Self-revelations or Lies?
If the anonymous author of the Benedict Post is actually Rod Dreher as we've assumed in the past, then I don't know what to do with this excerpt from a recent post.
Like Scalia, I am a former high school debater, a product of a Jesuit education, a traditionalist-minded Catholic, a conservative, and a lawyer. To see someone so similar, in that prominent of a position, not only saying it’s okay to think this way, but this is the way you should be thinking about the law was incredibly inspiring and motivating. As one of the many conservative legal minds who had (and will have) the privilege of learning the law from you: thank you, Justice Scalia.
Obviously Rod Dreher is none of these things, although an argument could be made that he is a conservative since many people think he is, including himself. But he is not any type of functional conservative, not any more than he is a functional ice cube. (Oh brother, Pauli, do you really want to bring up your support for that loser Romney who very losingly lost the 2016 Presidential election? Sure; if Donald Trump gets the GOP nod, I'll vote for his sinking ship over HRC.) So if this is Dreher's sock-puppet site, he is being extremely deceptive in claiming to be a Catholic lawyer with a Jesuit education. Of course, he has a history of doing this as we know.
This post goes on seemingly forever, quoting and commentating upon practically everybody's farewell tribute to Scalia. I don't know if anyone who reads here is bored enough to compare the quotes with Dreher's TAC tribute — I assume he wrote one — to check for matches, similar patterns, etc. The other angle might be to skim through the writings of His Crunchiness to identify traditionalist-minded, Jesuit produced, former debater, "conservative" friends for whom Dreher provides a name. I'm thinking of people like the rich guy who he drank beers with in Europe who is tired of fast-food joints and dumb-ass Republicans. He might be a lawyer who doesn't want to lose clients by admitting he actually buys into this Benedict Option balderdash.
The possibility exists that Dreher is the author and is simply lying about law degrees and Catholic cred to throw people off the trail. I wouldn't be naïve enough to rule that out. But there are so many nuts out there, like my font abuse friend whom I've written about (and more recent news about him later), that I don't doubt this person could be a separate individual from Rod Dreher. He could be just another self-righteous, politically-homeless dude with a blog, a permanent scowl and a desire for a Christian ghetto apart from all those pesky Christians.
There is, of course, the traditional rumination over whether the Iliad and the Odyssey were actually written by Homer or instead by a different Greek from the same village also named Homer.
ReplyDeleteI based my past declaration that "Benny" was Rod Dreher on the nature of the blog, springing forth fully formed with professional blogginess (not impossible for either a lawyer or a cabbage farmer, I would grant), with Twitter pals at The Federalist including Ben Domenech* (who apparently immediately snapped up and praised this new WordPress.com blog out of the background noise of WordPress.com's other eleven million blogs), on the New York Post-Drehery-chatty nature of the prose itself, on its trawling of the more lucrative Catholicsphere, and on the timing of its emergence, "vacation", and subsequent cessation of publication relative to the death of Rod Dreher's father. Benny's abrupt silence also tightly corresponds with our notice of him here at EQE, for what that may be worth.
As it happens, the post Pauli links to above is the very first to emerge since Benny fell into a coma last summer on August 19th, 2015. What has our professionally gifted blogger, allegedly a lawyer and Jesuit as well, been doing in the meantime, and why? And, as always, why does this proud Jesuit lawyer prefer anonymity?
To refine Pauli's revelations, Benny also claims to be under 30 ("I was born into a world in which Scalia was a sitting justice on the Supreme Court.") and has no trouble authoring a 10,902-word (plus title) post richly festooned with links to a host of key higher authority bloggers.
Assuming nothing of note in the Catholic universe has happened in the interim, aside from the death of Scalia, what else of note happened in Benedict Option Land around the time of Scalia's death? Most notably for me (and, sorry, I can't find a link to his exact words) Rod mentioned in an Update or comment that he would reveal his book publisher as soon as its PR department allowed him to.
So...Benny's back in business, and the Benedict Option book is definitely on. Or, the Benedict Option book is definitely on, and Benny's back in business after an inexplicable hiatus. I'll leave it to the readers to decide who is Homer, who is Homer, and who is not. Whatever the case, I think we can safely assume that the Benedict Option will continued to be tendered to Catholics via its eponymous blog as a positive alternative to what they have without it.
*Upon a quick scan, Domenech's own history is more interesting than I previously realized, including a stint at NRO.
Here's something fascinating to consider as well. For Benny - just as for any anonymous voice on the Internet - the chances that Benny is a Jesuit-educated lawyer are exactly the same as the chances that he is Rod Dreher.
