CRUNCHY CONspiracy
Only one thing can adequately explain the bull-headedness of Rod Dreher and his compadres in the face of devastating criticism. This is a question of product placement. Whole Foods and Birkenstock were getting tired of the same old marketing ploys to attract liberals (for example, Birkenstock's disproportionately high ratio of brown suede birks as opposed to other colors in the rainbow ... Yoga magazines at the Whole Foods checkout ...). Both companies were between a rock and a hard place; they were forced to cater to their liberal base, but simultaneously were alienating the conservative half of the country. Enter Rod Dreher, new marketing genius! He offered to lessen the liberal stranglehold on both beleaguered companies by writing an entire book justifying, indeed GLORIFYING, conservative consumption of Birkenstocks and organic leeks. Dreher is doing nothing less than creating an entirely new marketing demographic. Birkenstock is prepared for the new onslaught of nascently-crunchy conservative customers -- they market sandals in precious metal sheens now. Whole Foods is prepared too -- they sell non-organic vegetables and non-microbrew beer. It all makes sense ... even Dreher's citation of an article critical of Whole Foods was an obvious ploy to put us off the scent.
But I think we should be told.
But I think we should be told.
posted by kathleen at 8:24 AM
21 Comments:
oh man! you're right! there ain't NOTHIN less crunchy than a rampaging robot. what a fabulous way to earn big bucks and simultaneously work to preserve the American home and hearth.
I was starting to think the crunchblog had dried up and blown away. But Rod just put up a post. Wasn't much, mostly just a quote from a LA Daily News column that repeated some familiar crunchy-isms. Seems that the columnist's family watches no TV. Too bad they missed Rod's appearance on Rupert Murdoch's news channel.
The columnist also drinks organic milk because he doesn't like...antibiotics? Is he trying to keep the world safe from penicillin?
Anyway, the crunchblog has really slowed. Nobody else on NRO seems to be paying much attention because they're too busy with immigration and other issues.
Jonah posted something on the Corner about his Lost Wages trip. He complained about impolite dealers at Mandalay Bay. Maybe Rod should say that's what Jonah deserves for visiting the anti-crunchy capital of the world.
Rod just announced that the crunchblog is going out of business after this week. He kicked off the final festivities with a call for comments on...St. Benedict and the monastic life.
That should keep things quiet and otherworldly enough not to attract unwanted attention from anybody else on NRO. But Stegall will probably slip in one final blast at the suburbs.
What a small world it is sometimes. Chris Weinkopf worked together on the campus right-wing rag. I dropped him an email and he was quite amused to find out it was me behind this blog. He says parenthood has changed his perspective on a lot of things, which is not an uncommon thing- though it's interesting to note that Jonah Goldberg has in some ways become more libertarian even as he phased out Frat-Boy Jonah over the past 5 years or so.
"And I think the best way to change a culture is to seed it with holy people." That's Frederica in one of her more smug moods - guess who the "holy people" are - and Caleb just agreed with her. Except he added a caveat that even fewer people are truly holy than Frederica might allow:
"Evangelicals have been hurt by 'salvation inflation' — a temptation to define 'transformed, humble, holy people' in the most 'nice' and inclusive way possible to mean, essentially, well intentioned but virtually indistinguishable (and certainly manageable) citizens of late liberal modernity."
It's not amazing that Stegall thinks almost all of us are heathen compared to the holy crunchies.
Of course, the crunchies can never hear how they sound to others. So this final blast of literally holier-than-thou self-satisfaction will only alienate even more readers. When this blog finally finishes (this week, unless Dreher reneges on his promise) we'll all be better off without the crunchies' sanctimonious, insufferable, and completely unjustified belief that they are better and holier than the rest of us.
By the way, Angelo dropped an aside that the Iraq war is a "disaster." That's at least arguable - and has been argued extensively on the Corner - but don't expect any of the crunchies to disagree. They're too busy posing as holier than the rest of us to debate issues in the real world.
Jape or Stegall or whoever you are, not that I care...I'll gladly grant that I'm pro-choice in the first trimester. Dreher supported a pro-choice Congressional candidate, so I guess you've got issues with both of us.
As for being conservative, I'm a wishy-washy middle-of-the-roader who leans to the right on most but not all issues (like abortion, for instance). I voted for Bush but also voted for a few Democrats down the ticket.
I also don't claim to be one of the "holy people" and I don't castigate most of my fellow human beings as unholy and inferior. So, no, I'm not a crunchy.
By the way, Dreher's book is down to 1,700 on Amazon's sales list, on its way to oblivion. The book was going to fade pretty fast, anyway, because of the crunchies' holier-than-thou sanctimony. But the intolerably smug crunchblog may have hastened the inevitable.
