Seasons in the Sun
This blog was born for one purpose--to thoughtfully and humorously confront Rod Dreher's crunchy-con hypothesis--and it has long since outlived that purpose. Having written blogs since 1998 (no, really, I wrote my own blogging software), I was so tickled to finally have one that a decent number of people read that I stopped caring why. The time to close the door passed some moons ago, so this is the end, my friends.
Though I have done my best to mock some of his most cherished ideals, I don't think Rod is a bad person or The Enemy. I consider him, like Andrew Sullivan, to be part of the conservative communion in all its mystery. It is easy, relatively, to be an ideological traitor like Michael Lind: sure, you have to get a whole new set of friends and whatnot, but then it's done and you settle into your new life, though the stain of apostasy persists in funny ways. Dissidents head straight into the whirlwind until the storm ends, and for this they are detested with greater ferocity. While some people draw excess satisfaction from persecution, I have always believed in the honesty of Rod's intentions, and have always sought to apply the appropriate respect, particularly to him as a person.
I think the anonymous 24/7 echo chamber of teh intarwebs makes it too easy for people to shriek wildly at each other. All dissidents require a certain constitutional sense of defiance for the established order to survive doing what they do, along with the reverence that keeps them from packing their bags and leaving altogether. Solzhenitsyn did not want to repudiate the Russia of Peter, Tchaikovsky, and Dostoevsky, he wanted to see it live the promise of those great men. But the endless puerile rage wears away the best in us, and the best of us. Take the faith and love and reverence from the dissident, and all you're left with is the dissidence. Heat, yes, but little light. The gulag corrupts not only the dissident but his jailers too.
Were Rod's ideas not challenging and novel we would not still be talking about them. My feelings about them have been modulated somewhat over the past year, but on the whole I still feel in them a force pulling in the wrong direction, an instinct for statist (and stasist) action which contradicts my most fundamental humanistic impulses. And yet it is more important now than one, two, or five years ago that we confront these ideas honestly, for I feel a sense of leftism resurgent nearly everywhere I look, and we will win not by ruses but by superiority. The global warming charade threatens to plunge us quite literally into a new Dark Age, with dangerous economic and foreign policy implications the environmentalist naifs are content to sneer at as beneath their loftier consideration. In a mere hundred years or so we have leapt forward so far, and here, on the very doorstep of a new golden age, leftist armies are massing to put us back in our cages.
I have never had the pleasure of meeting Rod personally but if it should ever happen, I will gladly buy him a beer and greet him as a friend. And with that, the Contra Crunchy is hereby retired.
Though I have done my best to mock some of his most cherished ideals, I don't think Rod is a bad person or The Enemy. I consider him, like Andrew Sullivan, to be part of the conservative communion in all its mystery. It is easy, relatively, to be an ideological traitor like Michael Lind: sure, you have to get a whole new set of friends and whatnot, but then it's done and you settle into your new life, though the stain of apostasy persists in funny ways. Dissidents head straight into the whirlwind until the storm ends, and for this they are detested with greater ferocity. While some people draw excess satisfaction from persecution, I have always believed in the honesty of Rod's intentions, and have always sought to apply the appropriate respect, particularly to him as a person.
I think the anonymous 24/7 echo chamber of teh intarwebs makes it too easy for people to shriek wildly at each other. All dissidents require a certain constitutional sense of defiance for the established order to survive doing what they do, along with the reverence that keeps them from packing their bags and leaving altogether. Solzhenitsyn did not want to repudiate the Russia of Peter, Tchaikovsky, and Dostoevsky, he wanted to see it live the promise of those great men. But the endless puerile rage wears away the best in us, and the best of us. Take the faith and love and reverence from the dissident, and all you're left with is the dissidence. Heat, yes, but little light. The gulag corrupts not only the dissident but his jailers too.
Were Rod's ideas not challenging and novel we would not still be talking about them. My feelings about them have been modulated somewhat over the past year, but on the whole I still feel in them a force pulling in the wrong direction, an instinct for statist (and stasist) action which contradicts my most fundamental humanistic impulses. And yet it is more important now than one, two, or five years ago that we confront these ideas honestly, for I feel a sense of leftism resurgent nearly everywhere I look, and we will win not by ruses but by superiority. The global warming charade threatens to plunge us quite literally into a new Dark Age, with dangerous economic and foreign policy implications the environmentalist naifs are content to sneer at as beneath their loftier consideration. In a mere hundred years or so we have leapt forward so far, and here, on the very doorstep of a new golden age, leftist armies are massing to put us back in our cages.
