Still, it’s a dead end—creatively, philosophically, and politically—for conservatives to mimic left-wing storytellers.
For one thing, conservatives today lack the artistic skill to tell stories as well as the left does. More philosophically, the business of a conservatism with integrity is not to impose an idealistic ideological narrative on reality but rather to try to see the world as it is and respond to its challenges within the limits of what we know about human nature.It would seem from this that Dreher still thinks liberals have some kind of mysterious formula, transmitted to them by Satan, for turning their nefarious ideas into a magic weapon called Art that moves the masses.
Conservatism has within it the capacity to answer these challenges, but not if conservatives cling to stories that have lost their salience. We don’t need stories that offer prepackaged ideological answers to questions few people are asking.Okay, now we're getting somewhere...
We need stories like the one told in the comments section of my blog on the American Conservative website by a Texas reader.Oh shit. I'll spare you, but it's about how the guy's town was ruined by Big Gummint. But some of the policies that doomed the place were "authored by the New Dealers, others by Reaganites" -- so see, ambiguity! That's artistic, right? Throw in some jokes and we have a hit.
Another guy "hopes to start a literary movement dedicated to telling the stories of working-class people of the Rust Belt":
“Someone who is teaching can be the Allen Tate or John Crowe Ransom of this movement. Someone who’s working a factory floor can be the Wendell Berry. I’m not comparing myself to these guys, but someone needs to write about these things in a sustained way.”Maybe he can place an ad in the New York Review of Books to hire someone to actually write the stuff.
This reminds me of Liberty Island, the Ben Shapiro conservative arts site that has a manifesto but no content anyone would want to read. These people want culture as a means; the end is to effect the horrible political ideas they spend 99 percent of their time talking about. And as to stories, what Dreher won't admit is that they've had those all along: The Welfare Queen, The Dirty Hippie, The Child-Corrupting Homo, The Tax-and-Spend Liberal, et alia. But these stories were not created to reveal the human condition -- they were created to gull rubes into hate-voting for their candidates.
If conservatives don't have the kind of stories that move people the way a great song or play does, it's not because liberals took over the arts; it's because they don't really want them.
"Come ON, you guys! We've got the the wrapping all ready for you! Wait, why are all of you bringing us packin' peanuts?"
ReplyDeleteAnother guy "hopes to start a literary movement dedicated to telling the stories of working-class people of the Rust Belt":
ReplyDeleteStories of the working-class? That's great! Maybe start reading some Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck to get a feel for the history there, you'll definitely want to give Invisible Man and John Updike's Rabbit series a look. After that, well, there's always Bukowski, Phillip Roth, maybe Stephen King if you want to see how working-class themes can be transposed into genre fiction...wait, what was that? You were more interested in affirming that all people need when times are tough are Jesus, guns, and the NFL? Well, that works too. You could read a few Peggy Noonan columns to get started there, I guess. Anyway, happy writing!
Peggy Noonan and Charles Bukowski together, Your head has a weirder blender setting than mine.
ReplyDeleteIt's really not all that complex. I know there are a lot of people here who are going to argue that there's something fundamentally uncreative about conservatives. I don't believe that for a second - of course there are conservatives who are skilled artists. What you'll never find are skilled "conservative artists." A subtle difference, but an important one.
ReplyDeleteI read a lot of crap literature - mostly self-published - and the absolute worst type has to be the Story With A Point. Usually, they're dystopias - it's a popular subgenre these days, and people seem to assume that they're easy to write. Just take everything you think is bad, declare that the powers that be have made those things mandatory, ignore anything that doesn't have a political tie-in, and then have your Mary Sue mouthpiece waltz in and fix the world.
These stories always, always suck - left, right, or decline to state, it doesn't matter. The problem is not the side. The problem is that the writer has tried to produce something that's both literature and polemic and each one has ruined the other. So when you set out to produce "conservative art" (or "liberal art," for that matter), you've already beaten yourself. Ideology is poison to the creative process because it restrains your normally boundless ability to create.
Pardon the length, I just finished reading some "conservative art" so I've been primed for this for a few days.
Well, good works CAN be both, though it's rare.I'm thinking like, "Foucaults pendulum". But wow I'm glad I don't have your job.
ReplyDelete... the business of a conservatism with integrity ...
ReplyDeleteHmm. I think I see your problem right there Rod.
Ross Douthat/Rod Dreher- I always get these two guys mixed up.
ReplyDeleteLet's see, Douthat is the one who's always lecturing about the evils of gays, contraception, - actually any kind of sexual activity except that of pedophile priests, of whom he's a big supporter.
Whereas Dreher is the "Crunchy Conservative" who moved back to his sister's small town and started bitching about crappy Internet connections and demanding government subsidies to give him high-speed service.
And I do love the tragic story of the small Texas town: which, being about to disappear during the Dust Bowl, was saved by the New Deal and sucked on the government teat ever after until
The reader, who asked to remain anonymous, recalled how his West
Texas hometown disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s, its native population.dispersed. It had to do with the collapse of government support for
farm programs, which occasioned a localized depression. Yet those same
New Deal-inspired government programs, which had been meant to support
those communities, incentivized bad agricultural and financial
practices. Government, having lured farmers out onto the limb of
dependence, sawed off the branch behind them, at the same time the
oil-price collapse devastated the Texas economy.
Families lost their farms. The town bled out of all the people the
reader grew up with. They were in time displaced by Mexican migrants
getting by on seasonal work and welfare."
So this place, about to blow away during the Dust Bowl, was saved by the
New Deal and sucked on the government teat ever after.