Anyone who wishes to scare-quote a conservative for the apostasy of being "pro-choice" would do well to review noted social liberal Ramesh Ponnuru's comment on the "coalition of the whining."
http://corner.nationalreview.com/06_03_19_corner-archive.asp#093144
Well, I don't think I should be stoned (in the old-fashioned sense). But even Jonah, though he resisted most of the glaring opportunities to skewer Dreher's hypocrisy, couldn't help noting the Main Crunch's enthusiastic support of a pro-choice Democrat.
How Jonah resisted a screen shot of Rod's book on sale at the Wal-Mart site is beyond me.
Anyway, I have no problems with a ban on partial-birth abortion or second and third-trimester abortions in general, with the usual exceptions for the life of the mother, rape and incest. But I'm not holier than anybody else, unlike Dreher, who apparently has a God-given right to hypocrisy.
Frohnen just admitted that he doesn't homeschool his kids! What's next? A word of praise for Wal-Mart...especially if you're shopping for a certain book?
Okay, I overstated Rod's belief that he has a "God-given" right to hypocrisy. But the crunchies sure think they can bend the Crunch Manifesto when it's convenient:
"Far better to concede some hypocrisy as Rod does below (a sentiment I second), or even to celebrate one’s selfishness as a Randian might, than to wallow in a false goodness that in essence, denies us our souls."
That's Stegall granting the crunchies the right to hypocrisy because they're just so much better than the rest of us who are denied our souls as we "wallow in a false goodness." The crunchies, you see, have exclusive rights to genuine goodness...and apparently to non-denied souls.
Oh brother, it's no surprise Rod's book just tumbled to #1,950 on Amazon's sales rankings. Hypocrisy plus sanctimony does not make for an attractive package.
Casey: I don't understand why you feel that Rod's book being sold at Wal-Mart is that big an indictment of him. You could say it's a case of the capitalist selling the rope that he'll be hung with. If crunchy conservatism is the way to save the country, then isn't it appropriate to spread the gospel, er, message as widely as possible?
Now, as for how good that message is, now that's another question entirely ;)
Jape: The question isn't whether there are 20,000 people who agree with Dreher. It's whether he's identified and articulated an ideologically distinct and politically/culturally significant movement. Whether you like what David Brooks has to say about the "bobos" is your decision, but even his critics acknowledged that he had identified something new and worth talking about.
I love the fact that Rod is selling his book at Wal-Mart. It shows that he really doesn't buy this crunchy crud when it comes to his own money. That makes Rod a lot more likeable, in my (non-Wal-Mart) book.
I do wish he would be more upfront with these, uh, inconsistencies...like commenting himself on his Wal-Mart connection when Frohnen trashed Wal-Mart. Or admitting that he supported a pro-choice candidate because he thought air pollution was more important than abortion. But that might be expecting too much.
Now that I mentioned air pollution, Dreher's assertion that Dallas has "filthy air" was destroyed in a long post that Jonah referenced a while back. Dallas completely meets the EPA's most stringent standards for air quality, expect for ozone. And that one pollutant is hardly a major problem: last year Dallas failed to meet the toughest ozone standard four days out of 365. But Dreher, like so many ideologues, can't be bothered with the facts.
Rod's now into doomsday scenarios: suitcase nukes, overhead nukes, hurricanes, a Yankee world series win...
This truly indicates that the end is near...for the crunchblog. I'm a little surprised that Rod mentioned Katrina, because he went completely ballistic, bonkers and bananas on the Corner over the hurricane. Of course, it turned out that almost all the horror stories he was screaming about were false, or at best grossly exaggerated.
In fact, Katrina didn't demonstrate the fragility of civil society at all, as Rod bizarrely maintains, but exactly the opposite. The country as a whole and has recovered very well from the disaster, and even New Orleans itself is moving forward. Civil society seems to be doing just fine in the U.S. right now.
But Rod's so gloomy today. Maybe he's been looking at those Amazon sales figures. Or contemplating the vote percentage that the hated Joe Barton will roll up in the 6th district.
Suitcase nukes... yeah. He's getting dangerously close to Godfrey's Law territory with that one.
The Rita-Katrina parallel is really rich. I sleep in on Sundays so I guess I missed all those episodes of Meet the Press where Mainstream Conservatives talked about how New Orleans was a well-run city with healthy communities. Because Lord knows, you see all kinds of crazy riots and looting after hurricanes blow away exurban subdivisions in Florida.
I also think it's interesting Rod doesn't talk about the massive civil disorder that happened in New York City following 9/11. There's a place full of selfish hedonists and utterly lacking the sort of stable, long-term communities Acadia is known for. It would seem to be such a perfect illustration of his point.
Holy shit, he's talking about EMP weapons? He really has gone off the deep end.
Here's a lil' hint Rod: an EMP weapon requires a decent-sized nuclear warhead on top of a ballistic missile. Even Kim Jong Il knows better than to actually launch a nuclear missile at us.
And why does it take us from "the 21st to the 18th century?" It's not like Abe Lincoln had an iPod. It's only 2006. Why not say, "take us from the 20th to the 19th? Oh, right, sounds less skeery, dunnit? Besides, isn't that a crunchy fantasy?
