I suspect "disillusionment most poignant" will never come to Dreher. He's devoted to self-delusion. (Or at least pretends to be, for money and clout; for if Dreher could no longer play the high-minded Jesus scold, what would become of his audience?)
If Dreher were just an ordinary bore (or even an extraordinary bore) who would put up with him? As you say, the right-wing politics are essential to gaining an audience, because the clear lesson of the past 6 years is that, with the added spice of right-wing politics, some people will put up with ANYTHING.
The Times had an op-ed the other day that said, among other things, that what the Right understands is that attention is everything, and it's essential to be the center of attention, even at the cost of appearing ridiculous. Naturally, this makes me think of Dreher. That seems to be the transaction here, attention in return for willingly becoming an object of ridicule. It's not so different from the contract we struck with Snooki or The Situation when the Jersey Shore was on, Dreher's show is just more long-running than theirs.
I wish Dreher would go to Hungary where he could find his real calling as a fascist apparatchik/sycophant and never bother us here in the good old USA ever again, not that this will actually happen.
Congratulations, Roy, this was almost as annoying to read as Dreher’s own prose, and that’s saying something.
The family in which Dreher was raised (parents and sister) were likely assholes in their own way (that family produced Dreher himself, after all), but it's remarkable that BOTH of Dreher’s families eventually told him to fuck off. He is not simply divorcing, which is fairly commonplace, he is abandoning his two younger children to move to Hungary and he has publicly confirmed he is estranged from them.
Being cast out BOTH by your family of origin as well as by your wife *and your own children* does not happen to ONE individual simply because of chance or bad luck. But it *does* happen to someone who is a navel-gazing, insufferable dick to his nearest and dearest. No surprises there.
I suspect the problem with Rod's navel gazing is that he's gazing at everyone else's navels and telling them just how sinful/wrong/disgusting they are. Because he surely ain't gazing at his own navel and wondering "Gee! How come nobody likes me, even and especially my own blood relatives?"
It's true I've never seen anybody take as much judgmental interest in other people's pee-pees and wee-wees as Dreher. I think it was Jamelle Bouie who commented, "that guy's internet search history has to be filled with the filthiest things you can imagine."
He's like Paul Gosar, all of Gosar's 9 siblings (I estimate) recorded a TV ad saying, "Whatever you do, don't vote for our brother." Gosar won re-election, of course. Because there's a kind of voter who thinks, "If everyone around him hates him, that's the lib-triggerer I'm lookin' for!"
Their proclamation that they love a humble family man will lose out, every time, to their sense of themselves as the only correct person in a room of forty people begging them "Please for the love of God stop being an asshole."
"You saying I'm wrong, and supplying a mountain of factual evidence against me, only proves I've hit a nerve! Obviously I am on to something. Too bad you are not big enough to admit it."
Not back-handed, a genuine appreciation of your skill at parody, maestro. If reading it didn't make someone instinctively make the jerk-off hand gesture, it wouldn't have hit the mark of emulating Dreher's style.
Indeed, RD really missed his calling not being born as a medievalist of the 1950s or 60. For a sample that doesn't require access to a paywall, just read Ignatius Reilly's dialogue* -- both John Kennedy Toole & Ignatius were very much that type. That awful, florid, non-notable, bristlingly mincy style makes me glad John Williams never directly quotes any of Stoner's academic papers (who was also a medievalist). Also, if u want to be disappointed, read John Gardner's academic work, which is so boring you'd never think he could have been a halfway-decent novelist.
* I reckon though, speaking as a lit crit inclined to the genomic analysis of style, Toole is very much part of our host's satirical armory.
Oh. My. God. That something with as little self-awareness as Dreher can move and function and even communicate, after a fashion, is just amazing. I don’t have time right now to savor that whole essay you linked to but as soon as I can, I will. Thanks and as usual, great job!
There was a medieval exemplar about the contemplative, which goes roughly in modern English, "The philosopher who gazed so intently upon the heavens that they did not see the clay-pit they fell into..."