"“I miss the hometown where I grew up,” wrote the man, now in Dallas. “It doesn’t exist anymore." "
Ah, yes, those generations of welfare paid out as farm subsidies - and then the free market brought down oil prices- a truly conservative tragedy.
And the worst is now all that welfare is going to Mexicans instead of decent ruggedly-independent white folks
More philosophically, the business of a conservatism with integrity is not to impose an idealistic ideological narrative on reality but rather to try to see the world as it is and respond to its challenges within the limits of what we know about human nature.
ReplyDeleteThis is the funny part. They've been denying reality for so long, they couldn't find it with the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Don't you mean ruggedly-dependent white folks?
ReplyDeleteI think filling a pothole violates the bible in some way.
ReplyDeleteDepends. Is the pothole lawfully married?
ReplyDeleteNO! And she was dressed in indecent treadmarks!
ReplyDeleteThis is about as close as the Crunchy Con will come to saying that conservatives are dull ideologues. That he won't say it outright says volumes.
ReplyDeleteThere's a fundamental misperception at work here, or perhaps an intentional misdirection. One cannot tell truthful stories of salt-of-the-earth types when the omniscient narrator is Charlie Koch. If one is so carefully aligned with the people who are making life hell for ordinary people, one cannot erase that bias with mere cleverness. It's a bit like thinking that there's just got to be an Upton Sinclair out there who will write a cross between The Jungle and The Turner Diaries, or a Henry Roth who will write a Call It Sleep from the point of view of the electric company.
What Dreher and his cohort want is slicker populist propaganda, not art. That desire is at the black bottom of the heart of their eternal complaints and confusions about culture. Their policies are inimical to the interests of ordinary people, but they want fictional ordinary people to shout praise for them from the tenement rooftops.
The dead giveaway that Dreher is just selling snake-oil here is that he imagines a "conservatism with integrity." There is simply no such thing, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be. The policy impulses of conservatism have always been autocratic, anti-democratic and aristocratic, and continue to be to this day. Good luck turning those attributes into a populist genre. Decades from now, there will be no PhD dissertations on "The Tea Party Literary Oeuvre." Not because publication of same was suppressed, but because it's damned hard to write with a Gadsden flag in one hand, a copy of Atlas Shrugged in the other, while riding a Hoveround.
I think the root of the problem Dreher describes is that he's not even talking about "conservative art", but "Conservative art", and modern movement conservatism is really just a "human centipede" ouroboros, constantly re-ingesting the same, increasingly fetid dreck.
ReplyDeleteAnd here I was, thinkin' you'd let me sleep without nightmares.
ReplyDeleteMore philosophically, the business of a conservatism with integrity is not to impose an idealistic ideological narrative on reality but rather to try to see the world as it is and respond to its challenges within the limits of what we know about human nature.
ReplyDeleteRemind me why people think Brother Rod is a good writer.
A dream to some, a nightmare to others!
ReplyDeleteI think it depends. Unless your plot is very small-scale, simplified, or total fantasy, you're going to likely touch on a political issue, and likely to take a side, inadvertently or not. From there it depends on the author's skill and subtlety. Political novels as 'this is my Issue, if you don't agree with me you're a sub-human monster' or 'let me tell you the heroic adventures of the thinly-veiled version of the guy I voted for last year' are of course the bottom of the barrel. I tend to be fonder of novels that mix the author's politics with broader, more humanistic observations on the world and human nature, and synthesize it so that the political values come off as human values. Political authors I like tend to be able to do this. Compare that to The Jungle, a novel that got lost on its way to the Socialist Party rally, or of course Atlas Shrugged, the world's first 900-page shit list.
ReplyDeleteDouthat is the one who has a valuable platform that he didn't earn, and Dreher is the one who's bitter that he doesn't, and goes to great lengths to let you know how much he doesn't care.
ReplyDeleteHere's a hint: he's lying.
ReplyDeletePlease don't put The Jungle and Atlas Shrugged together. I get your point, but don't put ANYTHING together with Atlas Shrugged, ever. Atlas is a monumental shitpiece
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I think Dreher is talking about storytelling less in terms of literature and more in terms of building narratives. Thing is, conservatives are actually very good at narratives - it may be all they're good at. However, those narratives are never about uplifting the salt-of-the-earth types, but rather about pounding them back down. You can't very well lop off my left hand and then sing an ode to the wonders of having a right.
ReplyDeleteAnother guy "hopes to start a literary movement dedicated to telling the stories of working-class people of the Rust Belt":
ReplyDeleteThat would never work, for conservatives, those working-class people are the villains, and the vulture capitalists who shut down their factories are the heroes.
In conservative "Shane", Shane decides to throw in with the land barons and guns down the homesteaders.
Don't be so hasty, I'm sure one of the "confurvatives" could write a furry version of Atlas Shrugged.
ReplyDelete"Who is John Goat?"
Correction: I can't lop off my own hand and then sing an ode to the wonders of having a right, at least not until the blood loss has been stanched. I very much can sing an ode after lopping off your hand, given the requisite amount of sociopathy.
ReplyDeleteSee Rod? There may be hope yet.
OKAY. I'ts early mornin' here and I asked for no nightmares THIS night... Now.... now I'll have 'em forever.
ReplyDeleteSee, that's the problem-I was struggling to think of what 'liberal' work could be fairly compared. From what I remember of the Jungle, it's lousy writing. But Sinclair was a hundred times more decent as a human being than Rand ever was.
ReplyDeleteOK, I'll redact: The proper liberal equivalent for Atlas Shrugged is a 300-comment thread on Tumblr featuring a bunch of high schoolers arguing over whether a Doctor Who/Harry Potter slashfic is too heteronormative.
