Dreher along with his wife. He emailed me once or twice with a "keep it up" attitude.
2) A Catholic author praised a post of mine once in and email. Then later he emailed me to say "Don't tell Rod that I said any of this." It was as if he was afraid of Rod finding out he praised a blog post of mine–and get this: the post had nothing to do with Rod to begin with!
3) His now-defunct Bonnie Blue Blog contained thinly-veiled threats of a lawsuit over the now-famous Topix post where locals go to vent about him.
4) The Fr. Neuhaus grave-dance, delivered after Neuhaus’s demise, evidences his deep antipathy toward anyone who clipped his wings and right sized him on issues.
As soon as you see this side of him it becomes very difficult to look at the level of criticism on this blog which is mostly directed against his ideas that he promulgates and say "what a bunch o' haters." People first tuning in here might, or people biased toward Dreher might and I'm not saying we never cross a line, but on balance we don't hold a candle to him in terms of raw anger and destructive tendencies. Face it–the guy admits that he made himself develop a full-blown medical condition by his emotions alone. The day I do that is the day I hope someone waves a big red-flag in my face and calls for a serious intervention.
Then there's his control-freaky censorship. Only his acolytes and sycophants are allowed to comment -- or, at least, to have their comments stand.
DeleteWho else does that? What other putative news organ would get by with such Pravda-like censorship?
Even the few critics whose comments he does not delete are essentially fanbois -- OR punching bags whom he tolerates momentarily only so that he can mock and vilify them for the entertainment of his echo chamber. Again, what respectable news source would control comments to that insane an extent?
As a classic narcissistic bully, Dreher allows only those comments that feed his need for narcissistic supply. He must be adored; he cannot be criticized. How weird and sick is that?
This control freakery is of a piece with his nastiness -- his vicious, bullying treatment of those who disagree with him. Complete with personal insults and name calling.
We criticize these behaviors because they are profoundly wrong. That's different from attacking Dreher himself. But yeah, his bullying behavior is fair game. Especially (IMHO) when it is used in the service of Catholic-Bashing.
Why not just pray for him and stay away from his blog and forget about it?
DeleteGet thee behind me, Benedict Option.
Diane and Keith, are you talking about Rod Dreher or Mark Shea? Or both?
DeleteIf I were an enterprising Japanese movie producer/director, I would create a new science fiction film that would combine the worst aspects of each man's (?) character (??) into new monster films. Rodzilla. Markemon. Both on the rampage.
"We criticize these behaviors because they are profoundly wrong. That's different from attacking Dreher himself. But yeah, his bullying behavior is fair game. Especially (IMHO) when it is used in the service of Catholic-Bashing."
ReplyDeleteIt's not just Catholics. As he has proven many times in the past, he has no compunction about attacking his fellow Orthodox Christians who vary in one jot or tittle from the One True Way of Rod Dreher.
Nietzsche's words definitely apply here. "Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one."
"Anyway, if he wants to draw the hate, as you say, why give him what he wants? Why invest so much emotional energy in it? Isn't there a danger of teachable moments turning into invective for its own sake and borderline obsession? "
ReplyDeleteDreher is becoming more closely identified with "Traditional Christianity", and is becoming a spokesman that the media turns to for the Trad Christian viewpoint. For those of us who hold to orthodox teachings of the Church it is becoming more likely that his inept drivel will become increasingly identified with positions we are advocating in this culture.
Why speak out so emotionally and with such energy? In the secular business world you would call it brand protection. When you see someone putting themselves forward as a representative of your "product", but they are misrepresenting the product or, worse, truly damaging the reputation of the product, as a business you would stomp on those efforts both with legal action and a PR campaign.
While the comparison fails in many important points, the core remains the same. Media outlets turn to Rod as a voice for orthodox Christian views on culture, especially same-sex "marriage". His presentation is damaging the cause of the Gospel, the name of Christ, and the name of the Holy Church.
Are we not called to speak truth in the power of the Spirit when such things happen? Yes, it may only be a relatively quiet protest only seen by a few people, but at least SOMEONE is standing up and saying, "No! This is not right!"
In the secular business world you would call it brand protection.
DeleteYou are speaking my language and playing my song!!
What Anonymous said is my primary problem with Dreher's work on many fronts.
DeleteI first read his work when he was the token conservative on the op/ed page of our local print rag (The Dallas Morning News, or as our priest calls it, the DaMN). But he was more of a fifth-column-columnist in that role than he was a faithful representative of either conservatives or believers.
As we know all too well from reading the drive-by media, attacks on both conservatives and religion (and especially the Catholic Church) are often generated by: 1) the critic characterizing the positions of the conservatives/Church, and 2) then attacking that characterization. So there are two places where this goes wrong: a false characterization and of course the attack itself.
If the token conservative/believer is a mole like Dreher, he can do a lot of damage. First, he presents a false window into the conservative/religious viewpoint, as he either doesn't really understand what we're really about (his because-I-say-so SSM position is a good example) or is making the same mischaracterization. And secondly, he joins in the attack, giving rise to a "see, even one of their own doesn't agree with them" front.
