I sense a pattern here...

I posted this two years ago today. It was in the midst of the famous Topix flare-up. It may be a good idea for anyone new to the Benedict Option discussion to review this. Or anyone wishing to meditate further on the Platonic ideal of chickenness.

Especially note Jonah Goldberg's remarks on the archived link from that post. I believe they apply to the Benedict Option just as well as they describe Crunchy Conservatism.

I don't believe Crunchy Conservatism exists. I think it is Rod's invention. I don't think there is any body of thought, serious or otherwise, that is "crunchy conservative." I think Rod points to things he agrees with or likes and calls it crunchy and conservative when often they are one or the other. I think Rod's taxonomy is entirely artificial. And I think the word "crunchy" and the props used to support it are not only superficial, but they smack of precisely the kind of branding and marketing outlook Rod decries. Yes, yes, yes: There are people out there worried about the ravages of the free market and modernity who are conservative. Some of them dig organic food and open-toed-shoes. Some of them do not. I do not see what is to be gained by dividing people who agree on important things by concentrating on unimportant things.

Try it out, unless you fear that you may become a dreaded Benedict Option Denialist if you read it. But it is a good question to ask. Is the Benedict Option proposal "dividing people who agree on important things by concentrating on unimportant things"?

"14 White Chefs Frolicking Blithely in a Field of Daisies"

Hat tip goes to Diane who posted this on Facebook.

What's your favorite article title?

Since we're on the topic...

Since we are on the topic of Dreher's twitter account, I thought I'd post this which has got to be one of the funniest postings of all times.

SOS to @dwightgarner from a Sonic drive-in: Please save this Southern writer while he still has a life of the mind: pic.twitter.com/5P7q5vB8MC
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) July 21, 2014

More hilarity in the comments, I promise you.

Around the internets, Vol. 3

Welcome to another installment of (dum-ta-da-DAAAAAHH...) Around the Internets! This awesome feature is one which I originally described as "[a] quick digest of stuff which I've seen, read, noticed, thought 'Gee I ought to blog that', etc. over the last 4 or 5 months." Actually the time-frame is a bit shorter this time. So without further ado....

Firstly, it's always a good idea to check in with Sistah Raccoon in St. Francisville, Louisiana. She always has something interestin' to share with us. Her latest:

Ain't you glad you not related to Lil Ray?

Lil Ray now telling the whole world how old an feeble an helpless Big Ray be now.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher...

Old age be a humiliation, say Lil Ray. Telling about old people like Big Ray crapping they pants in the hospital. Course he telling ever body all this about Big Ray out a LOVE, you understand, umh-hnh.

Slow down, Lil Ray. You gone get all that land in good time.

Just be glad Lil Ray not telling the world what happening in YOU pants.

Whoa. Let that be a warning to all y'all who be lettin' y'all's kids borrow those bloggin' computers, let alone willing them over all that land. They'll be puttin' up pictures on billboards of you sitting in wheelchairs next!

Meanwhile, in an entirely different part of the internets which Diane pointed out to us (thanks, Diane!), there is some discussion about animals and human sexuality and Rod Dreher's take on it. Near the end of the comments, our friend Owen White reminds us of an incident in Paris back in 2012. From the link provided by Owen:

The taste was electric, almost indescribably good. It was one of the few times in my life when the experience of tasting something delicious made me feel a sense of exaltation. They were like cold sea grenades exploding in my mouth, bursting with saline, iodine, and that metallic taste you only find in oysters. I slurped them from the half-shell, holding them in my mouth longer than usual to savor the new sensations. I have never, ever eaten oysters that prepared me for these glorious creatures. Later, I e-mailed Julie that eating French oysters was like licking the ta-tas of Poseidon’s favorite concubine. She was not amused. But it’s true! The aesthetic frisson was absolutely erotic. Dominique Strauss-Kahn lives around the corner, at the Place des Vosges; I think his proximity to Le Bar a Huitres (Oyster Bar) might explain a lot.

