Interested in Rod Dreher's writing? Wait.
I would like to direct the reader's attention to this brief blog entry, in which Rod Dreher offers strong praise for an article about hunting and how it encourages masculinity and integrity.
Dreher. Hunting. Masculinity. Integrity.
The post is incredibly ripe for parody, but to my surprise it has prompted in me a reaction that is a professional writer's nightmare: indifference.
Judging by the activity there and here, I get the feeling I'm not the first to reach the point where Rod's writing has become less interesting than the Beliefnet ads that surround it. It might thus be a good time to make official what has been a long time coming: other than a few comments to this post, we're taking a break of an indefinite duration.
I'm considering this announcement to be a Christmas present to myself, as I've been very good this year.
Dreher. Hunting. Masculinity. Integrity.
The post is incredibly ripe for parody, but to my surprise it has prompted in me a reaction that is a professional writer's nightmare: indifference.
Judging by the activity there and here, I get the feeling I'm not the first to reach the point where Rod's writing has become less interesting than the Beliefnet ads that surround it. It might thus be a good time to make official what has been a long time coming: other than a few comments to this post, we're taking a break of an indefinite duration.
I'm considering this announcement to be a Christmas present to myself, as I've been very good this year.
posted by Anonymous at 3:32 PM
20 Comments:
Merry Christmas to all! I agree Mr. Dreher's writing is getting more boring with each passing day. That said, we need to hold him and his MSM colleagues accountable. I say this because he is good about holding Bishop X or Father Y accountable for any SNAFU in the church? Who holds him accountable for the fact that his paper supports the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize to Stalinist Propogandist who worked for the New York Times yet he did not criticize them. How about when CNN aired the video made by that Iraqi Sniper of him killing American soldiers. Did he offer any criticism? Of course not! He may be so boring at times he can put you to sleep. Even with that, we should hold him accountable.
being in a similar stage of life as rod and his wife, with very young children, i am over my head already.
and my husband is right there with me. i just can't imagine how i would react if my husband spent a goodly chunk of every day advertised his likes and dislikes like a 7th grader with her first my space page (I HEART BUNGALOWS! DON'T HEART MCMANSIONS! TOTALLY HEART DIANA KRALL AND ROB ROYS! DON'T HEART BISHOPS! WHAT DO U LIKE? R U PAGAN? I AM A WRITER! I TOTALLY HAVE TO WRITE OR ELSE I GET TOTALLY DEPRESSED! EMAIL ME AT BELIEFNOT.COM)
anyway, i'm mean. happy new year contras.
PS: diane, if you like boston camerata, you might really like Pomerium, who are based in NY. i have their xmas album "creator of the stars" which i think you would love but it's out of print. email me if you want a CD "sample" in the snail mail.
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Oengus writes here: "Please find some other venue besides BeliefNet. Not only are its comboxes full of garbage, its advertising is worse than obnoxious—not to mention that its web pages take hideously long to render for us poor folks who cannot afford the luxury of a high speed Internet connection." (bold mine)
Thank you, Oengus. The amount of T&A-laced ads on a page with Rod's smiling face is quite humorous, but pretty brazenly hedonistic and capitalistic for the workerboy's half-acre on an ostensibly religious site, methinks.
I second Bubba's recommendation to read Oengus's thoughts on recent sundry paleocon excrescentiae.
Saunter on over to this post and combox for some of Rod's you-can't-go-home-anymore crunchy sentiments followed by a some Pythonic you're-such-a-bleeding-racist comments. I laughed.
wow, that blog is now the harvey lacey show. think benedict dreher misses us yet? speaking of nostalgia, we, the contras, constituted the golden age of crunchy con-ism, an age now gone by.
how prissy was the vatican statement? as prissy as calling diana krall "my christmas elf"?
Diane, it is about as Prissy as his comments about the movie Brokeback Mountain.
LOL; In the New Year's Eve combox, Harvey does a multiple-post online tutorial on how to do italics. He's so helpful!
MMM: "He would seem a lot less stupid if he merely complained about people's lack of wider social and moral concerns in the conduct of their professional lives and not try to yoke it to some egregious flaw in contemporary conservative ideology."
Yes. Bold mine. Then...
"But if he did that, he would just be another person pointing out that there's a dearth of morality and social responsibility in the world today, and that doesn't sell nearly as many books as a cutesy alliterative slogan like 'Crunchy Cons.' "
Thanks for the links, Bub. This sums up my position better than I could. In terms of the prophetic value of Mustard's comments, the fulfillment came with Orthodoxy, Beaujolais and Diana Krall. I don't remember reading this post last year, but I'm adding it to my delicious category for Rod.
Also: people like Cube and Pink Logician have the same or at least similar issues with CCism. Especially Cube -- he's sympathetic to many of the ideas in CCism, but he doesn't know why it should be turned into a political thing. Plus he really dislikes the packaging & hates being called crunchy.
On that note, I think it will be interesting to follow the discussion surrounding Pearce's new book, Small is Still Beautiful. Read about it here. The publisher, mistakenly IMHO, had Rod do one of those back-page endorsements. I suppose it's not a marketing mistake, and hopefully it won't help perpetuate the closed party, armchair distributist aspect of this discussion. But if you haven't read Pearce before, take it from me; it will assuredly be a more thoughtful book, better researched and less taste-related.
