What your Rod Dreher Benedict Option community will be like
A kennel of distempered Chihuahuas barking at a cat.
Patriarch Rod, who in middle age is still whining about being "tortured" as a high schooler,
When I think about the bullying I endured in high school, the most indelible image on my mind is being pinned to the floor and tortured in a hotel room on a school trip, and the two adult women chaperones in the room literally stepping over me, lying there screaming for them to help me, as they left the hotel room.
finds yet another pariah to group-deride in order to keep the cult bond strong. After all, what does the Prophet of the Benedict Option focus on for those excellent, tingling, culturally disengaging blog hits if not strippers?
The post itself is entirely uninteresting. What is useful are Rod's consistent testimonials to his self-valorizing Christianity:
[NFR: That’s not the point. The point is that she is lying down with dogs, and complaining about flea bites. — RD]
[NFR: “Sex work,” as you call it, is inherently dehumanizing. The exploitation this writer complains about comes with the territory. What does she think “sex work” is? What sort of person does she think it serves? The kind of people who treat women like dirt. — RD]
Crunchy Mike brings it home:
It’s ironic (putting it kindly) that the greatest (only) source of my exposure to the trashiest aspects of our culture is this blog, home of the BenOp. It’s just so hard to square. Step away from the underbelly of the interwebs, Rod. Practice what you preach. You’re strategically withdrawing from the wrong things, and wallowing in what you claim is demoralizing and desensitizing us all.
[NFR: Are you not aware that this piece did not come from Gawker or some like site, but from The New York Times? It is leading the op-ed slot on the paper’s website. That is what makes it interesting to me — what it says about how our cultural elites regard stripping, sex, and human dignity. Your problem, ultimately, is not with me, but with the NYT, which is *not* the “underbelly of the interwebs,” but the flagship journal of the American cultural elite. If the Times thinks workplace justice for strippers is a vital concern, it tells us something about the culture. You think it’s trashy of me to notice this? Good grief. — RD]
Let me break it to you gently, Crunchy Mike, this isn't a bug in Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, it's its defining feature: the "Christian" version of the Mean Girls Table, where those who do measure up in their own eyes can sit apart and mock those who don't - strippers, the "wrong kind" of other Christians, the riff-raff of a world they've never managed to mature into.
And, as we've discussed before, of course they'll expect someone else to protect them.
It may not come as a surprise to some of you that I have known some strippers, even drunk with some strippers. Guess what? Except for what they do, they're just like you (particularly if you're a woman), same on the outside, same on the inside.
Yeah, there are crackheads and other desperate losers among them, but most of the ones I've known do it to support their kids, so they won't have to do the same kind of work. From what I've read so far of the sniveling, backbiting little Dreherhua - from his own lips - he's got miles and miles to go before he'd ever come close to being worthy of washing the feet of the women I've known.
Why would anyone be remotely surprised his closest family and community despises him in the same way?
So here's your Benedict Option, fools. Vaya con Rodos. And good riddance to all of you who vaya with him.
There would be no BO without Dreher's schadenfreude, or at least his pointing out the motes in neighbors' eyes. It's the fuel that the BO runs on -- only by constantly reminding readers about how bad the culture is Out There can he grow the customer base and keep the ones he has.
ReplyDeleteThat's really the BO in a sentence: Crunchy Con takes his toys and turns his back on the world that bullied and never appreciated the purity of the master race Christianity he always embodied. Others join him.
DeleteMeanwhile, life goes on: babies are born, the elderly die, and hyenas like ISIS prowl the marches.
Manipulate demand by yelling about the failures of secular society then meet that demand with a ready supply of Benedict Option. Enron Christianity
Delete-the other anonymous guy
Now, over a month since the "technical note" concerning Noah Millman, which is to say the deletion of his post asking Mr. Dreher whether he would stop engaging in outrage porn, the silenced question from Mr. Millman becomes more and more deafening.
ReplyDeleteHere's the interesting quid pro quo this sort of Faustian bargain Dreher has made leads to: in exchange for helpfully killing the Millman article, TAC/Allison now gets to cinch the genital cuff even tighter, and so the Benedict Option becomes progressively inseparable from the TAC/Wick Allison option: Obamaconomic, anti-Republican, non-interventionist, new-urbanist, etc., etc.
DeleteYou'd think, given the role Dreher has assumed at TAC at this point ("On the main TAC stage now...Mr. Rod Draayyy-eerrr!!!") he might be a bit more empathetic with strippers and whores.
Thank you so much for writing this. I am 180 degrees opposed to your religious and political beliefs, but dear Lord you understand the pathology and moral bankruptcy of that craven wretch Dreher like no one else. Carry on! *applause*
ReplyDelete--yet another anonymous
If today's post on Ta-Nehisi Coates is any indication the Benedict Option will be nothing if not a huge amount of verbal diarrhea that could easily have been summed up in one sentence.
ReplyDeleteToday's post: I read the book and did not like it.
Benedict Option: Christians should live like Christ in this fallen world.
Someone please give him some Imodium AD!
The Other Anonymous
Here is where to look for the humor in the forthcoming BO book (assuming a publishing patsy can even be found). The sorts of books Dreher so facilely piles up with his glasses and hand-carved prayer beads for quick intellectual selfie - e.g., Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - aren't Cheetos. They take time to read, digest, think about, re-read, re-digest, re-think about.
DeleteThey're not the sort of material, like ephemeral blog posts, the lazy Dreher is accustomed to clipping like collage material and pasting together into one of his transient mashups really designed only to attract eyeballs to a page for at most a week or so. But this is the only habit he's maintained at this point, so this will inevitably be how he deals with the sources he's assembling for the BO project: skim the book, find a tasty quote, shoehorn it in, rinse and repeat.
Even more humorous will be if he happens to fall into the sort of infinite well these sorts of things can open into: Book A footnotes Book B - which he didn't select at first - in some critical manner he can't ignore, so he breaks down and buys Book B, skims it - and Book B footnotes Book C- which he didn't select at first - in some critical manner he can't ignore, so he breaks down and buys Book C, skims it...
Finally, some editor probably unschooled in any of the material in any real depth will be saddled with taking the meat cleaver to beast on the table. It can't possibly be pretty; at best, it will end up as a sibling to the Dante book: some portion of the Western canon run through Dreher's peculiar intellectual Bass-o-matic.
You do know that there is nothing like the BO in Orthodoxy....DreRod is making this all up..
ReplyDeleteYep, I think we figured that out. :)
DeleteIt reminds me more of the Oneida Community and similar all-American experiments. Haven't we been through this before?
I said something very mildly critical of Mr. Dreher's promulgation of "Orthodoxy" over on the Twitter not long ago, and a prominent conservative Christian columnist replied to me, "altho Rod is Eastern Ortho …. fwiw." I then noted that I too am Eastern Orthodox (for what that was worth, I suppose). I think that a good many of Mr. Dreher's friends assume that he is exemplary of Orthodoxy.
DeleteFirst strippers, then todays target of opportunity: sorority girls.
ReplyDeleteFor someone so obsessed with the feral snarling masculinity of the Rolling Stones, he sure does run for mama's apron strings when confronted by it's antipode, female sensuality.
Then again, I believe there were girls present during the infamous school trip where the popular kids tortured Rod
-the other anonymous guy
Dreher writes in that post:
DeleteMe, I just can’t stop watching it, and trying to decode it.
I cannot for the life of me understand what he means by "decode it".
Lol, other guys have said they just can't watching it, too. But they didn't pretend they were trying to decode it.
DeleteAnd oh yeah. Roll Tide!