Pimping out a child

Now what in the world kind of American Conservatism do we have here?

Could it be a release from the Tea Party looking for some kinder and gentler press from all sides?

Maybe it's an early draft of The Road to Serfdom scrawled by a toddling Friedrich Hayek after observing a servant doing what they do best.

Nah, as it turns out, this is what your tax-deductible dollars buy at The American Ideas Institute's The American Conservative blog by Rod Dreher: otherwise mommy blog-typical content filched from his unsuspecting 7-year-old daughter Nora, a frequent contributor of such child labor, and pimped out as his own cheap and easy post-filler. Not only your tax-deductible dollars, by the way, mine as well, because who do you think has to pay more now to cover your tax deductibility?

And yet not only does a child's stolen refrigerator art (it's highly unlikely Nora received a proportionate cut of Dreher's pay for this effort as an allowance bonus this month) qualify as a legitimate government tax expenditure these days, it apparently also qualifies as some sort of example of conservative "culture" - in some Downton Abbey conservative-cultury sort of way.

Yep, that's what conservatism has now been reduced and degraded to in some quarters: the government-subsidized pimping out of someone's 7-year-old daughter's labor in order to earn their own daily bread.

Hey-ey, I, oh, oh I'm still alive...

I'm still alive, just on a new project and up to my neck. Props to Keith and all y'all for keeping stuff going on EQE.

Thought this was an insightful comment from an admitted liberal anonymous commenter (LibAnon) regarding why Rod Dreher rubs him/her the wrong way. The comment continues in the following section here. I'll remark on several excerpts, then I have to bolt.

....I was bullied pretty mercilessly for a while as a kid - in a Catholic school. But I've largely moved on with life. Sure, I despise bullies and authoritarians in general, but I tend to function decently well.

Rod doesn't. Rod's a perpetually aggrieved teenager in a pushing-50-something's body. Rod keeps an enemies' list far longer than Nixon's and nurses his grudges like precious children. The world has failed Rod, and Rod is going to make the world pay. It's all about Rod.

Most people who are bullied do move on with life. That's why I wonder if the new emphasis on bullying isn't caused somewhat by a fixation on it. It might be even more important to get over bullying episodes in the long run than "standing up" to the bully. I always imagine the kids who bullied me in school as working as lackeys in quick oil change garages and as farmhands in the middle of Bum-fudge-egypt. And I'm sure I'm right.

Think about the trajectory of his life since he's been online (which, thanks to his ridiculous personal oversharing, one can get a good sense of). He went to Dallas to do editorial work, but the newspaper industry started to go belly-up. This is the age of his Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet. Irritating to some, I found it fascinating. Sure, he was a little touchy, but seemed somewhat well-adjusted.

Then he goes to Philadelphia to edit the Templeton Foundation's new online magazine. He immediately runs into trouble because, shockingly, the Templeton people don't seem to appreciate a stream of posts about loose women rather than, you know, WHAT THEY WERE ALL ABOUT. Also, the OCA Orthodox churches (Religion Number 3, for those keeping score) don't fit Rod's standards. So, he passive-aggressively manages to get himself fired from his supposed dream job editing a magazine about the mysteries of the universe because he can't stop being snarky online (this time over some church dispute).

I think the man's peak was the Templeton Foundation gig. The guy had arrived and he didn't realize it. His pessimism got the better of him and all he could see were the things which were wrong with it.

You notice less and less about Rod's blissful family life (which he wrote a lot about in Dallas, which makes its absence all the more noticeable). The good Mrs. Dreher barely appears at all anymore.

Everyone keeps failing Rod. His idol, Wendell Berry, fails him earlier this year, and he turns upon him with a fury that makes me think Rod was looking for an excuse to unburden himself of that old man (who is far more influential than Rod will ever be). He goes the Mel Gibson route and founds the Church of Rod (affiliated with ROCOR, but pretty much Rod's personal kingdom) because the Orthodox churches in Baton Rouge aren't pure enough for him - Religion Number 4. His triumphant return to the town of his birth does not seem to be regarded so triumphantly by those he left behind - they're not lining up to kiss his posterior the way he imagines they should. He gets testier and testier, to the point that commenters on his own blog start posting their concern for Rod's emotional state.

I pointed out at the time that Wendell Berry's attack on Christian morality should not have surprised anyone. But I think Liberal Anonymous is correct to point out that Dreher's response to Berry's betrayal has has a "you-have-failed-me" tinge to it.