I admire your initiative here, but of course I must offer a friendly nuancing of your premise...
Rod Dreher in his head: Parzival (by Wolfram von Eschenbach) -- the pure fool knight Parzival stumbles into delivering the Fisher King & inherits the Graal kingdom, becoming a kind of Christ along the way. World without end.
RD to everyone else: Chaucer's the Miller's Tale, where dumb-ass fop canon's assistant Absolon tries to kiss his beloved Allison through a window in the dark of night. First time, he kisses Allison on her pussy. "A berd! A berd," he rushes off squealing, enraged & disgusted. Comes back with a burning hot colter & scalds her lover Nicholas on his taint, when Nicholas tries to repeat the joke with his own backside.
You’re being too kind to Dreher. Dunno that he’s any sort of philosopher as much as a WFB Jr fanboi/wannabe with an audience that believes that if they’re exposed to big words they’re not cretins and/or ignoramuses, which is to say they believe themselves smarter than they are which is of course actually limited by an addiction to denialism and being delusional.
I think we all worry about you crawling too far inside your subjects head for these pieces. Be careful out there!
I think Rod came home from his most recent trip and blamed, like always, his lack of performance during the expected
lusty return to the conjugal bed. on jet lag. His wife, as had become her custom on these occasions , patted his expansive forehead, whispered " There, there" and fell into deep deep sleep.
Later in her sleep when she cried out " "Mi Toro! " and " Popa Grande!"
Rod thought about how earlier, when he mentioned how nice the flowerbeds looked and how neatly the grass was cut
his wife said that the new gardener was doing an excellent job. Thorough and attentive.
Rod and his wife broke up because he was cheating on her. The third party, Rod's co-respondent, was The Sound of His Own Voice, which Rod loves more than any other thing in this world.
I tried to read the Dreher post but gave up. How many thousands of words does it take to say, “You can’t go home again, if you’re an insufferable asshole?”
That was funny but Roy sacrificed his usual clear, readable and erudite prose style to ape Dreher? I appreciate that he was giving his readers a taste of Fr. CrunchyCon’s turgid style, but I hope the effort didn’t damage Roy’s brain and or excellent original writing chops. My god, reading Dreher’s actual writing must be a real slog, because reading Roy’s parody was bad enough in that regard. No way am I gonna actually read the DimRod’s verbal vomit.
"reading Roy’s parody was bad enough in that regard."
Consider this, that Roy's commitment to the bit surely means that the approximately 800+1200+2000=4000 words he asserts himself to have elided were, in fact, words he had actually written, before sparing us (but not himself!). Christlike, Roy is.
"come to think of it, the sullen silences, slammed doors, and broken crockery I had previous attributed to demonic intervention may also have been warnings (though I certainly wouldn’t rule the Devil out)"
I think it's cute when folx think they are soooooo important that the devil herself would find their lives worthy of messing with.
Gotta be, but at some point, this piece stopped making sense. Maybe it's a reflection on the source material...?
Just checked and holy shit! Speaking of which:
"Budapest — how lovely it sounds when you pronounce the “s” like “sh”!"
Highly amused by that juvenile joke but then that stuff's my jam.
That said, y'all know my theory about Rod's coming divorce: Sex is at most incidental; I'm convinced the wife just had her fill of him and his bullshit.
And speaking of Mayberry: Unlike last year's road trip, this one offer no pleasant surprises other than, I suppose, the Blue Ridge Parkway with its sense of being in no time and, in places, no specific place either; just loose in time and space. But we stopped overnight in Mt. Airy and it was kind of depressing, partly in a failed tourist town sort of way. I mean, like when one saw a tip jar labeled "college fund" one had to wonder whether it was a con.
I confess I read the Dreher piece all the way through. It was exhausting and repetitive, but I couldn’t look away, as it was hypnotically repellent. Made me grateful not having to live inside his head full time.