So why was Rod Dreher's wife not amused by his description of eating good oysters being like licking a concubine's breasts? I don't know; maybe it's because she is a Christian. Well, he went ahead and put it out there anyway, along with her reaction. I guess he has a shorter memory about this

So many times, I’ll put something on my blog, and my wife will say, “I wish you hadn’t done that.”

than we do. Just for a sanity check I read this to my wife. Fortunately the floor wasn't damaged when her jaw hit it. But I have to saw that Dreher has bigger ones than me; that doghouse don't be looking too good this time of year. The obvious takeaway is this: it's okay to have sex with animals if they are dead and being served by a Parisian cook. For the record, I'm still going to pass.

This all reminded me of the time (and you'll see why in a moment) that Dreher referred to conservatives as "mongoloids" and then made the weak excuse that he meant it in "the Ignatian sense", referring to the character named Ignatius Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. My memory had been jogged about a link Topix Pat provided to another man's experience with the book; excerpt:

One scene, near the beginning of the book, had an especially dizzying effect on me. (I’ve read it hundreds and hundreds of times.) It’s where we find Ignatius practicing a little "self-love" in his bed; an innocent, even saintly, wank to a happier time in his life. He had accessories nearby: a rubber glove, a piece of fabric from a silk umbrella, and a jar of Noxzema:

Ignatius manipulated and concentrated. At last a vision appeared, the familiar figure of the large devoted collie that had been his pet in high school...Ignatius’s eyes dilated, crossed, and closed, and he lay back among his four pillows, hoping that he had some Kleenex in his room.

This is the page where I went fag. The solitude and isolation, the very sadness of it all, didn’t turn me off—on the contrary, it was the hook. Sex scenes had always been filled with gorgeous people. Ignatius wasn’t gorgeous. But he was sexual. I think it must have been the first time, in literature or film or life, when it occurred to me these were two different things. It was loud and clear. I had been fooling myself. I wanted something else from the Ignatiuses of the world. Something if much more than hugs.

So we find out now that the inspiration for Dreher's famous referring to conservatives as "mongoloids" is a grown man with over-valued intelligence who thinks about the collie he had as a boy while he is "practicing a saintly wank". I don't know if everyone who reads A Confederacy of Dunces becomes a homosexual the way Giancarlo DiTrapano says he did, but it's probably not worth the risk. At any rate, this might explain why the topic of sex with animals is of interest to the Working Boy; it's been in his wheelhouse for a long time, or so it would seem.

By the way, you all might want to give that entire oysters post a read. It has a lot of interesting material about going to a Novus Ordo Mass celebrated in Latin in Paris and how great it was. I think it's just one more piece of evidence that, like Casella noted, Mr. Dreher remains "culturally Catholic" no matter how incessantly he insists that he's not.

Update: Pikkumatti has provided a pertinent link with this very interesting selfie. (Title translation: Ignatius, my love)

Two New Reviews

One of the casualties of the exciting Dante project which we are chronicling here is that the new proposed book will draw a lot of attention away from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. This is really too bad; this monumental tome needs to be read and appreciated by all those interested in the life and times of Rod Dreher and will forever stand as an inadvertent exposé of his high self-regard, his vindictiveness against perceived enemies, his insufferable contempt for those not sharing his patchwork political ideology and his tendency to use other people as objects.

So it well to look at two recent reviews which are not meant to pan the book or dismiss it, and yet do not read like book-club cheerleader effervescence. They are also short and to the point, which is a positive feature in any review. The first was from August 13 by a reviewer named Kim Strong.

This book inspired me to want to love others more selflessly. Ruthie, though not perfect, was a good example of living the Christian life. I marked it down slightly for portraying her brother as a serious student of the Bible, but he didn't seem to grasp it well.

