The best thing I heard last night was Michael Rubin on Hugh Hewitt's show analyzing the perpetual gaffe situation due to the leaders of our country continuously flapping their mouths. He said something like, and I'm totally paraphrasing, "This is what happens when you have a President who is a Senator, a VP who's a Senator, a Secretary of State who's a Senator and a Secretary of Defense who's a Senator. They keep forgetting they're not in the Senate and the things they say now have consequences."
LOL: Look who wants to "drop a few small atomic bombs over there and just wipe them all out. That way there wouldn’t be anybody left in Syria to fight wars. Problem solved.”
ReplyDeleteI don't think second son picked that up from the kids at (home) school. So how did that idea form in his tiny, homeschooled Orthodox mind, that is, cleansing an entire nation with nuclear weapons? Is it even his idea and him being quoted? If not, what are we really seeing here? If so, poor captive kid. I see future internet archive ghosts just waiting to haunt him when he least expects it.
Mysteries even more befuddling than WTF Obama's speech last night was all about.
Keith
Looks like house arrest will be in order until second son knows how to tell Dear Ol' Dad what he wants to hear. Otherwise, there will be no birthday trips to N.O. so Dad can have choucroute garni (that includes "Mangalitsa pork belly" for you rubes, duh) while you get an over-priced hamburger.
ReplyDeleteOn second thought, maybe second son got a tip from older bro' on what to say so as not to have to endure such things. . . .
Pik, your link inevitably prompted another of those times I just go hmmmm...: in Dreher's life-defining theology of pigs, what role does gout play?
DeleteKeith
Keith, I'll see your "hmmmm" and raise you a Dreherian primer on what it means to be a "foodie" like him.
DeleteComplete with a selfie that I know you'll dig, and a shout-out to "Ta-Nehisi Coates" for his tale of getting high with his fam on a Whole Foods baguette. (I didn't know that true foodies look down on Whole Foods in the same way they look down on Walmart. Now I do.)
So in 12 years he's gone from rushing home to supply his pregnant wife with a croissant to shoving an ice cream cone in his face a la Joe Biden.
DeleteYeah, Pik, I saw that, and I swear at first I thought he was reading this thread or trying to justify to readers and critics outside his inner TAC circle for all his splurging on France & food: "When I cook, I rarely cook anything that could remotely be called “fancy”" (that's what dining out and commuting to France is for). Which I guess depends on what you mean by "fancy": That's why we buy all our meat from Whole Foods or straight from the farmers - no questionable local St. Francisville grocery store meat for him.
ReplyDeleteAs for the photograph, somehow I get the feeling that not more than 3 days after Paw Dreher first brought baby girl Ruthie home from the hospital li'l Roddie plopped himself butt naked into the salad bowl on the table and has been doing whatever it takes to regain being the center of attention ever since.
But I think the larger takeaway from these dreary sorts of summary posts beyond the reflexive attention whoring ("Look how goofy I look - in your face, sucka!")("Did you forget I've been to France and eat there like a native? Never forget that.") is that they're an ongoing series of resumes trying to hook a higher rung on the blogging ladder.
"Did I tell you I admire Negroes like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Atlantic? We're practically brothers! Not only have I been to France too, I experienced it just like he did! So what a team we'd make there at the Atlantic, eh? Eh? South Louisiana white boy and inner city East Coast Negro. Ebony & Ivory! Eh? Eh?"
Or the same thing with Sullivan - "Why, except for some obscure theological doctrines, I'm practically gay myself! Now look, you lost Sullivan, so now you need a "conservative" - an almost gay, Franconegro-friendly eccentric Southern foodie "conservative". Atlantic, how can you possibly say no? You know, Fallows might get cancer, then you'd really have to scramble. So let's just get me settled in before that, God forbid, should happen. Eh? Eh?"
Etc., puke, etc.
But I really think those of you who're mad at Dreher over leaving the Church or somehow think he himself is bothered by it should take a moment and seriously ask yourselves whether you're allowing yourselves to get played by Dreher on his terms.
Because there's only really been one North Star in all of Dreher's perambulations, and it hasn't been locality, or Methodism, or Catholicism, or the OCA. It's only what he can get in his belly.