For me, it comes down to one thing - does the story still work if you strip out the politics? 1984 is a solid piece of literature even if you don't know anything about Orwell's socialist bent. Meanwhile, Atlas Shrugged is a leaden lump, and there's absolutely no reason to read it except for the politics.
ReplyDeleteIt comes down to this: Would a person who didn't care about your viewpoint still want to read this?
For some of us "the limits of what we know about human nature" are more limiting than for others.
ReplyDeleteCan't remember much myself about The Jungle, either. But the absolute abomination that is Atlas Shrugged... is just... so fuckin' bad that words to describe haven't and can't yet be verbalised. But your substitute suggestion does fill me with horrors unheard of.
ReplyDeleteCharles Bukowski howls in protest with whatever air is left in those dead lungs.
ReplyDeleteBooze will temper the nightmares... lots of booze.
ReplyDeleteI think I should call out a dog's name here... what is it... dogmeat? no... benjy... no... Bingo!
ReplyDeleteYes, mock my cripplin' alcoholism. and there's only a half hour 'til the shops opens
ReplyDeleteHey, maybe they're doin' it dolphinstyle in the afterlife1
ReplyDeleteBarfly 2, or, Peggy and the Pink Dolphins.
ReplyDeleteBooze or bleach, booze or bleach.... BLEACH IT IS!
ReplyDeleteIt would seem from this that Dreher still thinks liberals have some kind of mysterious formula, transmitted to them by Satan, for turning their nefarious ideas into a magic weapon called Art that moves the masses.
ReplyDeleteI thought that was called the monomyth.
And it still wouldn't work for conservatives, as the protagonist has to change -- has to grow and develop -- in order to get the Hollywood ending. If the protagonist can't make the required change, it usually ends badly.
I think of Dreher as the down-home country version of David Brooks - a little less snobbery, a little more sanctimony.
ReplyDeleteOh, he's talking about Art with a capital "A," make no mistake about that. It's been the wingnut welfare Holy Grail for a long, long time, if only because they believe, in error, that if they can control the Culture, they can control society, and, by Gawd, they do want to control society.
ReplyDeleteDamn, it's been quite clear for a long time--they're evil little shits, and they want to be loved for it. They want to be immortalized (thus explaining, I think, the incoherent desire to put Reagan's mug on everything from Mt. Rushmore to airports to the FDR dime to scenic highway lookouts). That love doesn't come from political narratives they cooked up themselves. It comes from Art. They're scurrilous, mean-spirited little peckerheads who want to be revered forever. They want statues of themselves and their heroes. They want Epic odes written in their honor. They want dramas written about them. They want the People to think of them as larger than life. They want to be the History of the Nation.
And yet, they're mostly a bunch of fuckin' wankers and poseurs who make Walter Mitty look like a man of action. That's why they're obsessed with Art.
If conservatives don't have the kind of stories that move people the way a great song or play does, it's not because liberals took over the arts; it's because they don't really want them.
ReplyDeleteYes. Plus, it's hard to write convincing characters of any range or depth when you steadfastly or aggressively reject compassion, life experiences outside your own, and simply looking at the world through someone else's point of view. It doesn't make for good art. Conservatives can toss off tales of comeuppance of the Other, aggrieved privileged butthurt, and National Review Penthouse letters about how St. Ronnie called the Ruskies "the Evil Empire" and cowed them out of his sheer, rigid, capitalist masculinity. But that's about it, and why not just scribble off a hasty post for a quick amen from the rabid faithful than doing the hard work of writing a whole novel or play or script? (Or go the Glenn Beck route and just hire a ghost writer to write your laughable sex scenes.) Team Evil pays well, and even the dumb, mean, and lazy can nab six-figure gigs if they have a parent who's Lucianne Goldberg, a neocon, a closet neoconfederate, a neofeudalist, or a libertarian (but I repeat myself). Hell, the Kochs pay pretty well for even for relatively shoddy product, as long as it sneers at the right hated enemies, such as progressive taxation, environmental protections, the Commons and the social contract.
It's a feature, not a bug, that Ayn Rand couldn't write convincing human characters, because she hated humanity. Not all conservatives are nearly as sociopathic as she was, but the faithful have the same… bug.
Yeah, definitely; there certainly are classic authors and artists with a hard conservative or reactionary bent -- your Ezras Pound, your Yukios Mishima, your Davids Mamet. The problem is that like you said, what Dreher and Ben Shapiro and the rest want isn't "art by conservatives", just self-affirming, unchallenging "Conservative Art".
ReplyDeleteOf course if you laugh at Rod Dreher's stories, he'll just sue your ass:
ReplyDeletehttp://westfeliciana.blogspot.com/2013/07/topix-trolls.html
He's a one-man cultural Sharknado!
Another guy "hopes to start a literary movement dedicated to telling the stories of working-class people of the Rust Belt":
ReplyDeleteYou mean the "union thugs" who beat up innocent Tea Partiers and forced GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy? The people whose jobs your masters sent overseas? Yeah, good luck with that.
There's plenty of opportunity for character development in conservative fiction! For example, the protagonist could start out believing that torture is wrong and unproductive, but eventually come to the realization that it really does produce useful intelligence.
ReplyDeleteOr the protagonist could be a young man whose atheist professor is constantly berating good, wholesome believers, but the young man finally finds the courage to stand up and shame him with mighty Christian logic, and that young man's name could be Albert Einstein.
It's an old formula: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
ReplyDeleteYou can see this dichotomy within the works of a single author, even: Heinlein. I agree with pretty much everything his self-insert mouthpieces in Stranger in a Strange Land say, but it's still not a novel I regard particularly highly*, and certainly feel no compulsion to read again.