I've been so mean and nasty to Rod. So it's nice to see that he now admits many of the disaster stories about Katrina were "exaggerated." That's not exactly an apology for his embarrassing, screaming posts on the Corner during the hurricane. But at least it's a nod towards reality, which is often in short supply on the crunchblog.
Still, the whole disaster orgy is getting creepy. Come on, Rod. Do you really want to close out the crunchblog with doomsday? Life and even NRO will go on after the blog has stumbled off into the archives.
via Bubba:
>Frohnen admits that he's
>been "lucky enough" to find a good
>parochial school and denounces
>school vouchers because
>they "encourage consumerism."
Isn't it great to have money?
I knew a guy who was against school vouchers because it meant all "those people" might end up coming to the parochial school at his parish. This has the same smell to it. Why is it so hard for some people to believe that, for all it's little defects, the free markets helps poorer folks at the bottom at least as much as it might enrich those at the top?
Even Stegall's getting tired of the doomsday scenarios, and Rod posted a long e-mail that told the crunchblog to snap out of it. After p.o.ing plenty of people with sanctimony and hypocrisy, Rod may be getting the message that doomsday isn't very attractive to readers, either.
All in all, the crunchblog has to be the sourest, most paranoid, least encouraging thing that NRO has published since, oh, Derbyshire's latest rant that we're all DOOMED, DOOMED. And Derbyshire gets real old real fast, too.
The fact that Casey is "pro-choice in the first trimester" as he says doesn't seem to really be the point to Caleb. To him, I also am "...implicated by nearly all the habits of [my] heart in the same culture of choice [I] believes [I am] voting against..." even though I am not pro-choice on abortion, even in the first trimester.
Later in the same post, Caleb rails against the "pernicious logic of choice" which leads to emptiness and "lack of realness." This seems to me to be saying that having a choice can be a bad thing. This puzzles me greatly. I always figured that making the wrong choice is the bad thing, and that's why a proper formation is necessary, but having the choice to begin with is generally accepted as being from God - like a test. In the Bible, Adam was tested and failed, Satan failed (big time), Abraham passed his biggest test with Isaac, Moses got a B+, Jesus got an A+, etc.
These choices made in those examples all had clear moral significance. Insofar as a society limits an individual adult's perfectly fine choices (e.g., what school to go to, where to live, etc.) for fear of "wrong choices" (e.g., paying too much for an education, living in too big a house, etc.) that society isn't free.
No doubt I think this way because I'm using enlightenment thinking rather than Christian thinking for which I've been already scolded; in that case I suppose I'm still waiting for a wise teacher to enlighten me in a "more real" sense.
I just can't get over Dreher's self-absorption -- the self absorption -- my God, just the pure self-absorption -- it's in every post, but especially today's: "I can see that I was strongly affectedby 9.11." "I will never forget how blue the sky was on 9/11." "NOTHING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ***ME*** WAS AS TRAUMATIC AS WHAT FOLLOWED [i.e. the towers fell]"
tell us more Rod, none of us dolts have any idea what happened that day. no one else saw it live like you did, i guess. maybe I was too busy blow drying my hair to watch the news.
and then he has the UNMITIGATED GALL to end the same post by gleefully crowing that a Washington Post style reporter is coming to his house to cook dinner with him and his wife. you can just see him doing a little jig at more publicity.
i've jumped the parody shark now. now i'm in full-fledged anger and disgust mode.
Maybe it's time for a Matera-Stegall steel cage match.
http://crunchycon.nationalreview.com/archives/093468.asp
"Christians cannot answer The Da Vinci Code by resorting to Left Behind, the two polarities we are often faced with in this country."
I'm tempted to say that Matera could be a voice of reason, but then isn't he the one who said that "stock speculation is not sacred?" While I'd definitely take Trotsky over Lenin, I'd sooner take Bill Clinton over either.
For Rod it really does seem like there is "nothing more wonderful than me." His self-absorption about 9/11 would get some belly-laughs except it's so damn sad and short-sighted. Maybe Rod missed 2004, but this guy Bush got reelected at least partly because he did (and does) take the threat of Islamic terrorism seriously.
As for Rod giving up in Iraq, he should go on the Corner and make the argument. Rich Lowry and others are waiting to take him on. But Rod prefers to stay in the cocoon of the crunchblog, where he's in no danger from the tiniest disagreement.
Can't blame Rod, though. When he did venture onto the Corner to pronounce Dallas' air "filthy," he got slam-dunked with a reply that he's still smarting from. He confessed on the crunchblog that it was one of his nastiest experiences on NRO, and I can believe him.
Truth to tell, I'd like to see all the crunchies head for the Corner and take their chances with the big guys. Let's see if they can defend their positions when subjected to real debate.
Of course, that will happen right after Jonah becomes Hillary's campaign manager.
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