ReplyDeleteHere's how that works.
I can put out all sorts of what I consider to be good arguments that Benny is Rod Dreher, but without irrefutable evidence that he is - because Benny is completely anonymous - the chances that Benny is Rod Dreher ultimately resolve to a coin toss, statistically, 50% heads, Benny is Rod Dreher, 50% tails, Benny is not Rod Dreher.
But for that very same reason - because Benny is completely anonymous and thus exists entirely evidence-free - the odds that Benny is a Jesuit-educated lawyer are exactly the same that he is Liverpudlian green grocer or a Chilean Muslim woman or Rod Dreher, that is, 50% that he is, 50% that he is not.
Incidentally, this statistical minimal 50% is the very same reason the anonymous source and the anonymous claim works so well for Rod Dreher in his blogging. 50% is a very high starting point, and so for anything Dreher might want to claim in a post that cannot be falsified by irrefutable evidence, for every tails, someone simply doesn't believe it, there will be someone else, heads, who does believe it.
If Benny isn't Rod Dreher, I'm perfectly willing to accept that Benny is just another remora blogger like Jake Meador or Dwight Longenecker or The Practical Conservative looking to pick up extra blog hits by attaching themselves to high value key search terms like "Benedict Option".
But, given Benny's stubborn and persistent anonymity and its necessary consequences, the most interesting question remaining is what sort of person Benny's anticipated audience is supposed to be.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/living-in-unreality/
ReplyDeleteIn this morning's post El Rodbo quotes one of his readers as follows:
"The electronic world happens to be their reality and they are bringing the rules of this reality into the physical world."
I wonder if Rod ever stopped for a moment to consider if he has fallen victim to this himself?
Nah...not for a moment. That would require a level of self-criticism that he will never reach. It would also require him to reconsider his dedication to food porn and selfies.
Yeah, just finished reading that post of Rod's and had the same thoughts. He is ranting about people becoming removed from reality by living through their screens. Yet all the topics Rod rants about are things he finds on his...screen. He obviously spends many hours daily looking for (cherry-picking) and writing about things that outrage him. He finds his targets on the internet and sends out his rants on the internet and fields hundreds of comments on the internet...what does he think the difference is between him and the people he condemns for living through their screens? He freely admits that he's "lucky" to get to make his living this way, all online.
DeleteI guess we are to think that his dedication to luxurious food and drink grounds him in physical, local, interpersonal reality? That's all it takes?
A fairly simple question: does the Benedict Option embrace the sort of remote, vicarious ctber-exhibitionism-voyeurism precisely as exemplified in the blogging of a Rod Dreher, or does it recommend turning its back on such vulgar, pop-cultural cyber-exhibitionism-voyeurism in favor or real world Christian relationships?
ReplyDeleteTL;DR: Is Rod Dreher the reason Christians could conceivably need a "Benedict Option" - to separate them from vicarious titillation over a local double-wide strip club?
Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is going to bear a striking resemblance to the French castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
DeleteThe BenOppers having walled themselves off from the so called barbarians will, rather than withdrawal from what they see as the barbarian culture, mock it and think themselves clever as they do so.
It's really just a continuation of what little Rod has done since high school: been such a self righteous, insufferable prat that he has to run off to his safe space to keep from having the other kids taunt him.
Rod has supplied a post rich with irony to accompany your comment, one wherein he ends by asking So what do you think? Is this comments section worth it?, then proceeds to explain how the reader never sees the comments that don't make his cut - for example, those not fully answering in the affirmative like the comments posted in answer to that question do.
DeleteBenedict Option Christianity won't necessarily have to contain any real, natural Christianity fruit juice, it need only supply a warm, self-confirming and self-congratulatory bubble like Rod's comments section within which its members can feel as if they're being 100% Christian. Remember, Man is not a rational creature, man is a rationalizing creature, and Dreher - and only by the grace of blogging - has mastered merchandising to that Christian rationalization market.
Skimmed the post; ironically didn't read the comments. I've talked about this before, but couldn't find where... did find this, though -- pretty funny. But what I remember stating is that the elephant in the middle of the room is this: comments increase the amount of traffic a web page gets. Just like that little Coke sign in the sports stadium, people see the ad more when they hang around to post a comment, then see who responds, then respond to the responses.... I think I pointed out once that the neglect to bring up the most salient point about the reason for a comment section is like the first and second rules of Fight Club.
DeleteApropos of nothing at all beyond the sheer, pompous silliness of it all, this.