ReplyDeleteBut while Heinlein caves to the polemic temptation more than once in his career, he also writes plenty of novels where the political issues at stake aren't so in your face and clear-cut. Nothing astoundingly nuanced or high-brow, mind you, but I'd reread Starship Troopers before I'd reread Stranger in a Strange Land is all I'm saying.
*I do carry a certain sentimental fondness for Stranger in a Strange Land, because it had a lot of influence on the intellectual development of my impressionable high school self, but I like to think I've grown well beyond it.
Atlas Shrugged, the world's first 900-page shit list
ReplyDeleteIt's for things like this that I keep coming back to Alicublog.
I think Spaghetti Lee has found the perfect words to describe Atlas Shrugged. See comments above.
ReplyDeleteAnd that little kid who idolized Shane?
ReplyDeleteSteve Forbes, Jr.
~
There's not enough shit ever excreted to heap on Atlas. Hellen Mirren as Ayn was nice to watch, though.
ReplyDeleteI know I'm weird, but I always saw the movie version of Starship Troopers as the best executed satire ever of a work in dire need of one.
ReplyDeleteHe's got skin so thin he must look like a walking x-ray photo.
ReplyDeleteOf course, he is from the tribe that invented the SLAPP suit, so this is to be expected, I suppose.
"I'll teach you to call Rod Dreher a fur-faced poopyhead!"
the business of a conservatism with integrity is not to impose an idealistic ideological narrative on reality
ReplyDeleteHe knows this because it says so in the Bible, right between the bits about the perils of gay abortion and the redemptive power of the Laffer Curve.
Let it be solemnly said that he can eat me deeply.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised no one weighed in in the comments section to remind Brother Rod that the Bible and Atlas Shrugged are the only books anyone would ever need, which explains the dearth of Conservative art.
ReplyDeleteYou're making the dangerous assumption than they've ever read either.
ReplyDeleteYou're not crunchy, are you? We don't know for sure if he got his nickname because of a particularly nasty bad habit, y'know.
ReplyDeleteWow, I had to roll that one around in my briny brain a few times. Haven't heard crunchy-con since like 2005. But, yeah my bones don't break easy. My left shoulder, though, has been sorta loose in its socket since I fell off a quad-bike at 16.
ReplyDeleteI've posted this before, but my absolute favorite Dreher column is one where he called for more explicitly Christian literature, by which he meant literature that was pure Christian agitprop. His example was that Freedom would have been a lot better if in the last scene everyone somehow ends up in a church and all their problems are forgotten because Jesus.
ReplyDeleteI'd tell himto get back in the closet, but he'd only end up in Narnia.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that Rod just couldn't resist, or more to the point probably didn't even know he was doing it, referring to "the business" of a conservatism with integrity.
ReplyDeleteSpend enough time around Daniel 'incorporation of the First Amendment is the second worst thing in American history, after the tyrant Lincoln' Larison, and you too can forget that libel is a civil, not a criminal, issue.
ReplyDeletethat information was really nice. thanks
ReplyDeleteKant, Anthony
Free Radicals, Sagging Loose Skin
OK, I know we're talking mostly about literature, but I really hope, for the sake of whatever sanity Crunchy has left, that he doesn't wander into the theater at the cineplex that is showing White House Down. The sight of an idealistic black president who looks and sounds a lot like Obama teaming up with a heroic capitol policeman (one-a-them public employees) to foil a plot by a corrupt corporate suppliers of military hardware to start The Last War America Will Have To Fight might just fry the last of Rod's neural circuits.
ReplyDeletedidn't you make some kind of comment about a liberal using a hammer to sculpt where a conservative would use the hammer to smash? Better said than that.
ReplyDeleteOh I completely agree, although I'm pretty sure Heinlein was trolling us a bit with the book, too. If anything he leaned pretty far in the libertarian direction.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading Heinlein's Job in junior high while attending a "christian" (white flight) school. When the characters were dimension hopping they wound up in a world much like ours with stop signs and traffic signals, and very few cops. The fundamentalist main character is puzzled that people are willing to obey laws even when there is no real fear of punishment.
ReplyDeleteHe did write a lot of dreck, but he occasionally got some things right.
Ah, yes, redemptive, indeed. For it sayeth in the Epistles of R. Digestus that "Laffer is the best medicine."
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know. That was kinda my point. The movie mocks Heinleins libertarianism.
ReplyDeleteWait, is it just me or can that sound really anti-gay? Wasn't meant that way, more the opposite. I'm kinda lost here in my own joke.
ReplyDeleteFor someone who is asserting the power of narrative, Crunchy isn't very good at establishing one himself. After once again rolling his dead sister out (has he told you that he wrote a book about her? Well, has he told you today?), he meanders around, and eventually stumbles across the story of one Sam MacDonald, a former toiler at Reason, and how he's now an administrator at a hospital, and his mom, Dolly, a nurse, and how "[n]ow he’s the sort of man whose job it is to make sure there are no more Nurse Dollys—that is, no more women like Dolly MacDonald, his own mother." What does he even mean by that? Is it that Sam MacDonald is hamstrung by bureaucratic red tape from employing 73-year-old nurses, or, conversely, that he doesn't want his mom to have to work at 73 and is trying to fix that, or what? It doesn't say much for Rod's grasp of narrative when he can't even deliver a simple anecdote with a point to it.