Nothing to do with Dreher, but in the way that a certain word or phrase can trigger associations in the aging brain, I once owned (and may still own, somewhere) a shoebox of audio cassettes of The Barney Years (the only TRUE incarnation of The Andy Griffith Show). Audio cassettes because that newfangled VHS thing wasn't yet available at my parent's price point. The show works surprisingly well as a radio drama. One thing I always liked was the scoring, which was Hollywood-traditional in that each major character had a theme, and then variations on that theme depending on the character's mood. It's hard today to imagine a simple half-hour sitcom getting the services of a full studio orchestra, but that's how they did it back then.
Today, of course, the show's too cringey to watch (or listen to, if I could find that damn shoebox). At the height of the civil-rights movement, a show with a Southern Sherriff as the hero? In a town where no black faces are seen? C'mon, Andy, what did you and Barney do with all the black folks? (don't answer, I can imagine). And this his how THE WOKENESS destroys the joys of youth.
Gascap, Alabama needs to join Oatmeal, Nebraska, Dead Man's Fang, Arizona and Coyoteville, New Mexico in the pantheon of greatest town names that never were.
This whole piece is sublime. I also love "philia and storge and agape ... [as you find in] the lively Arts."
And for the record, the phrase (linked above) "My Gethsemane -- except worse!" has become one of my brain's reflexive exclamations whenever I'm having a bad day.
Yeah, I was remiss in not awarding Roy 2 Distinguished Marks for "philia and storge and agape ... [as you find in] the lively Arts." And very few people alive today know that Philia, Storge and Agape brought the house down when they played the Palace in '23.
I suspect "disillusionment most poignant" will never come to Dreher. He's devoted to self-delusion. (Or at least pretends to be, for money and clout; for if Dreher could no longer play the high-minded Jesus scold, what would become of his audience?)
If Dreher were just an ordinary bore (or even an extraordinary bore) who would put up with him? As you say, the right-wing politics are essential to gaining an audience, because the clear lesson of the past 6 years is that, with the added spice of right-wing politics, some people will put up with ANYTHING.
"who would put up with him?" Obviously, his fellow members of the League of Extraordinary Bores.
The Times had an op-ed the other day that said, among other things, that what the Right understands is that attention is everything, and it's essential to be the center of attention, even at the cost of appearing ridiculous. Naturally, this makes me think of Dreher. That seems to be the transaction here, attention in return for willingly becoming an object of ridicule. It's not so different from the contract we struck with Snooki or The Situation when the Jersey Shore was on, Dreher's show is just more long-running than theirs.
"Can you get a hairshirt through airport security? No? Guess I will have to leave that behind. Truly the trials of Job will pale by comparison."
-Dreher, probably
And that's not to mention the fee for baggage checking the enormous wooden cross.
Nah. It's carry on.
You're only allowed 250 mg of potsherds in a clear plastic Ziploc bag...
I wish Dreher would go to Hungary where he could find his real calling as a fascist apparatchik/sycophant and never bother us here in the good old USA ever again, not that this will actually happen.
It is! Click the first link. He’s moving to Budapest!
C’mon Rod, don’t stop there. Just a littttttle further East. You’re almost in HIMARS range!
Sadly, we've now got this thing called the internet, which enables Rod to be as much of a Buda-pest from Hungary as from anywhere else.
at least until he says something Orban doesn't like.
"Oh, you'll be surprised at what you can get used to" says Orban, removing his belt.
Congratulations, Roy, this was almost as annoying to read as Dreher’s own prose, and that’s saying something.
The family in which Dreher was raised (parents and sister) were likely assholes in their own way (that family produced Dreher himself, after all), but it's remarkable that BOTH of Dreher’s families eventually told him to fuck off. He is not simply divorcing, which is fairly commonplace, he is abandoning his two younger children to move to Hungary and he has publicly confirmed he is estranged from them.
Being cast out BOTH by your family of origin as well as by your wife *and your own children* does not happen to ONE individual simply because of chance or bad luck. But it *does* happen to someone who is a navel-gazing, insufferable dick to his nearest and dearest. No surprises there.
