If you're still taking Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ seriously, now I'm just laughing at you

Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™

In another 3,200-word eruction entitled - what else? - Talking Benedict Option, our favorite tailor to credulous emperors and their courts Rod Dreher does just that, talk, talk, and talk some more about people talking about Rod Dreher talking about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™.

Here is why I and others are laughing at you: not just because you thought those Shake Weights would knock that spare tire around your middle right down, not because you still want to maintain to your snickering friends that those premium-priced Monster cables deliver a noticeably higher quality audio-video experience, but because you are unequivocally one of these people:

Everyone said, loud enough for the others to hear: "Look at the Emperor's new clothes. They're beautiful!"

      "What a marvellous train!"

      "And the colors! The colors of that beautiful fabric! I have never seen anything like it in my life!" They all tried to conceal their disappointment at not being able to see the clothes, and since nobody was willing to admit his own stupidity and incompetence, they all behaved as the two scoundrels had predicted.

That's right. You're a goober, a mark, a chump, a sucker, the eager tool of a relentlessly self-promoting impresario who really does nothing else in life but promote himself. Because, bless your heart, that's just how you roll.

But perhaps not all of you. It's statistically impossible for all of you to naturally be that witless. And, moreover, one of the most salient aspects you share with Rod Dreher is the unquenchable need for your own Internet presence to constantly be reaffirmed, particularly by the highest god of the realm you serve, the one whose name also cannot be spoken and which also begins with a G.

In this ghostly, drifting penumbral nebula of cyber-pseudo-Christianity within which you promote yourself, everyone involved clearly understands Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ isn't something to be practiced, it's the Internet that is to be practiced instead.

Rod Dreher invents the Emperor's New Clothes of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ and wants to get everyone talking about it, because to talk about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is to talk about the narcissistic black hole at the center of the Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ event horizon, Rod Dreher.

But if there's something on a trending ballistic within that ectoplasmic cybermist of pseudo-Christianity that defines you, you don't want to be left out, do you? Maybe talking about Rod Dreher talking about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ will raise your own cyber-pseudo-Christian profile as well. And that will make your great god G very happy.

So for all of you more-than-mere-goobers, Christianity and Christian culture really become the means; mutually and reciprocally talking about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ as a thoughtful, serious option for Christians in order to raise the Internet profiles of all of you doing so becomes the true end.

And so as you peer into and talk about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ with a spiritual seriousness either credulous or cynical, the misty abyss of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ will rejoice and peer into and talk about you. And not only will that flatter you, it will make your great god G very happy.

But eventually, after Rod has landed his Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ book deal - you do understand all of this Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ noise, all of it, is nothing but an Astroturfed buzz campaign to land him a book deal, right? - and after he has sold many dozens of books and garnered dozens of five-star Amazon reviews from those blog followers whose comments flatter him, the hot sun of the real world will rise again, the misty vapor of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ will lift from your eyes, you will find yourself inexplicably babbling about a naked emperor, and you will sheepishly realize this

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air..”

Or maybe you prefer a more contemporary version

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...

You can even read all about this orbital ghost realm you and Rod Dreher are cheerfully cultivating instead of Christianity and Christian culture here.

In the meantime, though, I'll just be laughing at you. Because, like the Emperor, his courtiers, and his townspeople, you've worked hard for it, and you've earned it.

UPDATE (as they say): As my colleague Pikkumatti pointed out, in order to avoid the unfortunate fate of busy people referring to Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ as "Rod's BO", our Prophet has now launched on the hilariously entertaining course of recursively micro-branding his original brand. No detail is too small for the Mad Man Prophet. I expect T-shirts any day now.

In this brand-branding establishing post, Prophet Dreher gratuitously inserts the term "BenOp" no less than ten times including title and tags:

"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"

Hear his offering, Lord Big G, little double o, and reward him with first page recognition!

Go ahead, use our Prophet's hastily fabricated, Newspeak term "BenOp". Represent.

All that is solid melts into Dreher

Those who follow our newly minted notion of Dreherian emperorography* are already aware of Rod Dreher's opaquely named "Law of Merited Impossibility" which states, and I roughly paraphrase, "X won't happen to Y [variable you], and when it does Y [you, again] will deserve it."

I'm pretty sure no more effort was made to give this most recent emperorographic Dreher-branding effort any sort of intelligent name because, although he's been using it recently to bait paranoid Christians with inferiority complexes that, yes, so-and-soes are out to get you, he's really casting a much wider net to reel in any chump at all psychologically needing a reason outside themselves to explain why it wouldn't get hard that time, why they didn't get tenure, why she got the promotion instead, why you can't find a pay phone anymore, why those hose you paid a fortune for ran just as you stepped from the limo, why your dog stole your truck and ran off with your wife to the honky-tonk, why life happens, and all other generic reasons why there really wasn't a pony under the tree just like you wanted when you were six.

Don't underestimate the market for this sort of thing. Huge.

But I don't see why Rod Dreher should garner all the embarrassment of making up and trying to push phrases that make normally intelligent people say, "Wait - what? What can that even mean?" We can do that, too, by golly, and do it far worse, or my name isn't Keith.

So here's my own kickoff entry into making up an important and scientifically-sounding but semantically impenetrable Law I can then use to manipulate naive goobers with at will to my own self-promotional benefit:

The Law of Unintended Precedents: It didn't happen then, but it will when you least expect it, and then look out because there will be consequences.

which means - well, I'll think about it and let you know. Oh, I remember. You remember that issue we were talking about the other day - there was quite a bit of heated discussion at the time, as I recall, and tempers got a little short between some of you that really should be on the same side on this. Well, that was why: The Law of Unintended Precedents. Didn't happen then, did it. Which means that we all need to be ready, because it will, when we least expect it, and we should all be on the same page when it does. Because there will be consequences. Be sure to bookmark this paragraph so I can keep you posted.

Remember, you heard it from Keith: The Law of Unintended Precedents. Keith. Law of Unintended Precedents. Keith. Important. Affecting you. Keith. More importantly, your children. Keith.

Now your turn: why not come up with your own Law?

And if you can't, but if you've got something like a time share contract or a U-Haul trailer full of Hummel figurines you really need to offload, why not Google the phrase "Law of Merited Impossibility" to locate a sucker nodding thoughtfully over it online whom you could immediate dump either on?

*a game of mirrors gazing into mirrors that can be played meta-levels deep, for example, here I am coining a term vaporously thin in meaning at best to describe writing that is nothing but a film-like shell of self-promotional form enclosing, if anything at all, only more of itself

**The genuine human culture levels deep that lies behind the title of this post is actually worth far more than the post itself, but I thought I'd write the post anyway to give Dreher, culturally little more than a rodent eagerly eating through the paintings in the Louvre for no other reason than that the egg proteins in the paint are tasty and still nutritious, his rightful place in the history of that phrase. That and because his assault on Dante comes out in April, remember.