I suppose the author of the book might point out that, well, she has obviously bought into the idea that "there is no conflict between being a faithful Christian and living within the American system" unlike the enlightened Americans (of means) who are able to jet over to Florence for a cultural-political chinwag and have pictures taken of them putting food into their mouths. That's why Ms. Strong wouldn't recognize him as a student of the Bible as she (and practically all normal Christians) have understood it.

Here's the most recent one as of this moment, from September 12 by Bruce L. Taylor.

I know this is based on a true story so I wish the story of Ruthie's life would have told in more detail, emotions, etc. I wanted to know her better. We are told over and over what an amazing person she was but the personal touch was missing. I felt I never got to know her the way I wanted to so I could feel the difference she made in everyone's life. Something was missing in the story that I needed to draw me more personally into the story.

Something was missing. I agree; in fact, I'd point out that there was a lot missing from many of the episodes in the story that would have explained said episodes better. Oengus pointed that out about the bouillabaisse incident—that was the one about the time Rod made bouillabaisse at a family dinner and Ruthie not only refused to eat it, but persuaded everyone else in the family to abstain from it. Oengus spoke my thoughts in his comment:

I kept getting the feeling that RD had left out some critical piece of information which would have explained the motives that the other people had. It is easy for me to imagine that had I been there I would have come away with a different impression of why what happened happened.

I also remember pointing out somewhere that the first story in the book about Ruthie was missing something. This story—the first "proof" of her saintliness—was about how, when they were children, she wanted to take the punishment for something that her brother was about to be punished for. We're never told about the nature of the infraction because Dreher claims to have forgotten what it was. But I'm not so sure about this. It's nice to be the one to write history. Mr. Taylor's review received one comment.

I found that he was too wrapped up in his own experience which blocked his depicting Ruthie in a personal, real way. Perhaps that's what was missing?

Perhaps.

A Nasty Note from Joel Salatin

You might remember this guy, Joel Salatin, as the self-righteous farmer quoted in Crunchy Cons who implied that you couldn't be a true Christian and work in the agriculture industry unless you did things his way, i.e., organic pigs, small, local and what-not. If readers of Crunchy Cons forget him I'm not surprised. His over-the-top statements just melt into the high-pitch background of scolding dogma which is the warp and woof of standard Crunchy Conservative judgmentalism. It seems to me like Salatin is vying to become the successor to the throne of Wendell Berry, although I'm not sure he's against electricity.

Here's the recent rant from Salatin in which the squeal goes up another octave. He's mainly reacting to a speech given by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack at a Democrat fund raiser in which Vilsack points out that 40% of the US Military comes from rural America even though rural America represents only 16% of the US population. This is horrible news to him as someone who wants to see more people entering the farming industry. Here's his reaction in his words:

Are you ready? Here’s his answer: although rural America only has 16 percent of the population, it gives 40 percent of the personnel to the military. Say what? You mean when it’s all said and done, at the end of the day, the bottom line–you know all the cliches–the whole reason for increasing farms is to provide cannon fodder for American imperial might. He said rural kids grow up with a sense of wanting to give something back, and if we lose that value system, we’ll lose our military might.

Emphasis mine, I don't know about you, but I'm not going to go up to a member of the military from rural America—Sergeant Theresa Vail, to use an example from recent news—and tell her she is "cannon fodder". First of all, she'd kick my ass in short order, but more importantly because I respect the US military more than any other government institution. Pew says I'm in the majority with regard to this opinion and my guess is Vilsack knew his statement would resonate well with at least 78% of the invitees in that room.

Is the "cannon fodder" remark just an off-the-cuff angry outburst of Salatin's which we can excuse? I don't think so. Aside from the fact that he put it into writing, he does so twice. Here's his second use of the term, again with my emphasis:

But to think that my agenda is key to building the American military–now that’s a cause for pause. I will redouble my efforts to help folks remember why we need more farmers. It’s not to provide cannon fodder for Wall Street imperialistic agendas. It’s to grow food that nourishes, land that’s aesthetically and aromatically sensually romantic, build soil, hydrate raped landscapes, and convert more solar energy into biomass than nature would in a static state.