ReplyDeleteI was taken, however, by this quote from Sam MacDonald: "Using spreadsheets to talk about healthcare is like trying to understand a strip club by analyzing its annual tax return.” The point that he's trying to make is that you're not supposed to forget the human side of the equation, I guess, but it comes off (mostly due to Rod's framing) as that a good narrative can paper over some of the uncomfortable facts regarding things such as healthcare, such as that it matters very fucking much if you're one of the names on that spreadsheet, say, in the accounts receivable column. (And, for that matter, I think that you could understand quite a lot about strip clubs by looking at their tax returns, given that they're basically money printing presses fueled by testosterone.)
More sanctimonious than Bobo? I mean, come on, infinity + 1 is still infinity.
ReplyDeletethe business of a conservatism with integrity is not to impose an
ReplyDeleteidealistic ideological narrative on reality but rather to try to see the
world as it is does not exist.
Success is measured by the size of the daily floor clean-up bill.
ReplyDelete"...someone needs to write about these things in a sustained way.”
ReplyDeleteThis is similar to what I call "having an idea to have an idea." I.e., "It would be great to think of a _____." But when I have an idea to have an idea, at least the person called upon to have the idea is me. I don't think, "Hey, I'll outsource this, take some credit, ten percent of the gross, etc."
Artists react to the human condition. Conservative artists react to a political state of affairs. Just as the most vehement right-to-lifers don't give a tinker's fuck about actual life, but rather long to control women and get revenge on sexuality, so conservative artists couldn't care less about actual people. They resent the "liberal" bias that in fact pervades life itself. So their "art" starts out as agitprop and gets worse from there.
ReplyDeleteAgreed--and I've written several critiques/mockeries of it AND A BOOK-LENGTH PARODY, fa fucksake. "The world's first 900-page shit list" just impressed even Mrs. Wonderful.
ReplyDeleteShe was great. Meanwhile, I know the writer of the movie. When I was planning the parody I asked him what he thought of Atlas. He said he never read it--except for Galt's 60 page speech at the end. You could have knocked me over w/ a feather.
ReplyDeleteThis struck me, too. "To see the world as it is" is the final punchline/symptom of delusion. Especially from a pious Christian. "I believe an invisible, omniscient, omnipotent personality, who created existence itself, loves us and cares about which part of our bodies we stick into each other, and under what circumstances, and that He (who is male) sent His son to incarnate both Himself and humanity, and to accept death as a token of redemption for sins enumerated in a magic book and committed routinely by every person who ever lived without punishment, because I see the world as it is."
ReplyDeleteOr, he would proclaim it a triumph of conservative filmmaking and then get all tangled up in his reasons why it is, like a fisherman who falls overboard into his own net.
ReplyDelete"It's not a lie if you believe it, Jerry."
ReplyDeleteI'm still laughing at Spag's trenchant hilarity. Quips like that don't grow on trees, you know.
ReplyDeleteAnd just when I thought I'd forgotten about "An American Carol."
ReplyDeleteNobody climbs up on the cross like Brother Rod. Dude has a wicked case of Jesus envy.
ReplyDeleteThen I guess the original movie (1950s) War Of The Worlds must be conservative- only consider how the priest is vaporized by the Martians, and then the military's Atom bombs don't work... end scene: church! God SAVES THE DAY!
ReplyDeleteI want to collect all the publications of Harold Bloom and immolate them in a tremendous bonfire to honor this comment. Hail, Muse! Et cetera.
ReplyDeleteLove that movie!
ReplyDeleteDreher: For one thing, conservatives today lack the artistic skill to tell stories as well as the left does.
ReplyDeleteYou know why? Because you're fucking Neanderthals. Smug fucking Neanderthals. Neanderthals who rejoice and celebrate in their Neanderthalism. And Neanderthals have no business in culture or policy. Why not? Because you're atavistic peabrains. You're all "Fire good!" until Obama comes out on favor of fire. Then you're all, "Fire baaaaad!
That isn't thinking, reason, principles, values, or "seeing the world as it is." It's being a backwards jackass because you couldn't get laid, can't get laid, are uptight about getting laid - or you hate blacks.
I fear you don't know how right you are. There is Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis, of Conservapedia who thinks that the theory of relavity, black hole, higher math, evolution, literature and too many other things to list are a liberal plot to undermine the authority of the Bible and all what is doubleplusgood which is synonymous with conservative.
ReplyDeleteI think this is correct. I remember back to the days* when mags like the Spectator and the Weekly Standard were uniformly chanting that A) all organs of critical opinion were properly right-wing, what with Taste being innately aristocratic and dependent on Selection, etc., (at which point Henry James belched in his grave and collapsed into dust), but that B) the perfidious left had stolen them all by stratagems too unholy to be named, so C) the righties would just have to steal them back, then D) in order to make extra sure that the paths of righteousness were not deviated from a second time, they would have to invent a few organs of opinion of their own, in which everything and everybody would be vetted from the get-go and from the top-down, materiel and presenters and everything, so that the Message could not be re-betrayed. You won't find the same stuff in the same magazines these days, because after the boogers had given due warning of their intentions they went ahead with their plot and succeeded.