I suspect the problem with Rod's navel gazing is that he's gazing at everyone else's navels and telling them just how sinful/wrong/disgusting they are. Because he surely ain't gazing at his own navel and wondering "Gee! How come nobody likes me, even and especially my own blood relatives?"
It's true I've never seen anybody take as much judgmental interest in other people's pee-pees and wee-wees as Dreher. I think it was Jamelle Bouie who commented, "that guy's internet search history has to be filled with the filthiest things you can imagine."
Speaking of which, did anyone else have the nerve to click on the "sacramental meats" link? Because I sure didn't.
That was an alicublog story -- you should be OK!
Not a typo for "sacramental meatus"?
Gold star for "he's gazing at everyone else's navels." I'd love to steal it, but when? When?
Do you have any upcoming stories about oranges? Are you going to play "Once Upon a Time" soon?
The man who castigates the dust bunny in his neighbor's navel,
but notices not the entire fucking cheeto sticking out of his own.
— St.Paul of Tarsus (probably)
Obviously not an outy
He's like Paul Gosar, all of Gosar's 9 siblings (I estimate) recorded a TV ad saying, "Whatever you do, don't vote for our brother." Gosar won re-election, of course. Because there's a kind of voter who thinks, "If everyone around him hates him, that's the lib-triggerer I'm lookin' for!"
Their proclamation that they love a humble family man will lose out, every time, to their sense of themselves as the only correct person in a room of forty people begging them "Please for the love of God stop being an asshole."
For conservatives, being called an asshole is just proof you're correct.
"You saying I'm wrong, and supplying a mountain of factual evidence against me, only proves I've hit a nerve! Obviously I am on to something. Too bad you are not big enough to admit it."
39 people in that room are not the center of attention and only one is, and that's all that matters to Mr. Conservative.
"this was almost as annoying to read as Dreher’s own prose" uh, thanks?
Not back-handed, a genuine appreciation of your skill at parody, maestro. If reading it didn't make someone instinctively make the jerk-off hand gesture, it wouldn't have hit the mark of emulating Dreher's style.
Indeed, RD really missed his calling not being born as a medievalist of the 1950s or 60. For a sample that doesn't require access to a paywall, just read Ignatius Reilly's dialogue* -- both John Kennedy Toole & Ignatius were very much that type. That awful, florid, non-notable, bristlingly mincy style makes me glad John Williams never directly quotes any of Stoner's academic papers (who was also a medievalist). Also, if u want to be disappointed, read John Gardner's academic work, which is so boring you'd never think he could have been a halfway-decent novelist.
* I reckon though, speaking as a lit crit inclined to the genomic analysis of style, Toole is very much part of our host's satirical armory.
Verisimilitude!
My take is "just like Rod, only stiffer".
I am a Godly man, you know.
I tread the path where few would go.
This makes me so much holier than thou,
Don't bother to ask! I'm-a tell you how
I know for sure, so it would seem,
That in my eye there is no beam.
Thus it is okay that I note
That in YOUR eye there is a mote.
I tell freedom is just restraint,
And Hell is not a notion quaint.
I get to treat you with contempt and scorn
Because Scripture promises revenge porn
When Revelations comes to pass
And all whom I hate take it up the ass!
OK, OK. 2 marks.
Especially for:
"This makes me so much holier than thou,
Don't bother to ask! I'm-a tell you how"
and, within that, especially especially:
"I'm-a tell you how"
My chuckles bust buckles.
It scans!
Oh. My. God. That something with as little self-awareness as Dreher can move and function and even communicate, after a fashion, is just amazing. I don’t have time right now to savor that whole essay you linked to but as soon as I can, I will. Thanks and as usual, great job!
Stop now while there's time to turn back!
I'll second that: Just looking at the little progress bar was enough to dissuade me from actually, you know, reading it. Sorry the Maestro did.
Roy's like Perseus, he allows us to look at Medusa as a reflection, so we don't all turn to stone.
How's that for a high-toned reference? (I'll admit I had to Google "Who killed Medusa?", I thought it was Achilles, but no.)
