REACTION FORMATION. In certain slants of light, the blogosphere looks to me like a series of specimen tanks. Very little in it is really original -- though most days I do find writing there that is so incredibly bad that it shatters all known precedents for incompetence, which I guess is a kind of originality. But crap can be instructive if not elevating, and there are plenty of good examples of bad reasoning to be found.

Here's a classic by Crunchy Rod Dreher having to do with critics of Christianity and how hypocritical and "suicidal" they are not to be critics of Islam:

This is how the left works: yell "bigotry" to silence critics who confront them with arguments they don't wish to have. In Holland, Pim Fortuyn -- an openly gay hedonistic libertarian with a wicked sense of humor -- ran for prime minister on a platform that in large part warned the Dutch that they were going to lose their liberal democracy if they didn't confront the growing forces of Islamic extremism within their country's immigrant population. The hysterical left -- which is to say, the media and academic establishments in Holland -- called him a fascist, and left it at that. Fortuyn was so far to the left he made Barney Frank look like the Queen Mother, but none of that mattered to the left-wing Dutch establishment.

I honestly don't get this. Shouldn't liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging from the gallows.

Well, y'all know I roll: Jesus, Allah, Moses -- they're all comic-book characters to me. Having courted fatwa in the past, I can claim consistency -- as can Dreher, in his own, very different way: he has actually made common cause with Islam against decadent Western ways --

I probably have, re: fundamental morals, more in common with the first 500 people I'd meet in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran than the first 500 people I'd meet in Park City, UT, during festival time.

-- and, further, agrees with the mullahs that homosexuality is an abomination --

...a gay Republican male -- very successful guy, well-dressed, in the public limelight, not at all a desperate troll -- told me that this was a pretty normal part of gay male culture. He told me that he used to cruise public toilets looking for sex, in part because the stench of those locales smelled like "nectar"...

...what are the rest of us supposed to think about gay male culture, and the degree to which it self-defines according to behavior that most people rightly find repulsive?

So Dreher is mad at liberals for failing to defend gay people, whom he condemns, against Muslims, with whom he sides against gay people.

If this seems a bit muddled, you have to remember that Ole Rod sure is mad at liberals. It's a Southern thing. The last part of his post -- in which the liberal "wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind swinging from the gallows" -- reminds me of some of Dreher's other postings on "minorities," including this one, in which he decides that black folk who don't wish to sweat in the fields must be selling crack, and this other one, in which a black crime incident in New Orleans means that town is now "Mogadishu on the Bayou." Liberals must have done something to Dreher, or to his pappy, once upon a time, and he hasn't forgotten it.

TRAITOR. Thanks to Nancy Nall, I see Crunchy Rod Dreher has struck a new low. Because some guy made a movie about guys who fuck horses, Dreher thinks the Taliban may be onto something:

...what do you say to Muslims abroad who'd genuinely wonder why, if this kind of decadence is the fruit of American liberty, they should welcome what we have to offer?

You say, "If you don't like it, go ahead and continue to live in your medieval desert shithole, dumbass." That's what you say.

I believe that we have got to fight hard to defend the West against Islamic aggression. What, though, are we defending? D'Souza is right about this: the kind of people who make and celebrate "compassionate" movies about people having sex with animals are civilization's enemies.

You can understand Dreher's distress. Not only does he have to fight suicide bombers -- he also has to fight documentary filmmakers! And by "fight" I mean of course "write columns about." Amazing he finds the time to grind his pesto!

Dreher says that "I probably have, re: fundamental morals, more in common with the first 500 people I'd meet in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran than the first 500 people I'd meet in Park City, UT, during festival time." But he won't move to Cairo, Damascus, or Tehran -- dammit! -- because "I do not want to live under sharia or cultivate affinity for sharia-based societies, whose values I find in particular instances to be perverse and inhuman." (Emphasis his.) He doesn't say which "particular instances" he finds inhuman, but I have a sneaking suspicion book- and movie-banning aren't high on the list.

I sometimes -- cur that I am -- make fun of those of my fellow citizens who live in Bumfuck, Alabama and other such rustic locales. But it would never occur to me to declare that, because I do not myself enjoy snuff-dipping or tractor pulls, that I am in sympathy with the folks who want to blow those citizens up for Allah.

Yet for the past five years I've been called a traitor while Dreher has been drawing fat wingnut-welfare checks for his shitty writing and spending them on arugula and hemp clothing. Sigh. Wake me when this spaceship has left Bizarro World.

MY WAR ON IDIOCY, HOWEVER, PROCEEDS APACE. Rod Dreher, former film critic of the New York Post and professional Ned Flanders impersonator, tells his fellow anti-aesthetes at NRO why he don' gotta see no Brokeback Mountain to know them critics only like it because it's gay and thus appeals to their insatiable hunger for novelty:

Without quite realizing it--this happened to me as a conservative -- critics become suckers for novelty, especially of the transgressive sort. At its worst, you end up with a theater full of the most important film critics in North America at the 1998 Toronto Film Festival, roaring their approval of the creepy and misanthropic Todd Solondz's film "Happiness," which featured, among other transgressive delights, a comic set piece showing a suburban dad trying to drug his son's little playmate so he could anally rape him (he succeeded). It was one of the sickest movies I've ever had to sit through, but it received rave reviews--and, unsurprisingly, flopped at the box office.

The critics had to be wrong, see, because John Q. Public preferred.. what? Let's look at Happiness' opening week U.S. grosses. The box office champ was Eddie Murphy in The Holy Man, by the noted auteur Steven Herek. The title has the word "Holy" in it, so maybe Dreher interprets this as a victory for his pal Jesus. Also, #2 was One Tough Cop, starring noted Republican Stephen Baldwin. Clearly America was sending Solondz a message.