Oh, yeah, there's a blog to promote the book as well.
"Resign yourself that the work you're reading was written by a guy pretending to believe what he writes -- or who believes what he writes only at the moment -- and all your left with is the skill and wit with which he performs his routine. On that score I hardly think he's a better writer than amateurs like me."
I take it from the post that you guys are calling it quits? Assuming that, I set out to write a final critical assessment from the perspective of an active "semi-crunchy", about the grand old founder of crunchyism. My comment went long and was getting longer, so I just now read the combox to find Bubba and Diane pretty much held the substance of my post. Regardless this is my last comment, because I too have lost interest.
I spent New Years Eve drinking micro-brew from a local brewery with my wife in front of the TV if anyone is interested. Because I know food very well I know when someone does not know food. Rod writes mostly about the consumptive aspects of food. If he truly practiced and knew the subject, he would write about different things. If he were more than a consumer, but a creator, he would write about the act of creating. I do not recall his writing about himself within the context of creating (e.g. garden, house remodeling, creating jobs, creating legislation, etc.) He writes about others acts of creation. He himself creates writing, which is fine, but it is his living. For those of us who don't want to be consumers, but creators, it is difficult to transition from the consumptive life to the creative life. It would be nice at this point to know how Rod is going about his own transformation without jeopardizing his main source of income. After a day of writing for the "man", does he compose and play his own music and record it for his Ipod, or does he just buy the music of others? For as much as he spills about his personal life, it strikes me as odd why he does not highlight his own efforts to become more crunchy apart from his conspicuous consumption. He may in fact be less crunchy than Pauli working as a wage slave for big media. My advice to him is that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.
I do agree with some of his thesis/assertions. I hesitate to make any assertions since I am not going to really defend them here. It's the usual stuff for me, big business might be more about socialism than capitalism, I know more RINO's than social conservatives, employment specialization is more risky than generalization, bigger and efficient may be worse than small and inefficient in some cases. Like any hypothesis, I'd explore and defend it before promoting it. All I would ask that you guys keep an open mind to what Rod is promoting in his book. There is some truth in it, even if it is not the truth that can be defended empirically, at least not at this time.
It was a pleasure working with you all. Best of luck to everyone, and stop by my blog and say hello if something interests you.
he criticizes Pat Robertson for saying God told them things, but he did write a couple months ago that he received "a very clear and even startling call" from God to remain in journalism.
You should ask him whether or not he believes that the Blessed Mother appeared to Juan Diego and the 3 children at Fatima. That could prove a bit of a stumper for a both-sides-of-the-east-west-fence convert.
I'm glad God told me in very clear terms not to ever become a journalist at 5:32pm on my tenth birthday because this way I don't have to worry about what Pat Robertson says or does.
Re: crap and diarrhea. I agree with the so-called 3rd way-ers that Lord Acton's maxim "power corrupts" applies to large corporations, but I temper that with the application of the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" slogan.
I see myself an incrementalist, a humorist (as in this post where Cube and I have an exchange) and a believer in a "4th way" which is exemplified by groups like the Acton Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. Like them, I believe that there is quite a bit of leeway in Catholic social teaching as opposed to clear-cut prohibitions. If people don't realize this they end up accepting what I call moral equivalency lite which, although not as bad as the leftist version (e.g., common defense = terrorism), it ends up seeing preferences as dogmas.
So I'm very keen to find out how Pearce deals with the subtlety within these socio-economic issues and how they relate to morality as well as his recommended action items. The latter is perhaps too much to expect from an academic, but I'm an eternal optimist. Being that he's a former skin-head, he'll have already dealt with problems of blind rage and vision-clouding prejudice with which some people are still struggling. It's been awhile since he would have spray-painted "Friedman burn in hell!" on a London building. Add the fact that it's not his very first book and you have some good reasons to expect a better presentation of subsidiarity, distributism and the normal objections to implementation of these concepts.
Having said all that, there's a lot I'll probably laugh about as a businessman in the real world and as an American who enjoys the "not really democracy" thing quite a bit. And we'll all keep buggering on.
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"I wish you'd continue with Contra-Crunchy because it throws an interesting sidelight on Mr. Dreher and may even be serving to help keep him on his toes."
He doesn't deserve it, he spent too many months insulting us. hoisted on his own petard.
diane, here is the important question: is it the orthodox century because benedict ray rod converted to orthodoxy, or is it relevant point that benedict ray rod presciently intuited this was going to be the orthodox century and knew enough to convert? not that it matters. either way, BENEDICT RAY ROD IS A VISIONARY: the ultimate conclusion one is supposed to reach when reading his book/blog.
PS: diane, how long til tmatt calls you gollum, i wonder
Can a woman be called a pig? I thought you were only allowed to call men pigs. I guess we don't know that much about name-calling, alas.
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did anyone know that Max Weber said reading the sunday papers has replaced going to church on sunday morning? that would make rod/ray/benedict, newspaper editor, a bishop of some kind, at least in dallas, no? innnterresting.
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