Duh, Medusa killed Medusa, of course.
[looks back]
[turns into artisanal pillar of pink Himalayan salt]
[Runs back home, grabs hammer and empty salt shaker]
"Thanks for the tip!"
Not sure, as you describe him, he's special in any way.
There was a medieval exemplar about the contemplative, which goes roughly in modern English, "The philosopher who gazed so intently upon the heavens that they did not see the clay-pit they fell into..."
How Brother Rob sees himself: La Chanson de Roland
How everyone else sees Br’er Rob: The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
I admire your initiative here, but of course I must offer a friendly nuancing of your premise...
Rod Dreher in his head: Parzival (by Wolfram von Eschenbach) -- the pure fool knight Parzival stumbles into delivering the Fisher King & inherits the Graal kingdom, becoming a kind of Christ along the way. World without end.
RD to everyone else: Chaucer's the Miller's Tale, where dumb-ass fop canon's assistant Absolon tries to kiss his beloved Allison through a window in the dark of night. First time, he kisses Allison on her pussy. "A berd! A berd," he rushes off squealing, enraged & disgusted. Comes back with a burning hot colter & scalds her lover Nicholas on his taint, when Nicholas tries to repeat the joke with his own backside.
See? I don't always have to be "Grouchy"...
I accept your friendly amendment. All in favor, say Aye. [Aye!]
Thanks, I'm now convinced that all of medieval culture is just NSFW Three Stooges.
Mmmm, Wyse Ghuye!
‘Zounds, hende oon!
(Apologies to GM)
Oo, oo – now do Rabelais!
Bingo
You’re being too kind to Dreher. Dunno that he’s any sort of philosopher as much as a WFB Jr fanboi/wannabe with an audience that believes that if they’re exposed to big words they’re not cretins and/or ignoramuses, which is to say they believe themselves smarter than they are which is of course actually limited by an addiction to denialism and being delusional.
So, you know, pretty much bullshit artiste.
I think we all worry about you crawling too far inside your subjects head for these pieces. Be careful out there!
I think Rod came home from his most recent trip and blamed, like always, his lack of performance during the expected
lusty return to the conjugal bed. on jet lag. His wife, as had become her custom on these occasions , patted his expansive forehead, whispered " There, there" and fell into deep deep sleep.
Later in her sleep when she cried out " "Mi Toro! " and " Popa Grande!"
Rod thought about how earlier, when he mentioned how nice the flowerbeds looked and how neatly the grass was cut
his wife said that the new gardener was doing an excellent job. Thorough and attentive.
A good man. And thorough.
A good gardener knows when the field needs plowin'.
Rod and his wife broke up because he was cheating on her. The third party, Rod's co-respondent, was The Sound of His Own Voice, which Rod loves more than any other thing in this world.
I tried to read the Dreher post but gave up. How many thousands of words does it take to say, “You can’t go home again, if you’re an insufferable asshole?”
Yeah. Normally I'd blame the parents, but this time the blame's on Rod.
Look Homeward, Dipstick.
That was funny but Roy sacrificed his usual clear, readable and erudite prose style to ape Dreher? I appreciate that he was giving his readers a taste of Fr. CrunchyCon’s turgid style, but I hope the effort didn’t damage Roy’s brain and or excellent original writing chops. My god, reading Dreher’s actual writing must be a real slog, because reading Roy’s parody was bad enough in that regard. No way am I gonna actually read the DimRod’s verbal vomit.
"reading Roy’s parody was bad enough in that regard."
Consider this, that Roy's commitment to the bit surely means that the approximately 800+1200+2000=4000 words he asserts himself to have elided were, in fact, words he had actually written, before sparing us (but not himself!). Christlike, Roy is.
Truly a gift, Roy really cares!
"come to think of it, the sullen silences, slammed doors, and broken crockery I had previous attributed to demonic intervention may also have been warnings (though I certainly wouldn’t rule the Devil out)"
I think it's cute when folx think they are soooooo important that the devil herself would find their lives worthy of messing with.
