Brendan Eich is quoted here refusing to play the victim. (I capitalized the Theological Virtues; I don't think Mr. Eich will mind.) Excerpt:
On Obergefell and the inevitable SSM story, I do wish Rod [Dreher] would not
drop my name so much, because while I did lose my job, and also FYI I
did have to face a blackball-dropping event at one other Valley big
company, I’m not a martyr. We should all pray for greater Faith, Hope
and Charity, and stop whinging about SSM or the US-based global elite
that’s pushing it as just one step along a revolutionary road. More and
worse is coming, and complaining is far from being ready. Pulling out of
society also isn’t going to work, or satisfy Christ’s injunction to be
“salt and light” to the world.
Emphasis mine. I would like to point out that Eich's attitude is very close to my own, and perhaps he is expressing it better than I ever have when he states "More and
worse is coming, and complaining is far from being ready." It's not denial nor defeatism. It's not a shrug nor is it a shriek. It's the happy warrior mentality, and it is attractive and contagious.
“Pulling out of
society also isn’t going to work, or satisfy Christ’s injunction to be 'salt and light' to the world.” Loved that remark; frankly I didn't realize that Eich was a Christian. I guess I didn't pay a lot of attention when all that was going on, only to assume that the man was brilliant and wouldn't end up on the street.
I have to mention that I find Dreher's Prufrockian comment about Brendan Eich's view of the Benedict Option totally hilarious, even though it's hardly the first time we've heard it. [H]e’s not a fan of the Benedict Option, though I don’t think he understands what it is." Join the very large club, Mr. Eich. None of us quite understands what it is. We havemanydivergenttheories, all useful to some degree.
Are gay terrorists working secretly behind the scenes to suppress sales of Rod Dreher's The Little Way of Ruthie Leming? We know from Rod's own lips that sales have been disappointing, if not disastrous, and his fragmented tour of odd and isolated venues only confirms that. What other explanation could there be?
I saw this hysterical post on Dreher's blog today, and I immediately thought what he was desperately hoping to be was Bluto rallying the troops in Animal House:
Maybe it really is over, ya mo-rons. Maybe this time Wermer really has dropped the big one.
The only problem is that corporations, even liberal outfits like Mozilla, just don't work that way: it simply isn't the case that a few rinky-dink protests pop up on social media, and the board of directors then gather, pull their knives, and put Caesar down to please Pinkus, the one gay Roman who thought he dressed unfashionably.
No, in the real world populated by critically reasoning adults (which may, admittedly, exempt many of the adjunct professors populating Dreher's blog) this sort of action, reaction, and follow through only really happens if things are much more problematic at Mozilla and the gain from pleasing Pinkus is already greater than or at least equal to the loss from sacking Eichus Caesar.
So who wins with Eich stepping down? Everyone, probably Eich most of all.
For this to ever have come close to happening, Eich would have had to have been on thin ice as CEO already, for whatever reason. Corporations just don't change CEOs the way Dreher changes religions; they are actually too valuable to them to add or subtract frivolously. But now Eich can leave as a martyr instead of as a publicly humiliated failed CEO. Mozilla wins by looking even more progressive. And Pinkus wins by walking away with the delusion that his robe stayed on the floor where he dropped it because he commanded it to. Pinkus may come to learn that things don't always work that way.
And how does Dreher win with this post? Obviously it's good red meat, always good for blog hits. But in the time-honored Dreher tradition, it's also something else: the wrapper concealing a different payload.
Despite Dreher claiming "Yeah, it’s personal for me", it's nothing of the sort. He's already retreated back to his boyhood home, a boomerang child with jarringly age-inappropriate thinning hair, where no one can get to him to pull his pants down, and he's already abandoned any real interest in corporate journalism with his confessional wildings on his TAC blog over the past year. But most of all, as we've all pointed out here time and again, Dreher has never gone fully on the record against SSM in any way that could seriously get him in trouble: he already carefully OKCupids himself in advance of every blog post.
If you are already good with first getting the permission of others before speaking freely as the passive-aggressive Dreher does - the assumption underpinning this whole post - you are already their bitch.
Willingly.*
So how does Dreher win? The subliminal, implicit payload inside the wrapper.
This Eich thing is so historically hideous, second only to the fall of Constantinople - no, wait, the fall of France is a much better analogy - that it can logically only be the tip of the iceberg, so there's probably already a vast Pink Illuminati stalking Dreher in order to thwart everything he attempts.
Which is the only way to explain the inexplicable. Given his obvious talent as a writer and the obvious draw of spilling the beans on his dead sister, the poor sales of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming can only be explained by mystical evil forces implicitly, invisibly already at work.
And Eich's resignation is why you should begin to think so. Dreher doesn't need to tell you so outright; you can already figure it out for yourself, ya mo-rons.
Because it's only logical.
*Keith's Law of Permitted Free Speech, minions. Spread it far and wide throughout all lands. I'm a little behind on the internet meme-coining scale, you know.
"It is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one." — Gandalf the Wizard, The Fellowship of the Ring