I have never had the pleasure of meeting Rod personally but if it should ever happen, I will gladly buy him a beer and greet him as a friend. And with that, the Contra Crunchy is hereby retired.
posted by The Snob at 11:55 AM
13 Comments:
This has been a great blog. However, when Mr. Dreher makes some more stupid comments;we should still hold him accountable. That is why I think we should post them on the scrappycons.com blog. I also think we should use it and other blogs to point out how he and others in the Liberal MSM refuse to hold themselves to any accountability. The example I use is the silence regarding the comments of William Arkin of the Washington Post. He as I am sure most you know, called our soldiers "Mercenaries" and said "They should be thankful we are not spitting at them." Of course there is my all time favorite of him defending his paper's decision to support the Pulitzer for the New York Time's Walter Duranty. Mr. Duranty was a Stalinist sympathizer; whose puff pieces on the Soviet Union made it seem like a near Nirvana. Do any of you think if he had been in Berlin extolling the virtues of Adolf Hitler, the MSM would touch Duranty? Of course not! Enough of that, great blog.
Sorry to see you go, but it was fun.
As for Dreher being a liberal - let's not excommunicate him just yet. Yes, at some point it's absurd to keep calling a person a conservative after a point coughAndrewSullivancough, but we have a big enough tent to incorporate a large diversity of viewpoints.
As Padame and Luke would say, there's good in him yet.
thanks for the forum. we had joy, we had fun.
I won't say never for this blog--but I want to give the furies some time to dissipate and perhaps it will come back in some day and place, for an appropriate purpose.
Regarding Rod and Andrew's liberalism... I am to some extent willing to accept people at their face value. Unlike American Indian tribes, the Right is not exactly beset with poseurs wanting to be part of some mystic circle. Even Reagan, Thatcher, and Karol Wojtyla were at times disappointing to conservatives; if they are not qualified to judge 'true conservatism,' then surely we are not.
Rod to me feels less like an American leftist than a European conservative like Chirac, especially in terms of things like agriculture and development. I have always found it interesting that while the American left is largely a less radical version of its European brothers, the American right is largely unique in its sometimes-tempestuous marriage of dynamist and stasist (as V. Postrel termed them) personalities.
Ultimately I think this all reaches back to the Founding, which I think represented not just a legal but an intellectual break with the rest of the world, and especially Europe. Of course everyone likes to claim the Founders for their team. But I think it's interesting that while right-leaning people are generally likely to not give a horse's ass what France or Italy thinks of what we do, left-leaning people will often place equally large emphasis on those opinions. Certainly a large and perhaps majority portion turn their noses up when they hear the "American excptionalism."
hmmm. well, even a big tent has to have boundaries. it can only be so big. which is why it is helpful to ask why someone believes he is still in the tent, or even values being in the tent, when it sounds like he isn't, and doesn't want to be.
Goodbye, Bubba. It's been interesting. It's sometimes best to move on to other things.
Although it sometimes seems a bit incohesive, I still enjoy Mr. Dreher's writing, but I still cannot figure out what exactly "Crunchy Conservatism" is supposed to be.
The problem here is the desire to taxonomize the desire to eat heirloom tomatoes into a separate (let alone superior) wing of conservatism. The ideological uniformity of the Left is one of its great weaknesses, and it's due in large part to liberals' fondness for burning witches (compare the treatment of sens. Chaffee and Lieberman, for example).
This is the sort of thing you can afford to do when it's 1994 or 2002 and you've won big, big, big. Since 2004, the Right has been sharply on the defensive, and it is time we start acting like it.
Bubba: "It's obvious: it's a sensibility with a manifesto."
Hmmh. That's the best definition as I've seen so far.
GENUINE ROLEXES FOR $99.00.
preach it bubba
I guess the news is out.
As certain observers of this blog publicly indicated, it was a bizarre enterprise from the get-go. It was a blog that apparently catered only to about a half dozen Dreher-haters, most of whom are apparently incapable of distinguishing traditionalist conservatism from liberalism. Said observers wondered aloud about all the animus; about why a blog should be devoted to criticism of a paleocon writer, and not a major paleocon writer at that. It was really all too weird, and it's too bad you didn't have the sense to to kill the thing long ago.
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