Friday on the bus with Merle and Toby

No, not a euphemism for vomiting. 

But in honor of Will Wilkinson's "graf"  (whoever Will Wilkinson is), as breathlessly brought to us by Our Hero, I thought I'd add a little informal rendering of some low-openness music for today:

Couple of fine baritone voices there.  I don't know who the guitar player is, but he's pretty good, too.

Ruthie Leming: Low in openness

Our favorite backbiting coward Rod Dreher, fresh off the sting of having to take his kids to see the Duck Dynasty Robertsons instead of vice versa, turns to writing expert Will Wilkinson to once again drag his dead sister Ruthie's name through the mud now that she is safely beyond being able to talk back to him or otherwise stand up for herself

This Wilkinson graf, I think, explains why my sister had a permanent chip on her shoulder about something as trivial as my food preferences:

     My best guess (and let me stress guess) is that those low in openness depend emotionally on a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible. What high-openness liberals feel as merenostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids don’t experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if you’re able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. And what kind of monster would want that?

Well, there you have it, expert writer Will Wilkinson's best guess - until the next random opportunity presents itself.

Only You

Mark Shea Uses JFK Assassination Anniversary to Judge Baby Boomers

Actually, it's the comments which are more illuminating.

Hat tip to Erin "Amen" Manning, namesake half of Rod Dreher's Evans-Manning award for civil commentary.

[caption contest]

"I have a beard too!"

Attached to a post tagged "Duck Commander" and "Duck Dynasty" in order to draw traffic seeking those topics, one which somehow simultaneously manages to both sneeringly resent and suck up to Phil Robertson's family ("I simply cannot get over that these hirsute, Jesus-loving rednecks are massive rock stars getting filthy rich just being themselves. Sometimes, the good guys really do win."), this Duck Commander Nation-related "update":

UPDATE: Hey, don’t forget to come see me at the Chennault Museum in Monroe today, speaking at 3:30 and again at 6:30, and meeting folks and signing The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming in between (Books-a-Million will be there selling copies). I have a beard too! Not nearly as impressive as some people’s beards, but one does what one can.

Hi, Phil. I'm a pathetic internet dog tick named Rod Dreher. Can I live in your beard and suck blood from your face? Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeezzzzzzeeeee?

The American Conservative: becoming even more so any day now.

 (You didn't expect me to insult the Robertsons further by adding a "duck" tag to this post, did you?)

High School Student Ground and Pounds Common Core

Wow.



Hat tip goes to The Blaze.

Can't wait until Ethan Young's book comes out.