That's the only religion he has ever devoted himself to consistently and the only one he ever will. Everything else for Dreher is what journalists call "beats", even if they end up being participatory "gonzo" beats: he blogged about Catholic religion while he was a Catholic, now he blogs about Orthodox religion because he's Orthodox.
His true "religion", though, is no different from what pigs would murmur between themselves in hushed, reverent tones: the transcendental, redeeming superiority of the truffle over the acorn.
Ask not at what the turtle head pokes. It pokes at thee.
Keith
"...whose god is their belly," Where have I heard that before?
DeleteDianonymous
P.S. Just a few days ago, hundreds of people in Stokes and Surry Counties, NC, were pulling and praying for a 15-year-old kid who'd been seriously injured in a really horrific car accident and was about to undergo surgery to repair a torn aorta. The local community came together in amazing ways -- churches held prayer services, kids gathered at the school flag pole to pray, one entire middle school "wore red for Jacob," a local beauty shop even changed its outdoor sign message to "Pray for Jacob." (Jacob did pull through the surgery, thank God. He's not out of the woods yet, but, considering that it's a miracle he's alive, he is doing amazingly well.)
My point? Well, amazingly enough, through all of this, no one apparently thought, "Hey, let's write a book about this." No one jumped on the "Sweet-Little-Rural-Community-Coming-Together-in-Prayer-and-Support" Theme Bandwagon. I wonder why not? Could it be because this sort of thing happens every single day in countless communities across America? Ya think?
Good for Jacob! Yes, Diane, that's true -- it happens all the time. Dog bites man. I don't know where Rod had been before Ruthie fell ill. I made this point in my review. ("Hey, have y'all read my review of Little Way yet??") Maybe he wants to canonize not just Ruthie, but everyone who knew her or came into contact with her.
DeletePauli, he's become some type of spreading plague, consuming more and more people within his pod kingdom, first Ruthie, then her children, now this guy James Toney. I'm guessing his brother-in-law, ex-military, manned up and chewed his own arm off at the elbow to escape. Beware! Don't let the white devil Dreher capture your soul in his camera, lest you become trapped in his blog and personal advertising schemes for all eternity.
DeleteMeanwhile, he's throwing out random little gobbets of red meat posts to and fro to his disciple rodents as if he were this guy from Hollywood Squares: Syria (can't lose: what does everyone else say? just reprint that), NPR, beer, atheist academics, old guy penises, Baby Boomers, whatever will stick or make the rodents leap and cavort.
A chattering narcissist who contains multitudes, because he is about everything, and nothing.
Keith
Yes, Pauli, I did see where you made that point in your review. (And did I mention that I read your review? ;-)) In fact, to be honest, I stole the idea from your review. When this whole incident with Jacob started unfolding, and there was such an immense outpouring of caring and concern, your point recurred to me, and I thought, "Hmmmmm...."
DeleteA reader of Rod's book The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming who only Rod knows whether he even exists wrote to ask if he could e-mail him the passage in which his friend James Toney, a country preacher, eulogized his mother. He said he keeps lending out the book, and he finds himself without it just now, and longing to read about James’s sermon. Right now. Immediately. Can't hold it.
ReplyDeleteWhat a divine coincidence! What are the odds?
So Rod was even more generous: he created a whole post about it: Hey, have you read Little Way yet?, almost identical to a previous post about it starring the same unwitting mark. Can't let a good pic like that not be milked dry.
This fooking shill makes midway carnies look like selfless philanthropists. Run, Mini Me, Run!
Keith
RD is auto-parody on wheels.
ReplyDeleteThings on my "to do" list:
(1) Retract my book recommendation.
(2) I have got to do something with that picture with the Agenaise ice cream cone.
Oengus, thank God we have you to do the artistic honors again on our warrior poet of the idiocracy.
DeleteYou just know some bad person in assless chaps somewhere is already photoshopping that splurting ice cream cone into something less savory.
Keith
Hey, since we're standing here at your mother's graveside, mind if I snap a picture of you on my phone? for my blog? Just stand right there facing the light. ok, great shot, thanks.
ReplyDelete"And hey, I'm going to rip off your eulogy and put in a book I'm writing for a $1M advance, k? I thought it was the awesomest, 'cuz it talks about food with French names. I'll maybe use it in a couple of blog posts too -- that's my day job, you know."