Yeah, critics are frequently out of step with the People. Like that arty-farty Citizen Kane? Those fairies still think it's some kind of masterpiece, but us normal people know better. Hell, it ain't even in color!

Fortunately we have people like Dreher around to tell us that his opinion and, he includes generously, the opinions of all professional critics, from Manny Farber on down, are no more meaningful than that of any brain-damaged cineplex trawler. That's the kind of conservative he is -- the kind that apparently really needs to identify with the LCD, despite his book-larnin'.

Just don't let the boys know ole Dreher gave thumbs-up to American Beauty. In no time he'll be screaming "But I was suckered by its trangressive novelty!" as they back him up against the fag-killin' wall.

UPDATE. I will point out that Dreher hasn't even seen Brokeback Mountain -- though that should go without saying, as the new schtick in rightwing circles is to mouth off about pictures you haven't watched!

For instance, get a load of this Freeper thread about Munich -- it's almost semiotic: they don't know what happens in the movie at all, but boy do they respond to the signifers "Palestine" and "Hollywood"! (Favorite quote: "I love movies about historical events. I would like to see this, but if it becomes a platform for making excuses for what these terrorist scum did, I'll ask for my money back." Oh, boy, wouldn't you love to be there: "Ah done come all the way down t' the city, leavin' behind mah wife an' kids an' giant TV an' the hitchhiker I was rapin' and torturin', an' ah has to put up with this here moral relativism? Fill mah hand, you son-of-a-bitch!")

And there's always Ann Althouse, who blows a gasket when one of her commenters asks why she's talking so much about (unseen by AA) King Kong:

...I'm not "posting a review." I'm blogging, which means I can write about my thoughts however I see fit. I try to make it interesting for myself and for readers. Dutifully seeing movies and reviewing them -- why would that be better? Because I ought to be fair to the guys who make movies? They don't deserve fairness! They try to con us into going to see junk that we end up not liking -- and they get our money all the time for that.

"Seeing movies and reviewing them -- why would that be better?" And a college professor is asking this question! The next time someone tells you that blogs are the wave of the future, show him that. He may still think they're the wave of the future, but he won't be so happy about it.

UPDATE. Professor Althouse declares me a "silly man," links to a movie timetable in Madison, WI, and issues what I believe is called a bleg ("Any examples of an actor or actress that does nostril-flaring spoofily, for deliberate comic effect?"). A commenter notes that Ellsworth Toohey is a bad guy in The Fountainhead. The blogosphere: is there anything it can't do?

YOU'LL RU PAUL THE DAY!

Sorry to trouble you lovely people with another "I thought I could no long be outraged" post, but I made the mistake of reading Rod Dreher this morning. He's been on another fact-finding mission/foodie vacation for a while, delectating his sacramental snacks in England and hanging out with pomposeurs like Roger Scruton. After days of pictures of food and tourist attractions, Brother Rod returns to the states fresh and ready to witchfind. A little kid in Texas (a state which has so disappointed Dreher in the past) apparently likes to sing his songs while wearing a dress and makeup. Dreher, who apparently never saw Dee Snider, flips out ("We have completely lost our moral minds") and then starts yelling about how them there he-shes can get their titties chopped off if they've a mind to, all they got to do is call up a doctor, what-all is happening to his beloved heterosexual America, "We are a sick civilization that deserves to be punished," etc.

I guess Dreher felt as if he needed a better button, and veers into this:

UPDATE: Another, very different but still disgusting way we treat children:

And then he quotes a Times story about the Trump baby jails. That's right -- Dreher is willing to stipulate that kiddie koncentration kamps might be sorta as bad as kids allowed to play dress-up. Of course, after years of "I'm no Trump fan but" posts in which he hints that he'll support Trump anyway because he hates homosexuals, that doesn't mean anything except that he's a coward as well as a bigot.

To add piquancy, here's a tweet from National Review legacy pledge Jonah Goldberg:

Clearly this little boy's family, like the parents of all little boys in skirts, wants grown-ups to fuck him. Man, drag's been mainstream since Lady Bunny; do we really have to wait for the new millennium for these dopes to chill out about it?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Sure, I like pop-punk. Even when it's new! Thanks to Alan Scherstuhl for this.

•   OK, for you deadbeats who are not regular subscribers to Roy Edroso Breaks It Down -- and why aren't you? It's cheap, it's superb, and it offers a great opportunity to contribute to the (already in progress!) death of journalism without having to expose yourself to the cancelculture sob-stories of Substack's marquee dweebs  -- here are a couple of freebies: First, my tribute to ham-faced Erick Erickson and his much-remarked-upon plan to solve America's armed mass murder problem by literally giving everyone a gun. And let's not sleep on his prose style! Here's the lede from Erickson's latest atrocity:

Every year, I spend time on Good Friday on radio focusing on that weekend. Regardless of whether one is a believer or not, most academic and secular historians list the death of Jesus of Nazareth as one of the top five most important events in human history. Quite frequently, it is number one on those lists.

Again, regardless of the theology, when we are dealing with a day considered the most important event in human history by people who do not even believe in Christ’s resurrection, we should probably pause and not just explore it, but explore the world around us as it exists right now in relation to that event.

He makes Jonah Goldberg look like Nabokov. Also, enjoy this bagatelle about two old Republican hands confronted by the New Breed. 

