HERE'S YOUR HALO, WHAT'S YOUR HURRY? Crunchy Rod Dreher goes on and on again about the Devil in the moving pictures (in this case, the animated feature Open Season). Blah blah. But toward the end my ears perked:

"But we can't withdraw, we have to engage the culture!" an Evangelical friend said to me today. Yeah, sometimes. But I tell you, I'm glad that Noah didn't decide to stick around and engage the culture when the rain got heavy, and instead climbed aboard his ark and pulled up the gangplank.

It is always a pleasure to say goodbye to Dreher. After his career-building tenure here in Sodom on the Hudson, he said so long heathens, I'm off to the promised land -- Dallas!

Of course he got to Dallas and began bitching that it wasn't Crunchy enough. At first I thought he meant they didn't have enough high-grade mashed yeast and bulghur to suit his refined palate, and the houses weren't purty-lahk. But now it's looking as if no place in America will be good enough for him, blighted as it all is with Kultursmog.

To what redoubt will the Drehers repair? I like to imagine them building a space ark and zooming to Mars, confident that, despite the lack of breathable atmosphere, the Good Lord will sustain them. Or going to some Middle Eastern shithole where the general hostility to ungodly conduct, Western pleasures, and women's rights will more than make up the necessity to call Jesus "Allah" in public.

Maybe we'll just find them in their bunker, their bodies sprawled among the sacks of brown rice.

UPDATE. Oh, the comments are a joy, too. "Giving up football would be my equivalent to heading to the hills, and I might have to do so," says marko, because of the "the interspersed advertisements for the network’s amoral reality shows, immoral sit-coms and despicable dramas." marko also "go[es] through the Sunday comics with a Sharpie before turning them over to my 11-year-old." I wonder what the Righteous would make of Daisy Mae Yokum? She's empty out their pens in a hurry, I'll bet.

Best, though, is Rod hisself:

My kid Matthew was reading a Popular Science magazine a couple of weeks ago, and asked me, "Dad, what's erectile dysfunction?" It hadn't occurred to me that Viagra ads would be in Popular Science, but that just shows how stupid I am.

To coin a phrase: indeed.