Deletethis might be RayRod's funniest 9/11 post yet:
ReplyDelete"This morning, I thought about posting a remembrance here, but realized that everything that could be said had been said. Or at least everything that could be said by me had been said. I don’t like hearing about 9/11, or reading anything about it. The language has been blasted, exhausted. ... I prayed just now for the children of the firefighter whose funeral I went to in Brooklyn Heights. I can’t remember his name. I stood outside the church on Cranberry Street and watched their mother walk with them down towards Henry Street. I followed at a distance, and looked on as she loaded her fatherless children into the minivan, and drive off into their future.
So I spoke to God about them tonight, but that’s all I’ve said....
Standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, I saw the south tower fall..."
LOL
Cheap, trite, bathetic. Does he really not see how this comes across? It's sick-making, frankly.
Deletedianonymous
So I spoke to God about them tonight, but that’s all I’ve said....
DeleteKathleen, am I the only one who sees something monstrously presumptuous in the implications of the phrasing "So I spoke to God about them tonight"?
Not, "So I prayed to God about them tonight" - "So I spoke to God about them tonight"
I know God hears everyone's prayers, but I assume a bunch of mine are allowed to go to voicemail just because, well, even God probably has some priorities.
Apparently to Dreher, though, when Dreher speaks, God listens up, chop-chop.
Keith
What an incredibly Rod-centric passage you quote, Diane. Of course, we've all learned from anniversaries past that the important thing about 9/11 to Rod Dreher and his loyal readers is Rod Dreher's experience of 9/11. (And recently, Rod Dreher's fervent and ex post facto non-interventionist position -- to the extent required to draw a paycheck from TAC, anyway.)
DeleteBack to the passage. It wouldn't take much self-awareness, nor more than about 30 seconds of editing, to rewrite it so that it wasn't exclusively about its author. Here's my feeble effort:
Nothing more can be said about 9/11 . . . the language has been blasted, exhausted. But we can and should continue to pray for the families of the victims, especially the widowed mothers and fatherless children of the first responders, each time we remember seeing the towers fall.
. . . passage that you quote, kathleen, I meant.
DeleteI just love that he says categorically "nothing more can be written" then he goes writing about it for two lengthy paragraphs. His writing is an exercise in self-refutation.
Delete“She was carryin’ a cross,” he said. “Because let me tell you something, if you don’t sacrifice for your brother, if you don’t sacrifice for your neighbor, you not carrying your cross.”
ReplyDeleteOh my gosh. Talk about going out of your way to make these people look like backward, benighted hicks. "You not carrying your cross"??? Yeah, that's so quaint and colorful, inn't it? Those SO-phist-i-CAY-ted Yankees who read Rod's blog just eat this stuff up, I'm sure. "Ooooh, look at those cute little Southerners; my, my, don't they talk funny?"
dianonymous
Diane, we just don't get it. I mean, we jes don git it.
DeleteDiane, it's apparently Dreher's calling to help his readers understand the village in order to save it:
DeleteUnderstanding the South
Keith
How Rod Dreher pictures his St. Francisville neighbors and how he envisions he'll finally win them over by inviting them all home for a lovely Dreher dinner party:
ReplyDeleteGooble Gobble
But how will the well-kept Mrs. Dreher deal with this most generous vision?
Keith
I caught Freaks on TCM some time ago. "Gooble Gobble" is the most disturbing scene in a very disturbing movie.
Delete"Disturbing" is not the word. I saw it waaaay back when I was in college, and I still get the creeps at the mere mention of it. I wish there really were such a thing as brain bleach, because I would use it to bleach out all memory of that creepy creepy movie. I don't care if it's considered a cult masterpiece. It is just sooooo not my cup of tea, and that's the understatement of the millennium. :p
DeleteSorry for the rant...I am not criticizing anyone else's taste, believe me.
dianonymous
What can be better for you than prunes cooked in brandy?
ReplyDeleteAnyhow, I have been trying to perfect my caricature techniques.
Whoa, Oengus, that's remarkably good.
DeleteThe more I read about Dreher's striving to make each of his morning constitutionals a bloodsport event, the more I understand his need for prunes.
Keith