•   Speaking of old alicublog recurring characters -- well, first, check out this recent scene from Sesame Street where Elmo asks Russell why his skin is brown and Russell says it's melanin and Russell's dad says, "The color of our skin is an important part of who we are, but we should all know that we all look different... many people call this race, but even though we look different, we're all part of the human race."

Sounds simple enough, even corny -- something you'd think would be non-controversial, right? Well, here's what Rod Dreher thinks, in a post called (I'm not even kidding) "Segregating Sesame Street": 

I hadn’t realized how deeply the new progressive racial obsession bothered me until I saw that clip above, and realized that woke Sesame Street is now setting out to undo all the work that had been accomplished in the generations the show catechized. You know who taught my generation of children to see color? White people who longed for segregation’s return, and black people who lived in fear of white people who longed for segregation’s return.

Now kids can get that from Sesame Street. Good job, progressives; you are the most regressive force in American society today. I guess somebody has to teach the kids why it’s good to have segregated college graduations... 

 If you're thinking, how the fuck did Dreher get that from this video? the obvious answer is he only absorbs outside stimuli after it's bounced off the fascist funhouse mirror in his skull a few times, and he thinks everything would be hunky-dory if only black people would stop making a stink. But I should note also Dreher's alleged love of earlier Sesame Street, back before all the woke-SJW "we're all part of the human race" stuff:

I was born in 1967. Sesame Street was born two years later. I don’t remember a time before Sesame Street. It was my window into a world beyond the rural South. In 1999, when my wife and I moved to brownstone Brooklyn, I remember thinking, “I live on Sesame Street” — this, because the streets there reminded me of what I had grown up with. 

Aww, that's nice. Wanna know why Dreher left Brooklyn? As early as 2001 he was lamenting that his young son "won't have taken in the smell of tobacco, bourbon and dried gumbo mud flaking off hunting boots that is my father's aroma," and would instead grow up in "an urban culture dominated--indeed, in my social and professional milieu, overrun--by men without chests" and "a permissive culture that corrodes the moral structure his mother and I will try to build." Guess he found out Sesame Street was populated by he-shes, Black Panthers and moral relativists! Then he wrote at National Review in 2003, after he had split:

...all it takes is riding the NYC subway daily, and having to live with fear and loathing of the violent, profane and altogether anti-social teenagers who make public spaces here their playpens, to understand why middle-class people get fed up and move the hell out of town to raise their kids.

Now Dreher's blubbering that the TV show version of New York he claims he thought he was living in when he briefly career-moved there has been spoiled by a couple of African-American puppets. Yeesh, what a freak. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hope Fat Tuesday was good to ya.

•   Yesterday I released the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue about the Freedom Convoy fantasy and the credulous reporting that makes it look like a military invasion of the capital. There is little evidence that such a display of might is actually pending, however. Here’s a fun clip Patriot Takes found on Twitter of some Indiana insurrectionists looking at some trucks -- not big rigs, mind you, but pick-up trucks and some SUVs -- and declaring that the feds don’t stand a chance. 

Bottom-feeder websites like The Patriot Chronicles (warning: site is pop-up-spam-riddled) make similar claims:

Liberals must be losing their minds. We already know that the Biden administration has been afraid of this day—Just look at the fence they built around the Capitol, but the time has come. 

I think the reporter, “Daphne Moon” (guess this one’s not going in anyone’s clip file!), is talking about the fence that went up for the State of the Union address and has already been taken down -- but forget it, she’s rolling:

[Another website] observed the convoy in Missouri Monday, using the state’s traffic cameras. We estimated at least 500 participating vehicles, although it was hard to distinguish non-convoy trucks and other vehicles from those with drivers participating in the convoy… 

So, in other words, they saw a bunch of trucks on the highway. But here’s the main thing:

Online, the convoy’s following has grown. Aniano said the convoy’s followings on various social media platforms have moved from the hundreds to the thousands in the past few days…

Online -- that’s where I’m a Viking! They’ll keep this up until such fools as try it are hauled away, and then they’ll come up with another Army of Butch Stereotypes that will take over the government -- perhaps multiple editions of Joe the Plumber (remember him?) to clog the sewer pipes of the Swamp.  Got to have a dream/ If you don’t have a dream/ How you gonna make a dream come true? 

•   Oh, I also freed one of my REBID vaudeville sketches, this one about a Russian spam farm hit hard by economic sanctions. Of course, the joke's on us because Putin has plenty of spammers in the U.S., though I don’t know how much they’re getting paid. As you may have seen from my Twitter feed, Rod Dreher’s been very helpful to the subject of his famous 2016 “Putin: Our Tsar-Protector?” column. His current shtick is to cry UNDERSTAND, I AM VERY SORRY RUSSIA IS DOING THIS! at intervals while defending Russia. For example:

I can’t see where the West had any choice other than to have imposed harsh sanctions on the Russian government, but Westerners delighted by the punishment we are inflicting on the Russian people (as opposed to seeing it as a tragic necessity) are fools. We are in the process of immiserating an entire nation, and turning its people against us for a generation or more. 

We’re immiserating a nation! Boy, wait’ll Dreher finds out what Russia's doing to Ukranians! 

We are driving that nation, which we needed to help the West contain China, right into China’s arms. There may well have been no alternative here — at this point, I can’t think of one — but this has been a massive strategic defeat for us. 

I wonder who’s responsible for this massive strategic defeat? Maybe it’s the transsexuals Dreher’s always on the warpath against. Next Dreher approvingly quotes John Mearsheimer’s Ukraine Got What It Asked For POV and, as if he sees the Springtime For Hitler shock on his readers’ faces, rushes to explain:

I know, I know: we aren’t supposed to say these things. We are supposed to stay focused on the evilness of the Putin regime. 