Again, you have to think about what members of the military would think if you went up to them and told them they were "cannon fodder for Wall Street imperialistic agendas". Have you ever met people who have lost hands and arms in accidents of an agricultural nature? I have; but I will spare you the details. Suffice to say I'd rather have a 7.62x39 round in me than to undergo what some of them underwent. So—were they "cannon fodder" for the food industry? The people I'm talking about got hurt working for family farms, not huge agribusiness enterprises.

The piece gets sillier, nastier and more and more shrill until the last sentence, "Here’s to more healthy worms," squeaks out. Speaking these five words seems to be the perfect way to end this rant. I advise everyone to read it in its entirety to get a taste of how lunatic rage reads in print. My main takeaway is as long as these people continue to overstate their case with this fever pitch of poisonous rhetoric the world will be safe from their ideas. They blow their credibility whenever they speak in anger, which is to say practically every time they speak on a topic. There is nothing Christian about elevating the greatness of your profession and career choices above that of others. And let it be known that I have plenty of huge, healthy, organic earthworms in my backyard; thank you very much for your kind offer to take care of them.

Donald McClarey pwns Chipotle

Over at The American Catholic, Donald McClarey serves up several videos concerning Chipotle with this commentary.

Over the top and entertaining which is how I like commercials if I have to endure one. I like Mexican food but I have never liked Chipotle as the menu is too limited and their massive burritos leave me cold. Just as well, as those things weigh in at a 1000 calories, which makes their wholesomener than thou commercial hilarious. Yeah, we treat the animals we slaughter for your plate in a kinder and gentler fashion as we serve you their remains to make you obese!

Loved the second video. Much more likely to get me into Chipotle than the first and, no, I didn't download the Scarecrow app.



Not bad for a couple of (gay) white guys.

OK, color me slow. I just caught the "magic marker" reference. They always write on the foil with a Sharpie. Hilarious. I always get the burrito bowl when I go there. And, uh, a Modelo of Color, naturally.

"Miserabiliousness"

A reader sent me this comment on Rod Dreher's post Everything as Miserabilism. The reader had attempted to post it in the combox over there, but it was not approved. That's OK; we'll just read it and discuss it here. If the reader wants to claim the comment, the reader might do so in the combox; I'm posting this with permission. I really don't think Dreher reads this blog, at least not very much.

RD: Everything As Miserabilism

Certainly somewhere, somehow, in all of this there has got to be a tie-in to The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.

Maybe Ruthie was a kind of anti-miserabilist.

RD: At the end of my years as a Catholic, I had allowed anger over the abuse scandal to become almost the only way I could relate to the Catholic Church.

This is about the 10th thousand time you have reminded everybody about this. We are getting weary and miserable hearing about it, yet one more time. I suspect you might be having a bout of miserabilism here because miserabilists love to remind everybody not only about all their present miseries but all their past ones as well.

Perhaps, anti-miserabilists make miserabilists especially miserable in that the miserabilists obsess about what it is about those anti-miserabilists that makes them so dang un-miserable. I imagine that some miserabilists, being so obsessed with this perplexing issue, can concoct some very elaborate and far-reaching theories regarding the nature of Anti-Miserabilism.

Miserabilists might say to themselves something like this: “Why are all these dang anti-miserabilists not properly miserable like us? It just cannot be right. Don’t they know what’s going on in the world? Don’t they know that there’s something wrong with Kansas? There has got to be some kind of connection to anthropology or philosophy here! Maybe there’s this cultural predisposition among some backwards people that causes them to be anti-miserable when they should be cultivating all the proper feelings of misery that advanced people like ourselves have? After all, to be miserable is to be enlightened and refined and educated. Or maybe it is the food the anti-miserabilists eat? They are not getting the necessary nutrients and gastronomic experiences needed to render them properly miserable like us. Or maybe they listen to too much Fox News or Rush Limbaugh and they just don’t read enough profound and intellectual books like we do? They just need to study more Ludwig Wittgenstein or Søren Kierkegaard or Arthur Schopenhauer! Or Friedrich Nietzsche! Ah, we know! There has got to be a Unified Field Theory of Miserabilism. That explains it. It must be like matter and anti-matter meeting each other, except that instead of everything disappearing in a flash of gamma rays, their Anti-Misery Field causes our Misery Field to become even more amplified, thus making us even more miserable.”