My other large issue is that his output is tempting. I was originally drawn to some of the things he wrote because I too want to take back some of the things in the culture that have been conquered and taken away from conservatives (dammit, I like Broadway show tunes, and I like my Birkenstocks). So the Crunchy thing roped me in a bit, until I realized it was all about the things Rod Dreher liked on any given day. The prime example these days is "The" "American" "Conservative", which is neither American nor conservative, much less the exemplar of both. IOW, he's a phony, and will mislead the readers.
That's why I tear into him on these pages. He's a threat to the things I hold dear, and a threat of the most insidious kind. Besides that, phonies annoy me, and he is a phony in spades.
On Diane's point about defending the Church, I agree entirely. The Church is worth defending, lest the unknowing be led astray. Yeah, maybe it looks bad at some times (I remember that someone coined this group "Assholes for Christ" back in the Contra-Crunchy days), but it's important.
Just one guy's opinion.
In a post today entitled Christian Radicals, Seeing to the Roots (No longer a mere Crunchy Con, he has now identified himself as - actually becoming might prove a tad harder - a Christian Radical and a seer-to-the-roots - Dreher makes a blog necklace (a vastly different enterprise from actually integrating radically different thought traditions and logics) out of several things beginning with and ultimately deriding Nominalism and the Enlightenment, the latter which made the U. S. Constitution under which he blogs possible, and concludes with:
DeleteBottom line: Christianity is dissolving in America not because America has fallen from grace, but because the founding liberal principles of America and American society are working themselves out in history, as they must. It’s happening all over the West. This is not something that can be arrested using the tools of liberalism. The best we can do is fight within the structures of liberalism to maintain a space that will allow us to develop the institutions, the habits of mind, and habits of life that will allow future generations to live as faithful Christians in an anti-Christian world.
As I pointed out here, implicit in Dreher's vision is A More Perfect Paw, one, this time, who "gets him", without which Dreher's cosmology inevitably falls apart entirely, even to him.
Why is this implicit A More Perfect Paw (AMPP) crucial to Dreher's dystopian millenarianist cult of Christianity and thus ultimately to his BO? Because, without it, he is forced to acknowledge a "post-Christian", post-apocalyptic American landscape where, dang, the healthy fruits of the Enlightenment somehow endure nonetheless and its finest flower, the U. S. Constitution, still ticks along just fine, preserving Dreher-Christians alone in their Hobbit holes while somehow all the rest of America goes to Hell in a handbasket and there's nary a decent oyster or craft beer to be found.
Curiously, in any non-constitutional, AMPP-implicit universe, Christianity now only comes as one big happy Campbell's vegetable soup (there are apparently only generic, rightthinking Christians, secularists, and gays), where all God's denominations somehow now all seem to get along just dandy. No Thirty Years' War, no lynching and burning Mormons and driving them out to Utah, no Klan persecution of Catholics (and, by definition, who gives a f*ck about the Jews or Muslims?).
But what if this 200-odd-year-old value-free, purely formal gravitational field of constitutional equality among Orthodox and Catholic and Mormon and Jew actually were to power down and disappear? Gravity-free fall through the vacuum remaining, moored and guided only by (A) our different sectarian beliefs and (B) our relative raw power among one another to coerce non-conformists.
How would hidey-Hobbits really then fare in even a multi-Christian gravity-free beyond-Thunderdome?
While these things are fun for me to game out intellectually, Anonymous above utimately points to the practically and imminently most damaging outcome from Dreher's ravings: the run the risk of making all Christians look like idiots. If Christians themselves largely look like idiots, secularists will then argue, "Well, of course we believe in religous liberty - but for mature adults, not obviously confused and frightened children with implicit Daddy issues who should instead be lovingly cared for by those mature adults."
Thus, some other Option is clearly needed.
Heh-great minds. I was apparently writing this as Pik was writing his comment and we both ended up seeing Dreher as the same agent of damage.
DeleteI wonder how much of Dreher's current shtick is influenced by the anti-Westernism so rampant within ROCOR?
DeleteMore and more I am coming to appreciate the Greek Orthodox. Food festivals, Bingo nights, and tight dresses. I'll take that over Dreher's cultish crap any day.
The psychogenic Benedict Option: "Okay, see, it has to be that the rest of America will tragically die like Ruthie and get too old and sick to boss me like Paw and then I'll courageously come out after all the meanies are safely gone and explain how and why everything about it was so mean and wrong and how everyone should live now that I'm the last man standing."
DeleteAnd in an America now Internet-blog-open-and-free (how Enlightened!), there are more dreamers of this sort of passive-aggressive psychogenic revenge wet dream than just Dreher.
I'll elaborate on what Diane and I mentioned one additional thing about Dreher's calumny of the Catholic church, and really the worst part of it.
DeleteIt's one thing when the ignorant bash the Church. But Dreher writes of his (somewhat weird) experiences when he was in the Church, as though he is an authority on the Church, and then bashes it. The casual reader, and especially wavering Catholics, can easily conclude from his bashing that, "Gee, here's a guy who was really really into Catholicism and knows all there is to know about it and he couldn't take it any more. Why should I join/stay?"
P.S. Strike the "one additional thing" in the second line of the above comment.
Delete