Just like we’re not supposed to say the N-word! And we're supposed to say Orange Man Bad! It’s all soft totalitarianism, see.

Any introduction of complexity into the narrative cuts the purity of moral clarity. But facts don’t disappear because they are inconvenient to the story we want to believe. I’ve seen tweets in the past day or two from people saying that yes, the Ghost of Kyiv legend wasn’t true, nor are some of the other heroic pro-Ukrainian myths passed around this past week … but so what (they say): what’s important is keeping up Ukrainian morale.

To openly prefer a manipulative lie to the complicated truth is corrupt.

One million Ukranians have been made refugees by the Russian invasion. Dreher doesn’t dare call that a lie, yet, so he paints the corners. 

I’m taking some criticism in the comments section for spending more time talking about the way we in the West are responding to Russia’s aggression than I am talking about the aggression itself.

LOL no comment.

KISS OF DEATH. David Brooks tells us about the "young writers and bloggers" whom he believes will rescue conservatism from its doldrums. I feel it my duty to fill uninitiated readers in on those Brooks pets of whom I have some experience.

Paleoconservatives. The American Conservative has become one of the more dynamic spots on the political Web. Writers like Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison tend to be suspicious of bigness: big corporations, big government, a big military, concentrated power and concentrated wealth.

Rod Dreher has told his readers that the Catholic Church child-raping scandals are really the fault of liberals ("One wonders if the leadership of the national Catholic churches... assimilated any of this so-called progressivism in the way they thought about sexuality"); that he keeps a gun in his house because he's afraid of gay people; that he thinks a bride who shows a tattoo on her wedding day is a slut; that "I probably have, re: fundamental morals, more in common with the first 500 people I'd meet in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran than the first 500 people I'd meet in Park City, UT, during festival time," etc.

Also, Dreher defines his visits to the gym as "living out a conservative principle of taking personal responsibility and making hard but necessary changes to live within my means." Here's Dreher on integration: "People -- black, white, brown, rich, middle-class, poor, Christian, secular, etc. -- naturally want to be around people like themselves." And Lord, how he hates gay people.

I've been covering this guy for years, and if there's a more miserable, small-minded God-botherer out there I hope I never come across him. This is Brooks' leadoff hitter.

Daniel Larison's all right. I assume Brooks included him as a red herring.

Lower-Middle Reformists. Reihan Salam, a writer for National Review, E21 and others, recently pointed out that there are two stories about where the Republican Party should go next. There is the upper-middle reform story: Republicans should soften their tone on the social issues to win over suburban voters along the coasts.

This sounds more reasonable than the Salam I've read, who believes that to reform American culture the Right Sort must "outbreed the people you hate most"; compares the fining of BP for environmental crime to the slaughter of Native Americans; argues that flexible work arrangements for women in the workplace are the real tyranny, and woman-stay-home-take-care-of-baby the real freedom, etc. Plus he writes shit like this:

This leads me to my central fixation, which is the notion that most of our political and social conflicts are best understood as gang wars between people with different kinds of capital — people with cultural capital waging war on people with economic capital, or people with erotic capital deploying it to gain access to economic or cultural or social capital, and so forth.

This guy deserves not a plug in the Times, but a wedgie.

Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review has argued for family-friendly tax credits and other measures that reinforce middle-class dignity.

When it was pointed out to him that Red State family dysfunction was worse than Blue State family dysfunction, Ponnuru blamed it on black people. He is also the author of a book called The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life. 

Soft Libertarians. Some of the most influential bloggers on the right, like Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok and Megan McArdle...

Aaaaagggh! I give up. This reminds me of that bit from Annie Hall: "They give awards for that kind of music? I thought just earplugs."

UPDATE. I guess I should point to some McArdle Greatest Hits for the out-of-town crowd. OK, here's McArdle on why helping is futile ("It's all too common for well-meaning middle-class people to think that if the poor just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn't be poor any more"); on who the real victim is between the riches and the poors ("I doubt Occupy Wall Street will be assuaged by learning that the top 0.1% now only receive 8% of the income earned in the US, even if that number is the lowest it's been since 2003"); on how the exportation of manufacturing jobs to Chinese slave labor camps and resulting loss of jobs in the U.S. is a great trade because we get cheap crap ("I say to people, 'Why are you upset that the Chinese want to give us excessively cheap goods?' This is like a free gift from them to us. And we should be like, thank you, happy birthday!"); why giving health care to geezers is a big rip-off ("Moreover, as a class, the old and sick have some culpability in their ill health"), etc.

UPDATE II. Commenter mortimer makes a point about Brooks' full list: "Heather Mac Donald is 56, Tyler Cowen is 50, Dreher is 45, and most of the rest of Brooks' "young writers and bloggers" are in their mid- to late 40's. Even little Janie Galt is about to turn 40. .. If these boys and their ideas get any longer in the tooth they'll have to be put down."

Yeah. Despite Brooks' guff about how "these diverse writers did not grow up in the age of Reagan and are not trying to recapture it," they all clearly proceed from Reaganite premises: The market is the ultimate good, the poor are poor due to cultural rather than economic factors, and you better be nice to the fundamentalists because they're loaded.

But what really young jacks could Brooks have included? There's always the Kids from McArdle, Jane Galt's replacement crew during her frequent vacations, including Courtney Knapp, author of "Let's Abolish Tipping" (though to be fair she just wants to social-engineer the restaurant world, not stiff waiters for thought crimes like the Go Galt crowd), Tim B. Lee, who thinks toll roads are slavery, Katherine Mangu-Ward, who applauds the "university" Wal-Mart created for its employees (she went to Yale) and wonders why we consider jobs in America better than jobs in China, et alia.  Brooks wouldn't have to worry about them growing out of it -- as long as wingnut welfare exists, they'll have no motivation to do so.