ReplyDeleteAnd they still can't do it. They still don't write good novels, or film good documentaries, or write decent plays (example: get a load of what's happened to Mamet; it's like the Picture of Dorian Gray), or win the Internets on YouTube. This is while they (or the people for whom they front) control most of radio and TV and accumulate more and more influence in Hollywood. This is in the era of Faux News. This is with Malfoy Medved and Dreher himself manning the guns. They've got the instruments of communication and they've got most of the remaining organs of opinion but still practically everything they make stinks on ice and, even though they're in the position they initially craved, the one where they could write the reviews in which they praised and excused themselves, people are still willing to say so. They're willing to vote with the dollars they don't have and don't spend. They're willing to pass on the next shockumentary about Obama's Islamist Marxist Kenyan cannibal roots. They're willing to not pay to see the next installment of Atlas Shrugged. Of course Dreher is unhappy — it wasn't supposed to work out this way. Culture was supposed to be fakeable. Lysenkism was supposed to be the Key to Jumanji and the Good Time Coming was supposed to be at hand. Meanwhile the tail continues not to wag the dog: the excellence of cultural products still doesn't hang on how good their reviewers are willing to say they are. If I could I would feel for Dreher: his is the position of a man who has bought all the way in and whose investment has come to nothing. Sure, he's made a nice living out of his slice of The Business, and that's not to be sneezed at. But his faith has not panned out. He's faced, not with the realization that The Word is just a blurb, but that the blurb's not a good blurb. It's a pitch that doesn't sell, a cart with wobblewheels, a dog who won't hunt.
Poor guy.
*I know I'm dating myself back into prehistory with this. Oh well.
He'd claim that that president was, in fact, Herman Cain.
ReplyDeleteStill and all, wingnut welfare is a nice consolation prize for the Drehers of the country. Which is why everyone ought to be screaming bloody fuckin' murder about the free ride the 0.01% have been getting for nigh on thirty years. Maybe if that changed, the fatcats paying for the tripe being spewed by the wingnutz couldn't afford to pay for it, and the world would be spinning in greased grooves once again.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a big fan of book-burning. Kinda sets a bad example.
ReplyDeleteJust glue the pages together. I'm good with that.
Re: Harold Bloom— if I may quote Truman Capote: "That's not writing; it's typing."
ReplyDeleteNo, I agree, my one caveat being that IMO the reason guys like Dreher are not content with money (IOW the reason they're always bitching about everything, no matter how little reason they have, from a material point of view, to do so) is that they were told they could expect money and Glory too — they'd just have to manufacture the Glory themselves. Probably that sounded convincing, back in the day: Can do, says the cénacle, and they revv up the alembics. Then they sweat and they toil for twenty-five years (or more) at the end of which period their lead is still lead and won't turn into gold. It will turn into money, but not gold. (Proving if anything that while the Devil may keep his promises the same thing can't be said of every last one of his minions.)
ReplyDeleteCodename "Black Walnut"
ReplyDeleteThat's not glue!
ReplyDeleteI know precisely how right I am. They have been constructing an alternate reality for decades, and now they can't escape their epistemic closure.
ReplyDeleteI expect this is one of those times when reading a conservative when you've got to insert "white" before a bunch of things for it to make logical sense.
ReplyDeleteBut even so, unions are pretty goddamn persuasive. I know some folks in that demographic who are pretty sure Obama's 1.) a secret Muslim who's 2.) going to try to take their many guns who voted for him because their union reps convinced them he's better for their pocket books than Mitt "Seriously" Romney. I don't think a literary flowering planted in the salt of the earth here in Michigan is going to produce as many paens to Ronald Reagan and the glories of the free market as these jokers think.
True story: In 2004 I had a conversation with an older gentleman, college class of 1961, civil engineer, gated community, golfer, divorced ("She got half my money, and deserved it"), in the middle of making payments on a Russian bride, busily reading The Gulag Archipelago -- and he told me he had a great idea for a novel. Was very excited about it. I asked what it was about. I expected something high concept -- time travel and Stalin. Solemnly, he said this: "It's going to illustrate my theory that women ruined the workplace in America and we've been in decline ever since."
ReplyDeleteI laughed. I thought he was kidding! Oh, he got angry at the laugh. He was serious. So, desperately, I asked about the characters. He waved a hand, mystified at my question. He said the characters were of secondary importance.
So I risked a personal note: You're an interesting character, I said. You've got this Russian woman on her way because, as you say, Russian women still know how to make a man feel like a man. Think about that. Think about what it means if a character says that, not you, but a character -- the question in a novel isn't Is he right? That's a nonfiction question. In a novel, the question is Why does he think that? Trying to answer that could make a very interesting book.
Annoyed, he said flatly it was a lot more appealing to him to warn people, especially the younger generation who maybe didn't even realize we're in decline. The boomers were useless, but he saw hope in my generation; we might get it. He asked who I planned to vote for. When I said Kerry, he looked away, sighed "You'll grow out of that," and ended the conversation.
I think about this guy occasionally. He shared the facts of his life generously over drinks, and maybe I was an asshole by turning his idea against him. But if he really wanted to write a novel... right?
But to some people, art exists to state a lesson. That's the whole point of it. Asking him to see a book as a chance to explore ideas without solid answers was like asking a lifelong freight train to take a hard left. He wanted his book to state only the conclusion of his exploration of ideas -- an exploration that was maybe perfunctory and at any event took place off-stage -- and the events of the novel would be engineered to reinforce that conclusion. And maybe that's how he engineered his life too.
I'm not saying he made a terrible mistake there, exactly. I'm a guy who can decide nothing, ever, with finality, so I'm a whooooole other disaster. But I'm surprised I never thought of him in relation to Roy's Kultur posts till this one, because man. If that old golfer reads blogs, he definitely reads Dreher.
tl;dr, sorry.
You guys are killing HMDK with the imagery here, but it makes me larf, so please continue!
ReplyDeletePerhaps you should have just encouraged away, so that he'd waste ten years on the Great American Novel that no publisher would print. At least it would keep him busy and out of trouble.
ReplyDeleteOr you could have really fucked with him and told him that if he had a Russian wife on the way, he'd damned well better read Dostoyevsky.