As we always like to say, read the whole thing. I don't necessarily agree with the characterization 100%; I think everyone tends to feel more like they've been failed by public figures than admitting their folly in trusting them to be their spokespeople. That's why our friend, Tom, is always quoting the Bible with "Put not your trust in Princes." Plus pointing fingers gets easier the more you do it. But it does seem like Dreher may be "failed" more often than most due to the remarkably bad judgment with regard to those with whom he throws in his lot, e.g., Abp. Gandalf, Met. Jonah, Wendell Berry and Wick Allison and his crazy crew at The American Conservative, which LibAnon rightly terms a "sinking ship".

One more insightful observation I will point out that LibAnon makes is the blogging less and less about "blissful family life". It does seem like this feature has fallen off as of late. But this is not necessarily due to a decline in bliss. Maybe the man is just wising up about the dangers of oversharing.

Putin is his proxy

In my previous post I raised the central question of why a yappy little dog like Rod Dreher would bark in the night in defense of an international (and intranational) geopolitical thug like Vladimir Putin. Even if he disagrees that Putin is the all-purpose thug anyone older than 13 can clearly see he is, why say anything at all? Why speak out in 5 back to back posts, much less in his defense at all?

Because Dreher and his fellow Putinistas badly need Putin's services. Putin is their cutout. Putin is the Christian Dreher would be if only he had a really big brother like Putin to make that a safe and profitable option for him.

Putin is Dreher's proxy.

If you're effectively no more than the pseudo-religious-conservative version of Barbara Walters that Dreher is, running a pop-cultural blog on whatever is topical, with regular food segments for Pete's sake, a pseudo-religious-conservative version of The View, you need a cutout to say and do the tough, incontrovertible things for you so that you don't get your own hands unequivocally "dirty" and so as a consequence that you don't lose the vast chunks of readership you'd lose if those sentiments were directly attributable to you.

So instead of bashing Catholics or Protestants any more directly than you already do, you instead praise the authoritarian leader of a country where Catholicism and Protestantism can never hope to gain any real foothold and where the state-supported national religion just happens to be the one you most recently converted to. If you spoke and acted too directly yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might lose readership and influential people might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of gays at all beyond your vague, mumbling, abstract references to religious liberty, Putin becomes your alter-ego. If you dared to speak and act so directly against gays yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you would almost certainly lose your large, devoted gay crunchy-foodie readership and influential people like Andrew Sullivan might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of America being a superpower in the world and doing the things on the world stage that America must do to maintain that status and not relinquish it to another, you let Putin do the speaking and talking instead and then, when the context seems safe, speak out loudly in defense of him. If you spoke and acted directly yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might lose patriotic readership and influential people might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of an all-girl punk band scandalously named Pussy Riot, you feature their name copiously in your posts whenever the NPR and the MSM crowd do (because who isn't drawn to the tag "pussy"?), but you let your proxy Putin give them prison camp terms without raising any protest yourself, then long after the fact murmur that, well, that's not what you would have done. If you had spoken and acted directly without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might have lost readership and influential people might have stopped linking to you.

In short, if your self-image is one of a stern, muscular Christian more sternly and muscularly Christian than any Christian could ever possibly have been in the history of stern and muscular Christianity, but if that self-image really lives large only in your nightly, Ambien-fueled fever dreams and in real life you find that prudence and profit dictate that your personal profile must inevitably be as quirky and harmless as that of a Zooey Deschanel...dude, do you ever need a proxy.

So Putin becomes your alter-ego and proxy. Putin is that tough guy you'd be - really, you would - if only groveling and simpering for a buck wasn't ultimately your highest value.

Hey, are you media guys being mean to Vladimir Putin?

The American Conservative seems to think so, and its Senior Editor Rod Dreher is hard on the case, gathering leads in a post cleverly entitled "Putinfreude". Because, dude, if you can coin a meme that ends up going viral, David and Ross will link to you, donchaknow, and you know what happens then, don't you? That's right, bro: big advance.

And...well, aw, shucks, that's not going to fly. Nyet, nyet, nyety-nyet-nyet.

Commenter Paige Belle points out

Putinfreude would mean “joy taken in Putin.” I’m sorry, but the joke does not work.

Nuh-uh, Rod retorts, in his most TACcy Senior Editor retortiness

[NFR: You're being too literal. You know perfectly well it's a play off of the sounds in the word "Schadenfreude." -- RD]

I know how he feels. I'm often gobsmacked myself when I take professional writer Rod Dreher at his literal word.

But, actually, "Putinfreude" ends up serving DreherTAC's purposes twice over, by soliciting the taking of names of those being meanies to the international thug Putin in the service of the inexplicable joy they seem to take in him, as The Washington Free Beacon recently noted (originally linked, I think, by Pik, but I couldn't find the comment; sorry.)