BREEDER MAILBAG.

It's hard to pick a favorite among the many obsessions of Rod Dreher. His flat-out support of tyrants so long as they're religious ("Putin, Our Tsar-Protector?") is pretty good; his terror of the trans menace (“an older transgender said to him, ‘You’re just a kid now, but when you turn 21, we’re going to take you out and get you broken in’”) is even better. But for my money, his tendency to sputter over porn is the richest vein. I thought he had spiked his meter for good some years back, when that "2 girls 1 cup" thing was happening -- anyone who'd been around the block even once knew it was just the Fetish of the Week, something to épater the squares to be replaced with some other woo-woo the following month, but Dreher went so nuts over it that he appeared to be promoting it:

(I know that the way I'm writing about it will make lots of readers want to see the clip. I'm sorry about that, but there's really no other way to write about it. If you are bound and determined to let your curiosity win here, please at least go to the Wiki entry to understand what kind of images you are going to have burned into your brain forever if you watch the clip.) 

What kind of society do we have when that kind of information is easily available to people, especially to children? What kind of society can we hope to have?

Hur-ray, hurr-ay, hur-ray, only one tenth of a dollah! This week Dreher's on a real tear, fueled by his Reader Mailbag routine that's brought us so much pleasure in the past. In the first installment, one of several alleged correspondents says he grew up going to church but, stuck as he was in the "very liberal, atheist Pacific Northwest," what chance did he have to avoid mega-porno-sin:

I had my first encounter with Marijuana in a church parking lot. My friends from youth group turned me on to pornography at the age of 11 (perhaps one of the worst decisions I ever made, but more on that later). These same friends taught me how to swear, catcalled the girls in our youth group, and gave me a pretty good compilation of dirty jokes (I confess, I still enjoy the jokes)...

Haw haw, not much harm in dirty jokes -- they mostly just reenforce stereotypes, which is godly, rather than get you hard, which is not!

...I’m the oldest child in my family and have always had deeply conservative views on life (again, contradictory to my lifestyle).

Brother, if America only had a dime for every time it heard that one. Things got worse for our correspondent:

From about 16 through to November-December 2016 time frame, I lived a life of pretty pure hedonism. I struggled with romantic relationships (I’ve had one successful, long-term one, but even that was clouded by the girl’s inability to commit–I’m unfortunately still pretty madly in love with her).

Her inability to cum what? Eventually our hero got religion, but there's a stumbling block:

I easily gave up cocaine, nicotine, binge drinking, and casual sex. But I cannot give up pornography.

Maybe if he hung in with casual sex, he wouldn't need the porn. Well, to each his own. There are other witnesses:

I confessed my addi[c]tion over and over again in the confessional but still got no relief. Then God entered the picture again in the form of another book: Be A Man by Father Larry Richards. A sermon from Fr. Larry is like a punch in the mouth.

I have to say, nine times out of ten a punch in the mouth will stop you beating off. Next:

Porn made me impotent.

Nice lede! But...

I have been married nearly 25 years, and for most of the first 20 years ours was a “dead bedroom.” Despite the fact we managed to have some kids we would go months in between intimacy. On at least one occasion we went a full year. Many people would have left the relationship but I determined I was going to stay for the sake of my kids, and I wasn’t going to cheat because that could lead to all kinds of complications (like divorce and not being able to see my kids).

But porn – porn was available to satiate the sex drive.

...I'm not sure you thought out what was making you impotent. I thought Dreher would be spent for a while after that, but damned if he didn't come back today with more tales of porn horror:

Our daughter was asked by a boy to provide oral sex for him at recess… in first grade.

Another great lede! If these guys get tired of working for Letters to Rodhouse they can make some real money in the clickbait farms.

...The 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students at the local elementary school were using their school district-confirmed google accounts (for google drive to send homework back and forth) to sign up for youtube and some of them were posting videos of them dancing naked for all the world to see with their google/district email displayed. Most of the parents and school employees were totally unaware this was going on! The overwhelming majority of parents are clueless to what their little darlings are doing.

I'm still trying to figure out what actually happened here. Are these 8-to-10-year-olds actually taking videos of themselves nude and posting them on YouTube with their contact information? Has this correspondent alerted the parents, or the police? If not, what's stopping him? Is he afraid they'll take them down?

This other guy, I have to admit, paints a compelling picture of his youthful porn encounters back in the days of the horse and buggy:

Later, when we migrated to the burbs, a full blown Playboy was somehow acquired (God knows how). It was placed in the woods, under a giant pile of illegally dumped concrete. EVERYONE knew where it lived. By everyone, I mean every boy in a 2 mile radius. Occasionally, someone would say, lets go to the rock. Whence we sallied forth as a group to flip a few (maybe 9-10 total) pages of a dirty (I mean actually dirty) magazine. Then, almost in a daze, the magazine was placed back in the rock, and we left.

And today these men are in the Order of DeMolay and pillars of their community -- but share a terrifying secret! (I would so have preferred their version of I Know What You Did Last Summer to the one they actually made.)

I write this Thursday night; will Dreher be able to get it up again Friday? Come on, Brother Rod -- third time's the charm!

NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD. Rod Dreher thinks the trouble with religion today is it's not masculine enough. After a quote about how there are too many women at services, Dreher preaches:

I believe one reason so many male Christians responded deeply to Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" was because it depicted a masculine Jesus who chose to endure excruciating pain to rescue those he loved. The Christian faith teaches that this is what Jesus did, but somehow the intense physical courage that that act of love required is easy to overlook. Gibson didn't overlook it. The Jesus Christ of his film embodied manliness par excellence: a strong, brave man who was willing to suffer and die to save others. After I saw that film in a press preview, then went to Ash Wednesday services and heard the plush priest give a homily about how Lent is really supposed to be about learning to love ourselves more, I wanted to slug the guy.

This helps me understand the appeal not only of The Passion of the Christ, but also of contemporary action movies in which the hero emerges after numberless beatings and explosions to kick the ass of Evil. This certainly makes The Passion more interesting than I originally thought. Jesus got more savage treatment than even John McClane gets in the Die Hard movies, and in an age before gunpowder. But since the Biblical conventions made it impossible for Gibson's Jesus to go out and beat hell out of his persecutors, The Passion left its audiences to carry a dream of vengeance out of the theatre and into the world. One of Dreher's sources writes that a Mass "must be a certain kind of ritual. It must be majestic, soaring, even martial. It must challenge and call you on." No wonder Dreher hates the happy-clappy stuff: when one's God has been torn to bits, Christian Soldiers go not inward but Onward.

I have generally assumed that the agon of action heroes was something through which fans released the little frustrations of their lives, but I begin to see that for the devout it may actually be an animated version of the Stations of the Cross.

THE LATEST CRAZE.

If you see less of me here than previously, overwork at my cott-damn job and sloth are only part of the reason. So many of the conservative tantrums I see in print or online these days are dull beyond imagining and it's often hard to get inspired. Trumpism has made many of the brethren lazy; remember when they felt obliged to construct elaborate fantasies to defend their stupid ideas -- for instance, that marriage makes you rich? I sort of miss those days. I recall they used to even promote actual policies that were almost as funny as their rages against Lena Dunham. but why bother to try and make it look good when the most overt rightwing grifting and racism are now national policy, and your comrades in the Q miasma are coming up with ever more outlandish conspiracy theories for you to believe in? In this environment even my usual punching bags like Jonah Goldberg have lost quite a bit of sawdust; I mean, look at this shit. You see my dilemma.

But there are some Trumpkins\ tropes that are worth recording if only for the historical record (though I suspect future generations will remember us mainly from Leibowitzian memorabilia). A major example is the I'm No Trump Voter But shtick. I normally refer to this in the context of Rod Dreher, who is constantly using it in "I'm no Trump fan, but"/ "I'm no Trump supporter, but"/ "I didn't vote for Trump, but" locutions. Here's a recent example:

Politically speaking, religious liberty is the most important issue to me. I wouldn’t rule out voting against Donald Trump in 2020, because some other issue was so urgent, and so important, that it justified voting against my religious liberty interests. But every time I start to think that, some progressive organizations will come out with statements that portray ordinary First Amendment backers like me as some sort of unique and horrible threat to decency.

Dreher's column starts out as a defense of Jeff Sessions' obviously anti-gay God Squad, which he starts defending by quoting sympathetic lefty milquetoasts. But when he runs out of those, he seems to realize all that's left for him is to defend it himself, which would make him look ridiculous; so he flips the table by talking about how libtards are making him, A Reasonable Conservative, vote for Trump, so there.

(For extra entertainment catch Dreher's update: "If your a liberal who can’t come up with anything more serious than, 'Christians are just mad that they can’t discriminate against blacks anymore' — seriously, this was one comment — then you shouldn’t waste your time commenting, because I’m not going to publish it." Sheesh, what a snowflake.)

Another fine example is John Kass' recent column at the Chicago Tribune, the news hook for which is Paul Manafort's trial. Kass takes Manafort's side, believe it or not ("Democrats are lathered up with the trial of this B-movie villain, this Manafort, whose alleged crimes took place long before he worked a few months for Trump"), and even quotes Mollie Hemningway, a hi-sign for Trump dead-enders. But, probably realizing (like Dreher) this tack will make him look stupid if he doesn't gussy it up somehow, Kass devotes most of his real estate to how the Media -- from which wingnut columnists always exempt themselves -- are dissing The Little People, and (everybody say it with me) This Is Why Trump Won. Kass declares himself Not A Trump Fan, of course -- "he wasn't my choice for president" -- but he kicks it up a notch by suggesting that even Trump's voters aren't Trump fans, either:

Many were shocked by Trump’s manner, by his bragging, his rude behavior, reference to his hand size, his boorishness, the way he treated women.

And still they voted for him. Why? Because they loathed the other side more. They loathed the establishment. They loathed the media. And their reservations about Trump were washed away by the laughter following Clinton’s “deplorables” line.

No wonder people seem so grumpy these days -- they all have a president that nobody wanted!

I've been trying to come up with a name for this line of guff. "Tsk-Tsk Trumpism" is one I like; @TelegramSam100 has offered "Trumpism Private Reserve (Not that yucky stuff the peasants drink)" ; @txoffender says "Trump Goggles." Any other ideas?

GUN NUTS, PART INFINITY.

The latest NRA charmless offensive shows how bad the situation is. When the NRA found its normal post-massacre duck-and-cover routine -- that is, waiting until our attention was drawn away from the latest multiple-casualty Second-Amendment demonstration -- had left it vulnerable to the protests of telegenic survivors, they immediately went on offense, with Wayne LaPierre babbling about socialists and Dana Loesch lying at top speed at the Parkland town hall. If you want to know why LaPierre and Loesch chose not to take a more reasonable and conciliatory approach with the kids in the wake of the mass gun murder they'd just suffered through, dismiss from your mind the absurd idea that it's the natural product of principled advocacy; ideas that are right don't need to be defended with bullying and bullshit. The NRA's PR makes clear that they are not peddling an Amendment or a specific interpretation thereof so much as the fear of violation and the thrill of violence.

