BELLS, SMELLS, AND INCELS.

I'm an old fart and in many ways think like one; I am pleased, for example, when Pedro Martinez bitches about pitchers who save their pwecious widdle arms with short starts. Sure, the world and the game have both changed, but I'm an old fart, dammit, and there's not much left for me except the prospect of withering death, Gold Bond Medicated Powder, and the right to complain!

But I tell you, boys and girls: While I at first found the prospect of music and movie stars doing the Vatican drag at the Met Gala a tiny bit embarrassing -- not so much for the Church, though I am ex-Cath, as for the Met (since it's charging the little people more money to get in, I feel it shouldn't be glamming so hard) -- I was talked out of it pretty quick by all the wingnuts screaming sacrilege. Of course no one was more protective of the Mother Church than religion-hopper Rod Dreher, who starts by suggesting that one reason he became Catholic was the stink-eye he got from an old priest when he tried to touch him up for some old vestments for Halloween; the priest's "visibly shocked" refusal was "teaching me something about sacredness," says Dreher -- no doubt that it's a powerful weapon to use against the psychologically crippled.

And now we have rappers wearing mitres! Look, says Dreher, here are some dirty lyrics from a dirty, dirty Rihanna song: "Sticks and stones may break my bones/But chains and whips excite me." Gasp! Normally one only finds such disgusting sentiments on greeting cards, aprons and coffee mugs.

But Ross Douthat manages to top him: The Gala, he muses, is the fault of Vatican II.

It was the church’s own leadership that decided, in the years following the Second Vatican Council, that the attachment to the church as culture had become an impediment to the mission of preaching the gospel in the modern world. It was the leadership that embraced a different approach, in which Catholic Christianity would seek to enter more fully into modern culture, adopting its styles and habits — modernist and even brutalist church architecture, casual dress, guitar music...

And these concrete cathedrals and folk masses took the majesty out of the Magisterium:

The secular culture welcomed the church’s Protestantization and demystification and even secularization, praised the bishops and theologians who pursued it, and then simply pocketed the concessions and ignored the religious ideas those concessions were supposed to advance. Meanwhile, that same secular world maintained a consistent fascination, from “The Exorcist” down to, well, the Met Gala, with all the weirder parts of Catholicism that were supposedly a stumbling block to modernity’s conversion…

See, the plebes still go for that disused liturgy and pomp -- 'member when everybody bought that "Chant" record? And this, Douthat says, shows an opportunity for Churchy wingnuts:

Thus the only plausible approach for Catholicism is to offer itself, not as a chaplaincy within modern liberalism, but as a full alternative culture in its own right — one that reclaims the inheritance on display at the Met, glories in its own weirdness and supernaturalism, and spurns both accommodations and entangling alliances (including the ones that conservative Catholics have forged with libertarian-inflected right-wing political movements).

The future of conservatism: Bells, smells, and incels! I wonder whether Dreher or Douthat or any of the other crabby cons have considered even for a minute that what they're promoting is basically a fetish, and that what they appear to love about the Church has nothing to do with Jesus (the world's first SJW, after all) and everything to do with grandeur and power of a sort promoted by Donald Trump -- he's into all-gold stuff, too.