Oh, indeed, they want glory. But, IIRC, Charlie Pierce, in Idiot America, suggested that the typical life of the American crackpot should properly be obscurity. Wingnutz welfare has upset the natural balance of things, to my mind. Without money (and free bandwidth), the Drehers of this age would lapse back into a well-deserved anonymity, in which, as far as I'm concerned, they can grumpily contemplate intemperate fortune and rail against Greatness Denied every Sunday in the park, along with the rest of the cranks.
ReplyDeleteCan do, says the cénacle, and they revv up the alembics. This is so nice. You have my axe.
ReplyDeleteI stand corrected.
ReplyDeleteMost people read it the other way around, skipping the speech.
ReplyDeleteI think everyone's missing the simplest explanation here. Dreher just wants to make Grand Poobah Storytelling Minister of Kulture the highest office on the Right and fill it with the only qualified person available, himself.
ReplyDeleteForget Marco Rubio, forget Rand Paul, forget Paul Ryan, they've all been consigned to a whole class of loserness which Dreher has now decided to plow under. From now on in Drehermind the storytellers shall lead the party and inherit the earth, and who more qualified to rule them all than the master storyteller himself, the author of the anemically selling Little Way of Ruthie Leming?
"But you all still need me!" Dreher shouts to the Right "I'm still relevant!"
And the Right answers with the rich insect chorus of a long Southern evening.
Don't worry my bemulleted Canadian action hero, I survived.
ReplyDelete"...and that young man's name could be Albert Einstein."
ReplyDeleteChristian logic? Is there something about Albert Einstein we don't know?
Common trope of conservative Christian chain email mythology. Occasionally it occurs to them that a Biblical source of authority is meaningless to a non-Christian, so they come up with a well-known and loved secular source of authority and pretend that that person would totally be a fundamentalist Christian.
ReplyDeleteExample.
Gone With The Wind is the most conservative (white, bigoted) book I recall reading, and it was fairly successful.
ReplyDeleteDEDUCTIBLE!
ReplyDeletePlease don't sneer so at Neanderthals. I know, its wrong to compare "conservatives" to pigs or hyenas or vampire squids, those poor innocent creatures. But at least they can demonstrate to us their superiority to conservatives, while the poor Neanderthals are extinct, and probably killed by conservative Cro-Magnon guys.
ReplyDeletetransmitted to them by Satan I first read this as "transmitted to them by Saturn, and I was really excited! Damm.
ReplyDeleteRainbow moonbeams and orange snow!
ReplyDeleteWhen conservatives actually sit down and write a novel, its usually porn. Awful, ghastly, sickening porn, at that. Consider Scooter Libby's book, or Mrs. Cheney. Bill O'Riley's Magnum Dopus.
ReplyDeleteWith a sex scene only Ayn Rand could love, i.e., a rape that the woman ends up loving.
ReplyDeleteWait. The "Bonnie Blue Review": Is that a reference to the Bonnie Blue Flag of the American Civil War era? (One of the original and first flags of treason?)
ReplyDeleteNo, on second thought, don't laugh at his stories. Treason is seldom funny.
I have a friend who is a bit on the conservative side, and he unabashedly believed that it was a piece of dreck.
ReplyDeleteMy late brother used to buy old Playboys for a junk shop. That was the test of whether they'd be bought.
ReplyDeleteIf you have European ancestry,( as I do) you may have as much as 4% of your DNA being Neanderthal. So they aren't quite as extinct as you think they are.
ReplyDeleteI'd have to say that great swaths of John Steinbeck are no longer readable either.
ReplyDeleteI remember my son at age 7 laughing his head off at 'Pogo' with obviously no clue as to the politics. Walt Kelly was funny and he could draw his ass off.
ReplyDeleteA perverse friend has named his new dog Bingo. To his credit, he laughed when, after some puppy outrage, I called him Dingo.
ReplyDeleteI managed to love both the Narnia stories and the Philip Pullman stories, but then I love good stories.
ReplyDeleteI once met Phyllis's husband and Andrew's father, J.Fred Schlafly, not too bright, not too handsome, just the sort to insist on a leading initial.
ReplyDeleteI wonder, after reading that --how many novels have such men read in their lives, that they would have such an idea of what novels should be like?
ReplyDeleteUmm, civil engineer, I'm betting one for sure: The Fountainhead.
ReplyDeleteWhich is where he must have gotten his notions about character development. After all, to Rand, all characters were simply mouths to issue very long, tendentious speeches, and this guy sounds as if he had a few of those in mind.
I know, make him listen to Choctaw Bingo for 48 hours without sleep.
ReplyDeleteThe Firesign Theatre called this one 45 years ago: "Honest stories of working people told by rich Hollywood stars!" Of course, in this case, it's "fifth-rate Hollywood failures," but it's the same general principle.
ReplyDeleteWhich is pretty funny, considering that the inevitable reaction on hearing his name is, "Gee, just like J. Fred Muggs."
ReplyDeleteI don't know what Dreher's yapping about. Conservatives have plenty of stories that they love.
ReplyDelete"Red Dawn," "Death Wish," "The Turner Diaries," just to name three.
Rod's story is a sad, sad one. He's not stupid at all, but somewhere along the way - maybe after getting fired from the Templeton Foundation because he just couldn't shut up about all the evil gays and sluts and his almost incomprehensible intra-church vendettas - his mean streak grew to freeway-size. He used to blog quite a bit on whatever he was reading (often quite interesting), but since coming on board at the American Conservative, he sounds like the Republican Jerry Springer - and he writes about all of these "perversions" in such a leering, creepy way that I hope Mrs. Dreher has the number of a good divorce attorney or two close to hand, because I think we're not that far from a Rod Dreher kinky sex scandal.