That's why they came hard -- not because they're tough, and certainly not because they're right, but because they're full of shit. And they count on their belligerence to convince Americans they're fighting for them, rather than fighting to keep up the nice livelihood gun manufacturers have bestowed upon them, and against "socialists" and other ooga-booga rather than against the young citizens who have seen the effect of their depravity up close and want it stopped.

Too many liberals seem to think shame or conscience is going to stop these guys. No. They have to be repudiated decisively at the ballot box and throughout public life. If they aren't, things will only get worse.

Depressing, isn't it? Thank God we've got Rod Dreher for lulz! Right out of the gate God's Gastronome gives us a striking comparison:

I get as annoyed with right-wing Second Amendment absolutists who insist that any attempt to control guns will lead to a civil liberties apocalypse as I do with left-wing First Amendment absolutists who hold that any attempt to control access to pornography is welcoming Big Brother.

You'll get my porn when you pry it from my warm, sticky hands, Dreher! Porn, or what passes for porn at the BenOp compound, turns out to be much on Dreher's mind: After suggesting school shootings are caused by kids going to large schools -- as opposed to the one-room schoolhouse where Rod's ancestors l'arned to read and cipher -- he suggests a connection to stories in magazines like The Lily and Teen Vogue "pushing polyamory," ass-fucking, ice cream douches and vibrators -- "the most tender, intimate expressions of love between a man and a woman, reduced to bestial gestures," preaches Rod; "...It’s almost as if the dominant culture and its institutions are radically dehumanizing teenagers, and are mystified as to why some of those teenagers don’t see others as human beings worthy of respect and care."

I wonder what's the mechanism of action for this -- do the antisocial young men who comprise the majority of mass murderers get corrupted by reading Teen Vogue and Vulture? Or do they somehow meet the sort of big-city gals who read these publications, perhaps at potential-mass-murderer mixers, and become intoxicated and corrupted by their intimate Ben & Jerry's scent?

As usual, the Dreher "reader" "letter" is the highlight:

UPDATE: Reader Matt in VA writes:

I am surprised that you don’t draw out the parallel between school shootings and another common theme on this blog — early-onset transgenderism.

The easy availability of machine guns can't be the problem; otherwise why would they be so much more scared by the monsters under their beds?

UPDATE. Who could have suspected that Rod would have a woody for third-generation French fascist Marion Maréchal Le Pen? She speaks French and hates homosexuals -- il se pâme! ["Lady Marmalade" plays] Voulez-vous détester les Noirs (ce soir)?

FRIDAY AROUND THE HORN.

Happy Labor Day folks. Take it easy, but take it.

•   Rod Dreher's going on again about how the atheists are persecuting the Christians. (The casus bellow this time is, two years ago Vanderbilt University kicked a Christian student org off-campus because they wouldn't sign a non-discrimination agreement.) This is from Dreher's gloss on some other Jesus freak:

He goes on to say that Christians — the untame ones – need to learn how to deal with the coming scorn with “a disregard which quickly turns the pathetic instruments of stigmatization into jewelry and art.” Why were the martyrs joyful? Because they were confident that from their suffering, new life would emerge. So too should we be...

“Blessed are you when they persecute you and speak all manner of evil against you.” What if we lived as if that were true?

Dreher, as you may know, lives off writing and royalties and is always fucking off to Paris. Some martyr! When they send the lions after Dreher I can see him trying to throw them off the scent with a coq au vin. "But it's free range" will be his last words.

Believe it or not, though, there's someone worse on this subject. Well, we can't be too surprised, it's Erick Erickson in the tertiary stage of whatever's wrong with him:

A lot of Christians have long thought they could sit on the sidelines. Only the icky evangelicals they don’t much care for and the creepily committed Catholics would have to deal with these issues and the people who hate those deeply committed to their faith. They, on the other hand, could sit on the sidelines, roll their eyes, and tell everyone that they didn’t think it was that big a deal. They were, after all, on birth control or watching whatever trendy HBO series is on or having a cocktail or perfectly willing to bake a cake for a gay wedding.

Do conservatives never drink cocktails? Or are my cheap beers now rendered "cocktails" just because I, a filthy liberal, am drinking them? Well, I always suspected P.J. O'Rourke was full of shit.

...You may think you can sit on the sidelines. You may think you can opt-out of the culture war. You may think you can hide behind your trendy naked Leena Dunham t-shirt while you sip trendy drinks talking about trendy shows and writing columns demanding Christians be forced by the state to bake cakes, provide flowers and farms, and offer up photographs of gay weddings. But not only will you one day be called to account to your God...

Yeesh. Here's a serious question: Does this sound like a spiel you'd expect from a movement that was gaining adherents? (Also: Did someone actually show Erickson this shirt? Well, at least his friends have a sense of humor.)

UPDATE. In comments, right out of the gate, (the good) Roger Ailes: "I think Eerick Eerikson could pull off a trendy naked Leena [sic] Dunham tee-shirt. And by pull off, I mean masturbate into."

•    But I thought conservatives loved it when businesses got tax breaks to promote job growth... oh, it's communist TV shows, nevermind. Key phrases from Dennis Saffran's City Journal article: "contemporary progressivism is an upper-middle-class movement that caters to the social libertarianism of coastal elites," "crony capitalism," "corporate welfare," etc. Key missing phrase from his article: "trickle-down."