The magazine has recently taken to supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin

In an essay for the January 2014 issue headlined “Russia’s right turn: Moscow has reclaimed its 19th-century conservative role,” William Lind argued, “American conservatives should welcome the resurgence of a conservative Russia” under President Putin, who has passed laws against gay “propaganda.”

The American Conservative also published a pro-Putin column in December by Buchanan, who founded the magazine in 2002.

“While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm,” Buchanan wrote.

Calls to the American Conservative’s customer service line were unanswered, and editor Daniel McCarthy did not immediately return a request for comment.

So what is it that has DreherTAC forever wishing they knew how to quit Putin but failing?

His strong, Godfather-ly hand in world affairs? Like Syria.

His status as the political head of the church to which at least two of TAC's senior editors belong?

Or just those never-ending beefcake poses?

Last Exit to St. Francisville

...something about possession by demons raising the Klienpeter cows' cortisol levels, resulting in too much butterfat so the sour cream was spoiled when he opened it, and then little store laughed to see such sport and then if that wasn't enough, on top of all that the cow ran away with the spoon. Yeah, I know, but what're ya gonna do? At least there's no Ace involved. Right? I'm right, right? No one's seen any marks. No one's said so. Ergot in the sour cream? I dunno. Whatever. Okay, call you tomorrow.)

Sorry, where was I? Look, I've got to get some overdue things wrapped up, so I'll just shut up and let Abe narrate this one.

These things matter. To the demon-possessed cows, maybe.

Rod Dreher explains the right way to believe in God...sort of

I found this teaching by the One both strangely ambitious and remarkably empty at the same time.

In a post entitled Postmodernism & Secular Fundamentalism, an atheist commenter said

My creator endowed me with a brain that does not allow me to believe in, say, the story of Shadrach.

And I also agree with Flannery O’Conner’s observation to Mary McCarthy concerning the taking of Communion: “If it’s a metaphor, then to hell with.”

Unlike many of the new atheists, I see that there is much that is good and beautiful about organized religion.

And like many Freethinkers, I realize that many people like Rod Dreher would be miserable without a personal deity.

Their belief neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

That seemed pretty tame to me for an atheist. But not to Dreher. He snarled,

[NFR: Like many so-called "freethinkers," you mistake your own worldview for a neutral one. How do you know I would be "miserable" if God did not exist? That's a self-serving perspective that seeks to explain away religious belief as a compensatory emotional or psychological phenomenon. Could I not say that people like you cannot accept the possibility that God exists because if He does, then you aren't free to do whatever you like? Yes, I could. And it may be true, because it was true for me when I was a young man. But it also might not be true, in your case. Point is, you don't know why I believe in God. -- RD]

In order not to disrupt the narrative flow, I'll let others examine any non sequiturs involved in Rod's reply. Ultimately, they don't really seem all that important, because the actual whammy conclusion ends up being no more than that "You don't know me, man, so you can't say anything about me!", which is always a good all-purpose remedy to anything anyone says. I wouldn't use it if a cop stops you for speeding, though, but otherwise. To continue.

Suitably chastened, the atheist later whined, 

I’m sorry Rod,

I thought you said that you WERE miserable during a period of your life when you were experiencing doubts about the existence of God.

Rod lets him kiss the Harry Potter frames in penance and explains

[NFR: I was miserable, but I didn't start believing in God as a way to get rid of misery (though it helped). Believing in God because you might get something out of it doesn't work. And in fact, some of the most miserable people I know are Christians ... but then, if they were atheists or Hindus, they would be miserable, I'm convinced. -- RD]

Doesn't work? I'd count getting saved as getting something out of it, but okay. Strangely, having pulled this "self-serving perspective" out of the bunny, Dreher never does say what does work. So we'll just have to guess.

So what else doesn't work? And what does?

Believing in God because Chartres Cathedral seems to have been on the approved list, although believing in God because of some smoking hot chick God made Himself probably doesn't, so if you don't believe already, you need to be saving for that ticket to France, not to Cancun. I think it's safe to say oysters are in, the vast wonder of the great outdoors itself, probably not so much.

While you're making your lists and checking them against the Book of Rod, I have to tell you I get the sense there's some kind of fix in on this, like one of those job descriptions that only happens to fit the CEO's nephew. It might or might not involve things like chairs and benches, or long natural beards, or even Dante. But whatever it is, I'll bet a six-pack that Dreher's got the qualifications and I don't. Dang.

What's up with Mark Steyn and National Review?

His last post there was Christmas Eve, and his prior post just two days earlier is salted with enough allusions to editorial disagreement to bring John Derbyshire's fate to mind.

Is Steyn just preoccupied playing hockey stick with Michael Mann, or is something else going on?

Moses knows his business

Amen, indeed.