Now here are my comments. Let's start off with some self-plagiarizing from two years ago. I made this in response to the anonymous Orthodox commenter; I provide his/her comment in italics:

There is no reason ever to convert to the Orthodox Christian faith unless one genuinely believes that it is the true faith. From the beginning, the signals from Mr. Dreher were that he did not convert to Orthodoxy because he believed it was the truth, but only because it was not the Catholic religion. It was sad to witness.

Thanks for this, Reader, you speak wisdom. We can't know for sure what is going on in someone's mind, but the evidence supports your balanced analysis.

If there is one thing I am trying to bring to light in my posts about Rod Dreher it is that he is haunted by the Catholic Church day and night. He can't stop writing about his Catholic experiences even when he tries to write about something else. He can't stop criticizing the Catholic church even when he is in the midst of criticizing a different church. He has become the professional ex-Catholic which he claimed to loathe. I see only one happy ending for Rod and that's to come back to the Catholic church quietly and take a seven year hiatus from writing about religion. If he can't bring himself to do the first, the least he could do would be to try the second.

I still stand by these words, and I'm still trying to hope that he does come back. People who consider themselves friends with Rod who are Catholic are certainly hoping that he returns. And they know that he knows that they want him to return to the church.

Here are my last thoughts about the matter. On the day I converted to the Catholic faith as an adult, a priest gave a group of us a talk basically stating that what we were about to do was one of the most serious and consequential things anyone could do. Based on that he said “No one will think or feel any less of you if you get up and leave and decide you don’t want to go through with it.” Something like that. I don’t know if Rod heard the same thing, but it really doesn’t matter—as a potential convert embracing the faith you know it already. I lost a lot of friends by converting, and my family was more religious than Rod’s so there were harder feelings there. Joining the Catholic church isn’t something you do on a whim. However it seems to me that Rod may have left on a whim. I wouldn’t be surprised if the man has tremendous guilt feelings about leaving the Church, and he is constantly “kicking against the goads” so to speak, and blogging endlessly about his departure is his continuing attempt at catharsis.

I don't think it's working. He's been at this for years now. We notice that the man's miserabilism about Catholicism flares up whenever there is Catholic stuff in the news. Flannery O’Connor famously stated that she didn’t know if the American South was Christ-centered, but it definitely was “Christ-haunted”. And along those lines, I believe that this man is haunted by the Catholic Church.

Quick Refresher Course on Crunchy Conservatism

I'm planning to post something soon about the libel flair-up which we've been discussing over here, but I've been too busy to do so, so I'm throwing this out there for now. Not apologizing—see number three here.

I came across this review in New Criterion while googling the phrase "platonic ideal of chickenness". It's seven years old, but I don't remember reading this review when the book Crunchy Conservatives first came out. I might have read it, but either way, I think it's good to read it again and note that Dreher's ideas, his tone and his manner haven't changed very much even though, from what I know, he doesn't use the adjective crunchy that much anymore unless he is referring to his earlier book. WSJ's Joseph Rago, the author, read the book and came to the same conclusions that we did. Here are some excerpts, but the entire thing doesn't take long to read.

