Man Cave : Man vs. Family

An interesting piece over at Acculturated  caught my eye. Pull quote:

What differentiates the man cave from these more traditional male spaces is that workshops and studies are designed to accommodate a particular, elevating interest. These rooms are only isolated inasmuch as the activities proper to them are best pursued without distraction. With the man cave, however, the isolation from the family—the escape—is the primary purpose of the space. The man cave, therefore, is the image of the traditional male space without its substance.

This is a good reminder for me to put my office-with-a-recliner to better use when I'm there.


P.S. I've enjoyed reading the pieces at Acculturated.  It addresses cultural topics, as Dreher's blog attempts to do, but with good, clear writing and without the author being part of (much less the entire) story.

The Obvious Comparison

I was going for a run the other day in 25 degree weather and I began thinking about two of the most perplexing people alive at this moment. I mused that maybe I should do a Top Ten list of things that Pope Francis and Donald Trump have in common. But the two main things I came up with is that photographers seem to love to capture their facial expressions and they put their feet in their mouth a lot. So I gave up, even though I knew it would be instructive to point out the similarities of two gentlemen who are so good at surprising, perplexing and making headlines.

So along comes this really good article. It's worth reading, and it details some commonalities of these two super-famous men. Here's the most interesting part to me, something I've been wondering about for some time now:

But iconoclasm, though exhilarating for a while, may not deliver the revitalization it promises. For all his global popularity, the pope has failed to improve the reputation of the church he leads. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found “no evidence that Francis’s likability has boosted Catholic identification, worship attendance or prayer.”

This may be because, as the German writer Martin Mosebach has observed, Francis presents himself as a “dynamic, unconventional, courageous pope with a golden heart” in contrast to a church that is a “crusty, dead, faithless, rigid machine.” Why go to church? Better to follow the pope on Twitter.

That makes me sad; I'm afraid it rings 100% true. I don't hate the Pope the way some people on the Catholic right seem to, but I don't really see him as doing anything that great. He needs a lot of damage control, and no one is coming back to the church because of his "new style".

Obviously this is sort of the feeling I have about Trump. My opinion of him has gone down since he decided to stink up the GOP primaries, but I don't hate him.

I guess the biggest similarity to note is between Catholics who support the Pope and Trump's voters. It doesn't matter if they do or say something cringe-worthy, we still support them. In fact, I would suggest that Donald Trump is already a Pope of sorts, judging from his followers' devotion. But who am I to judge?

How could the people be so wrong

as to consistently support Donald Trump for President?

But this is where American politics - not the politics of a Laurus or a Putin, but American politics - separates itself from religion.

With religion, the people are either right or wrong with respect to an absolute revealed Truth. In American politics - as opposed to the politics implicit within the hypothetical Benedict Option - the right of the people to decide for themselves what is right for them is the persisting political Truth, regardless of whether that decision ultimately proves to be for good or ill.

In the wake of the passing of Justice Scalia, this irony becomes poignantly salient, that Justice Scalia's entire legacy was one of preventing him and his fellow justices from intervening in the form of what Andrew McCarthy and others before him have referred to as an elite super-legislature to prevent Americans from freely deciding how they would be governed, no matter how right or wrong others, judicial elites in particular, might view such decisions.

Because of Scalia, we still have the right to choose a Trump, or, hopefully, better, and, because of Scalia we still no longer live in a romantically imagined Middle Age, where we might dream like school girls of life under a kindly and wise paternal czar but, for our dreaming, find ourselves saddled by a Stalin instead.

The Benedict Option has taken the Benedict Option

A timely comment has serendipitously prompted me to answer a question, actually two questions, that have been gnawing at me of late.

First, why has Rod Dreher strategically withdrawn once again into the sacralized universe of bloggy outrage porn, entreating his readers to imagine and think about titillations running the gamut from underage teen sexting to collegiate SJW silliness to Trump mania?

Second, and, oh, yeah - whatever happened to the Benedict Option?

As it happens, the first question is the answer to the second: Rod is pimping outrage porn once again as fast as his chubby little fingers can type precisely because the Benedict Option has gone and taken the Benedict Option on him.

Perhaps the Benedict Option is just resting.

To understand this, we have to understand what the announcement of the non-pursuit of a late Benedict Option by anyone would actually look like in practice.

First of all, it wouldn't look at all like what I just described just now any more than that girl's rejection of you would be overtly spelled out to you to your face as her rejecting you.

Instead, some entirely rational explanation for why you and she somehow just never, ever manage to get together is offered. Perhaps a dear relative just died. Perhaps she must wash her hair. Perhaps something terrible happened at the salon she simply must try to remedy. Perhaps a monthly visitor is in town and, surely you understand, don't you? Of course you do.

In the same way, the Late Benedict Option is only resting.

Rod is not blogging about it other than to tag it inexplicably into other posts, because of course publishers don't want to see him give away the goody for free. Which publishers? Why all those publishers giving one another sharp elbows in a frenzied bidding war, wanting to make pots full of money from a Benedict Option book if there were a Benedict Option to write a book about in the first place, of course.

In the meantime, ADHD-symptomatic Rod Dreher, in addition to busily compounding paying posts out of the unpaid comments of his TAC readership and haphazardly stitching together great swatches of the thinking and writing of others; arranging the most scrumptious, artful pictures of his trademark glasses perched upon piles of Great Books like a photographer for Bon Appétit; and scouring the Web for the next big thing to tumescently tick you off, is also furiously burning the candle at the other end over parchment writing the Great Benedict Option book.

For you.

You just can't see it, and of course you wouldn't expect to.

You believe that for the same reason you still believe her, because the alternatives - realizing that she really, really doesn't like you, realizing that once again you've been played as the congenital chump you are (remember Benny?) - is just too horrible to contemplate.

So surely, somewhere, out of your sight and impossible for you to detect, Rod Dreher is furiously writing that Benedict Option book for you. For you. And if you call up little Trixie just one more time, that will be the one. She'll deliver. So never give up. Never, ever say never, tiger.

Sure, there a a few bloggers here and there trying to leach a last bit of PageRank and link love (::cough::) by writing about alternatives to the Benedict Option - that is, alternatives other than its non-existence. But that's about it .

Could the truth really be that there is no Benedict Option, no Benedict Option book, present or future, no Benedict Option publisher, and never will be any such things, any more than there really is a living, squawking Norwegian Blue parrot?

But that's the thing, isn't it. Like the regular anonymous comment or email Rod Dreher receives which invariably adds thoughtful, additional dimension to whatever he recently wrote (I think of these helpful, invariably anonymous packets now as "Indates" rather than Updates), the Benedict Option, like the vibrant Norwegian Blue parrot it seemingly yearns to be, never really needed to exist.

Monty Python has etched its place into modern comedy on the basis of a parrot that never was alive and never would be, and Rod Dreher to a fraction of the same degree has done the same.

Well, not into modern comedy. Or not intentionally.

"God made men and women ... "

"... and that night, guns made them equal."

The Eagles of Death Metal front man speaks out, emotionally, on gun control.

H/T Louder with Crowder.

Matt Dolan for State Senate

We have three Republicans vying for the nomination for the Ohio State Senate seat where I live, but I think I'll either vote for Matt Dolan or Mike Dovilla. They're both leaders. Here's Dolan's 30-second spot.

How many view the Trump campaign

As this.

(Conceivably NSFW, depending. Hat tip: R.D. Brewer @ AOSHQ))

Latest Video from Center for Medical Progress

Heroes. They are undaunted.



Gotta run.