Hey, if God can help you win a high school football game, then why can't Satan break a little crockery?
Beelzebub breaks all the crockery
Then stuffs Rob into his lockery
When Dreher dishes
Everyone wishes
Time'd stop, by breaking the clockery
Gotta be, but at some point, this piece stopped making sense. Maybe it's a reflection on the source material...?
Just checked and holy shit! Speaking of which:
"Budapest — how lovely it sounds when you pronounce the “s” like “sh”!"
Highly amused by that juvenile joke but then that stuff's my jam.
That said, y'all know my theory about Rod's coming divorce: Sex is at most incidental; I'm convinced the wife just had her fill of him and his bullshit.
And speaking of Mayberry: Unlike last year's road trip, this one offer no pleasant surprises other than, I suppose, the Blue Ridge Parkway with its sense of being in no time and, in places, no specific place either; just loose in time and space. But we stopped overnight in Mt. Airy and it was kind of depressing, partly in a failed tourist town sort of way. I mean, like when one saw a tip jar labeled "college fund" one had to wonder whether it was a con.
"at some point, this piece stopped making sense."
At what point did it ever START making sense?
I confess I read the Dreher piece all the way through. It was exhausting and repetitive, but I couldn’t look away, as it was hypnotically repellent. Made me grateful not having to live inside his head full time.
Holy f***, does he ever shut up??
Nothing to do with Dreher, but in the way that a certain word or phrase can trigger associations in the aging brain, I once owned (and may still own, somewhere) a shoebox of audio cassettes of The Barney Years (the only TRUE incarnation of The Andy Griffith Show). Audio cassettes because that newfangled VHS thing wasn't yet available at my parent's price point. The show works surprisingly well as a radio drama. One thing I always liked was the scoring, which was Hollywood-traditional in that each major character had a theme, and then variations on that theme depending on the character's mood. It's hard today to imagine a simple half-hour sitcom getting the services of a full studio orchestra, but that's how they did it back then.
Today, of course, the show's too cringey to watch (or listen to, if I could find that damn shoebox). At the height of the civil-rights movement, a show with a Southern Sherriff as the hero? In a town where no black faces are seen? C'mon, Andy, what did you and Barney do with all the black folks? (don't answer, I can imagine). And this his how THE WOKENESS destroys the joys of youth.
R. Crumb has a famous cartoon of Mayberry as a Sundown Town, with Barney leading the lynchmob. Not hard to find on teh Interwebs.
I was gonna say, Mayberry was definitely a Sundown Town.
Gascap, Alabama is *definitely* a Sundown Town, as it's a hamlet within Bedford Forrest County (of which Fritters is the County Seat).
Gascap, Alabama needs to join Oatmeal, Nebraska, Dead Man's Fang, Arizona and Coyoteville, New Mexico in the pantheon of greatest town names that never were.
Jimmie Buffet wants a word...
"[Approximately 800 words later]" - This won the morning.
Yeah, this is an excellent bit. I lold.
This whole piece is sublime. I also love "philia and storge and agape ... [as you find in] the lively Arts."
And for the record, the phrase (linked above) "My Gethsemane -- except worse!" has become one of my brain's reflexive exclamations whenever I'm having a bad day.
Yeah, I was remiss in not awarding Roy 2 Distinguished Marks for "philia and storge and agape ... [as you find in] the lively Arts." And very few people alive today know that Philia, Storge and Agape brought the house down when they played the Palace in '23.
They were no Tinkers, Evers, and Chance, though.
Yeah, more like Stinker, Nevers and Nochance...
It is a mystery why Brother Rod's family would resent him for moving them to his podunk hometown because of his daddy issues.
It's amazing how bad things happen to the truly rightous: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/10/all-projection-all-the-time-3
For crudite´s like him did I write:
It’s pretty damn hard to depict-o
The serious harm they’ll inflict-o
Their disgraces are rampant
And will not be dampant
Til caught In flagrante delicto