The major thinkers, to be sure, may be reinterpreted to meet the conditions of contemporary life. New discoveries must be made. But Dreher’s findings are slight. The novel thing about a “Birkenstocked Burkean,” it seems to me, is not the Burke but the Birkenstocks. Dreher is preoccupied by lifestyle signifiers—the way people dress, the homes they live in, and, particularly, the food they eat. For reasons I can’t comprehend, he has a voracious obsession with the “right” kind of organic food. At one point, he tells a story about a really delicious free-range chicken he ate with his family: “It was … almost the Platonic ideal of chickenness.” Eating is for Dreher a fundamentally political act. “There are many mansions in the American conservative house,” he writes, “and some of them are old and funky and smell like a pot of organic mustard greens cooking down on the stove.” This gives you a taste of his ersatz cracker-barrel folksiness.

Style over substance—check. The phrase which jumped out at me was "Dreher’s findings are slight." This was something we were always noting back in the Contra-Crunchy days. Whenever Dreher said something we agreed with it seemed like others had said it already and usually better and less obnoxiously.

One thing he marginally adds in this is the notion that under our current political alignment, not all conservative ideas belong usufruct to the Republican Party, and indeed the GOP often does things that are not conservative. He further reminds us that not all ideas emanating from the left are bad ones, particularly in regards to the stewardship of the environment. True enough. The traits crunchy cons mainly borrow from the left, however, are sanctimony, condescension, and impermeable self-regard.

Sanctimony, condescension, and impermeable self-regard—check, check, check. Nothing to add to this observation. Crunchy snobbery deserves no more than this bulls-eye waiting room diagnosis.

This is most evident, and most insulting, when Dreher draws distinctions between crunchy cons and regular cons. If you’re not wearing the Birkenstocks, so to speak, you’re not getting Burke. Only those who have been inducted into the mystery cult of crunchy conservatism are leading rich, fulfilling lives. Dreher’s mainstream conservatives are “really” spiritually arid and “really” desire only filthy lucre. “[M]ost people who call themselves conservative today,” he summarizes with by-God certainty, “aren’t really conservative in a deep sense.”

These are severe charges. Regrettably, Dreher is not analytic but impressionistic in his writing. He relies heavily on interviews, which lend to his arraignment an air of sociology, but little evidence or argument. You could say that the crunchy cons believe they’ve cornered the market on virtue—but then, they don’t believe in markets.

Here the money clause is "little evidence or argument". Dreher was incensed at the time because Jonah Goldberg basically denied the existence of crunchy conservatism as a political reality, and challenged him to give evidence of its existence. But proving a theory is beneath the Believer who has unshakeable faith in the object of his Belief. Or maybe what seems like faith is merely disguised delusion based on "impermeable self-regard".

Jackie M on Food Snobbery

Everyone needs to read Schmucks by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder before they die. Luckily I didn't die laughing while reading it, but it is very funny. The duo takes on everyone from Bill Clinton to Larry Silverstein and every group from TV Weathermen to the ACLU.

Here's a short excerpt from his "Dumb Schmucks" section, the chapter entitled "Restaurant Critics. Talk about food and whine":

Food critics changed forever dining out from a pleasant, non-challenging, no-nonsense family gathering to a fancy-schmancy, status-conscious event where you had to have spent a year at Berlitz to understand the menu.

Waiters turned into poets, describing the dishes as "The lamb is boiled in a reduction of Australian beetle juice, and then is basted with a turkey gizzard mélange and lovingly caressed by an open flame for 30 seconds before being bathed in a 1946 crapola red wine which is assertive without being impertinent."

Suddenly, Da Bella Gypolla, out local Italian restaurant, became a "ristorante" and overnight, spaghetti became pasta, cheese transformed into formaggio, and every shmo diner started using the phrase "Al dente, per favore."

Later in the chapter he explains that burnt fish magically becomes "blackened" if it's served in the "dingy, depressing swamp country of southern Louisiana".

It's odd, but nobody eats a burnt bagel. The fad has stayed mainly in the fish area. But, as this concept becomes trendier, we envision the Cajun bagel, burnt to a crisp.

Funny. Well...OK. His food sensibility is probably not amusing to everyone.