DeleteThe APL's light bulb moment leads its mission statement:
"THE ACADEMY OF PHILOSOPHY AND LETTERS was founded in recognition that the direction of society is set by its most deeply held beliefs and aspirations."
Whoa.
The keynote speaker? BenOp Boy himself.
On the Board of Directors...oh...Daniel McCarthy...Rod's editor at TAC.
"MO-OMMMM!!! Can I have a philosophical conference tooooo??? Pleeeezzzzz??? About the Keith Option, of course. Rod's Uncle Daniel put HIM on one. I want one, toooo!!!
"The Keith Option starts with the recognition that all Options begin as optional, but it is up to YOU to make them a sure thing. And, doggone it, you CAN! Because you're good enough, you're smart enough, and, doggone it, and people like you!
"MO-OMMM, pleeezzz? Look we can both do this. You put the Keith Option Conference on YOUR CV and I'll put the Keith Option Conference on MY CV. And you can be Treasurer, too, seeing as you handle my allowance. Pleeezzz???"
A fairly accurate analysis of Bennie the sock puppet's writing can be analyzed with regard to word choice, sentence structure, grammar, and general construction todetermine the degree to which Bennie's writing is similar to our working boy. A probability that the two are the sme author can be generated. Stylistically, Bennie and Rod sound alike to my ear but a computer analysis can give some indication f the writing samples were written by the same person.
ReplyDeleteThat's an excellent point. Every writer has a "voice." In my professional experience as an advertising hackette, it is really hard to emulate someone else's voice. Not impossible but darned hard. As you say, perhaps a computer analysis may prove illuminating.
DeleteActually Diane it is very difficult for writers to change their typical forms of vocabulary, punctuation styles, sentence length stc ... JK Rowling was unmasked as the author of a well received novel written under a pseudonym by precisely these kinds of methods. There have to be computer programs onlne that can do this sort of analysis.
DeleteFor someone who burst on the scene with an extremely professional and promising (with friends in high blog places), carefully thought out (identity-free, comfortably weekly, comment free, Email solicitative) one-stop shopping Catholic newsletter and associated Twitter account (with helpful weekly Benedict Option payload as Cracker Jack prize), Benny has surely proved oddly absent.
DeleteA few weeks of publication - and vacation suddenly calls. Then an unexplained, at least by Benny, and unbroken, seven-month-to-the-day hiatus, culminating in a close to 11,000-word verbal purge noticeably different, whether deliberate or not, in style, content, and identity (with fresh, new seasonings for the drab old anonymity!) from the original, ostensibly professional weekly Catholic newsletter.
One of the basic principles for both finding or simply noticing the Waldoes that don't belong in the field of sunflowers is that of sufficient reason: why does something exist/is the case rather than not, and particularly at the level of its constituent elements. So why Benny rather than not-Benny?
To my eyes, Benny seems extraordinarly manufactured and artificial in every part, not the least of which is bizarre incongruity of an anonymous celebrator of Catholicism, and not at all the way I would imagine a genuine, organically developed and delivered weekly Catholic newsletter of such expertise to present itself. But I'm neither Catholic nor versed in the genre, although I am familiar with Gabriel Sanchez, have heard of Rorate Caeli and others.
What, if anything or everything, about Benny appears normal to eyes other than mine?
Even though Pope Francis isn't going anywhere and Pope Benedict isn't coming back, the smaller member of the ambiguous Benedict duo - Benny, with brown hair, but does it really matter which is which? - is back, ambiguously dissing Pope Francis by hot-kiss-linking all of Rod Dreher's current go-to bloggers.
ReplyDeleteI can only passive-aggressively suppose the only relief for a Pope Benedict not returning from his twilight retirement to set things straignt would have to be some other sort of Benedict option.
Let's recall that the anonymous Benny has just previously anonymously informed us that, just like the non-anonymous, publicly well-known Antonin Scalia, he, she, or xir, too, is a former high school debater, a product of a Jesuit education, a traditionalist-minded Catholic, a conservative, and a lawyer. And maybe either an anonymous Pulitzer Prize-winning author or a magic talking seagull, to boot, but, because he, she, or xir is anonymous, I have no way of confirming those since the anonymous Benny did not claim to be either in his, her, or xir's anonymously-authored blog post.
One thing you can count on, though, is that I, Keith, as a highly decorated Sky Captain, renaissance man, top neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver, rock star, comic book hero, and probably the last hope of the human race, will not leave you wanting for anonymous Benny updates.