ReplyDeleteEwwwwwwwww.
"The Little Way of Ruthie Leming" may be a decent book for all I know, but Rod's self-promotion has been nothing short of sickening. And lately, he's been getting less-than-nice about his late sister on his blog, too. But she's done her job, I guess. He's riding his sister's death to riches - he got a million-dollar advance on the book. A million dollars.
Like I mentioned earlier, it's funny that Rod's written about art again, when he seemed to have thrown art and, well, intelligence in general overboard. He's great at throwing people overboard. When his idol/guru, Wendell Berry, came out forcefully for gay marriage, Rod threw him overboard with a glee that makes me wonder if Rod had been looking for an excuse, and was grateful to have found one. I will say that I think Wendell Berry's 40-odd books and hundreds of essays, short stories and poems easily trump (in an artistic sense) Rod's two mediocre books and creeptastic blogs (he does have multiple blogs now, too - West Feliciana Parish allows him to indulge his racial issues, for example).
(As a side note, Rod's also thrown his church overboard, too - he recently went the Mel Gibson route and pretty much set up his very own church (since the Orthodox Church in America wasn't good enough for him, he contacted probably the most conservative Orthodox group in the U.S., the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, to set up a mission in his very own parish). Interesting since you can go to Google and find multiple existing Orthodox churches in and around Baton Rouge, but Rod needed his very own. What a guy.)
I think Rod has another couple of books in him - I eagerly await the anguished anguishing that he'll do when he leaves his wife for either a younger model or because he finally comes out of the closet. I'm sure it'll be a lovely story, and in the end, just like with his sister's death, it will really be All About Rod.
Awesome. Just awesome.
ReplyDeleteDidn't Andrew Schlafly literally create his own Bible translation because all the others weren't sufficiently conservative enough? I hear Jesus got edited and rewritten quite a bit, especially.
ReplyDelete--I agree Rod is not stupid, but he does seem incapable of understanding some very simple things.
ReplyDelete--The self promotion involved in the Ruthie book is really quite sickening. Especially considering, as far as I know, that all of the profits go to him, not her immediate family. His sister has been dead all of what, two years now, and he has already written a book about her and shamelessly promoted it in literally scores of blog posts. Isn't that a little, I donno, exploitive?
--As for his getting less than nice about his sister on his blog, that is part of my point. It is weird for him, particularly after writing a book about how saintly she was, for him to be running down his recently dead sister. On the other hand, to the extent that she actually WAS nasty to him (and perhaps one or two select other people too), it totally refutes what he promotes as the lesson of her "story." If she was not a saint, well then, what makes her "way" anything special? And if she was seriously flawed, why should we think that she had the key to the "good life?"
---As for Berry, and Rod's religions, you are totally correct. I think it was on this blog that someone posted the not at all far fetched notion that, in a year or two, Rod would have hauled the long suffering Mrs. Dreher and the boys down to Nicaragua, that they would be living in a straw hut, and that Rod would be running around the rain forest yelling in triumph that this, finally, was the real "The Answer!" I think of those poor kids, whose grandparents were Methodists, who were first started along the way of Roman Catholicism, and who now are made to, literally, kiss icons down in East Podunk every night before bedtime, because Rod has decided to become Orthodox. Even weirder and more self indulgent that orthodox Orthodox is no longer acceptable to Rod anymore either. Rod will never find the Answer. Or, rather, he will continue to find it, but it will always be changing. Based on the last thing he read. Or, his guilt trip over his dead sister will wear out, and he will get restless and want to move again. Then he will jettison all of this Berry, rootedness, small town crap and, shamelessly and seemingly without realizing how transparent it is, say that God told him to do it!
"I think it was on this blog that someone posted the not at all far fetched notion that, in a year or two, Rod would have hauled the long suffering Mrs. Dreher and the boys down to Nicaragua, that they would be living in a straw hut, and that Rod would be running around the rain forest yelling in triumph that this, finally, was the real "The Answer!""
ReplyDeleteThat's a good summary of Barbara Kingsolver's "The Poisonwood Bible". Art!
Here are Rod Dreher's latest stories:
ReplyDelete"Mimicking Pornography"
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/mimicking-pornography/
and
"Modern Barbarians"
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/modern-barbarians/
Shorter, both: You monstrous sluts make these times evil.
Sorry, Rod, but I think more people are going to want to see Johnny Depp with a dead crow glued to his head than follow your stories. Try, try again.
FWIW I perceived it as a play on words, not an anti-gay thing.
ReplyDeleteWell, it was, but I kinda weirded myself out with that comment, because it was actually more that sharculese mentioned Chrisitan lit. and Narnia readily leapt to mind, hence closet (wardrobe). A little insight into how my brain works, I guess.
ReplyDeleteI just finished re-reading Starship Troopers as my son is reading it, and it's got great huge wodges of exposition and ideological set pieces. I must have skimmed over all that when I read it originally as child because it really breaks up the story. The thing is though, he kinda sounds like a libertarian, but he's really not. The whole point of all the polemics is that true virtue is racial survival and depends on the individual sacrificing himself to the collective through military service. And that the military prepares you to be a voting full citizen by teaching unquestioning obedience to authority. And that the societies of the 20th century collapsed because parents did not spank children so they went wilding. But since the return of public floggings everyone is nice and well behaved which is why the troopers are attacked by civilians on their first leave and also why the women's quarters (purdah?) on the star-ships have to have armed guards at the entrance. Which is because women are the the only reason soldiers fight.
ReplyDeleteNeeds more precious bodily fluids.
-dg