CRUNCHY ROD DREHER DOUBLE PLAY! The guy just gets worse. In one of his last spasms of infatuation with Amanda Marcotte, he complains that the MSM isn't as enraged by her Virgin Mary jokes as he is, and approvingly quotes the Catholic League madman Bill Donohue:

Newsweek reeks of a double standard. In its December 11, 2006 edition, it said that Michael Richards had gotten himself in trouble for his ‘racist rant,’ and in the same article it recalled Mel Gibson’s ‘anti-Semitic remarks.’ On February 5, 2007, it said that Isaiah Washington got himself into hot water for making a ‘homophobic comment.’ In other words, when someone makes a racist, anti-Semitic or anti-gay remark, Newsweek labels it as such. But when obscene comments are made about the Mother of God or religious conservatives, it counts as mere criticism.

So in Donohue's and Dreher's mind(s), making fun of their imaginary friend is the equivalent of calling someone a nigger or a faggot.

But the cream of the jest comes later:

Many on the left can't see what the big deal is, and say that Christians who are offended by this wouldn't have voted for Edwards anyway. Really? My "Kingfish" gibes aside, I was interested in what he had to say about the economy, and populism. But now, forget it.

This is the same guy who suddenly decided last year that the Iraq War was a terrible mistake and that the Republicans were thoroughly corrupt, but concluded, "I don't think the country deserves the Democrats" -- largely because the Democrats might slow down the criminalization of abortion for which Dreher prays his knees off every night.

The Republicans could be running drunk and naked through the country setting fire to barns, and Dreher wouldn't vote for Edwards or anyone remotely like him. Jesus, don't these people have a whole commandment about lying?

BARELY LEGAL. I've been rough on Rod Dreher for siding with Islamic fundamentalists against the pornography that made this nation great, but maybe I merely misunderstand him. Maybe he's really just a cultural adventurer, curious about and tolerant of strangeways around the globe. For instance:

In our culture, it is abnormal for 14 year olds to marry. The fundamentalist LDSers have a communal structure built to accomodate married 14 year olds (well, "married"). I happen to think it's terrible to force a 14 year old to "marry" a 50 year old man who has five other "wives." I would put a stop to it. But shouldn't we at least ask ourselves on what ground we stand to criminalize the practice, when many of us are perfectly willing to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.

If you're surprised Dreher, who doesn't even want high-school girls to engage in inter-gender wrestling, is relatively cool with Church of Lolita-Day Sex, you shouldn't be. The cultists have a skygod and the sort of "Benedict Option" separatism that gets Dreher mistily reminiscing about David Koresh. With God all things are normative!

I think this presents an opportunity to advocates of gay marriage: simply declare homosexuality a faith and gay marriage one of its sacraments. Not only might they finally get Dreher's respect (and that of a wider, momentarily-confused redneck populace), they would be eligible for government grants.

They would obtain other rights, too, it appears:

On January 10, 2004, the church suffered major upheaval when Dan Barlow, the mayor of Colorado City, and about 20 men were excommunicated from the church and stripped of their wives and children (who would be reassigned to other men), and the right to live in the town.

If I'd known when I was younger that there were churches that followed the ways of Gor I might have rethought this whole atheism thing. Well, too late for me now: I'm too strong in my lack of faith and values to endorse such religious practices, except on a fantasy role-playing level.

THE HATE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS PREMISES.

You may have seen Katherine Stewart's Times Op-Ed suggesting that the "government schools" theme beloved of modern conservatives has its genesis in slavery and segregation. Some relevant clips:

Before the Civil War, the South was largely free of public schools. That changed during Reconstruction, and when it did, a former Confederate Army chaplain and a leader of the Southern Presbyterian Church, Robert Lewis Dabney, was not happy about it. An avid defender of the biblical “righteousness” of slavery, Dabney railed against the new public schools. In the 1870s, he inveighed against the unrighteousness of taxing his “oppressed” white brethren to provide “pretended education to the brats of black paupers.” For Dabney, the root of the evil in “the Yankee theory of popular state education” was democratic government itself, which interfered with the liberty of the slaver South.

Flashing forward, Stewart touches on the influence of protowingnuts James W. Fifield Jr. and Rousas Rushdoony, and on the Brown v. Board of Education fallout in the South, where "some districts shut down public schools altogether; others promoted private 'segregation academies' for whites, often with religious programming, to be subsidized with tuition grants and voucher schemes."

Stewart also mentions the influence on this movement of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, which insight appears to have twisted some of the brethren's guts -- for the same reason that, you may have seen, Nancy MacLean's recent book on another libertarian saint, James Buchanan, has enraged rightwingers from Reason to The American Spectator to Jonah Goldberg (and, in my view, if you were trying to triangulate the absolute worst of the conservatarian movement you could hardly pick three better coordinates).

Speaking of worst of the worst, Rod Dreher gets after Stewart today:

...I read this op-ed piece from today’s New York Times, in which Katherine Stewart says that people like us — parents who have chosen to withdraw their kids from public schooling, or not to send them there in the first place — are Jesus-crazed racists who hate democracy, or at best useful idiots of said villains. It is liberal crackpottery at its purest.

Then Dreher quotes two of his buddies (Andrew T. Walker and, God help us, David French) on how bad she is -- but he does not quote Stewart. At all. In fact, he doesn't even try to characterize her arguments, except as something he and his pals hate -- and his quotes from them don't mention her historical sources, except for an offhand reference to "tying [church schools] to a Confederate past" from French. Her point of view only appears, distorted, as a reflection in the shiny surface of their rage.

Even for Dreher this is a bit much. But I shouldn't be surprised. As we've seen time and time again, Dreher is pretty much a segregationist, and usually drenches that sentiment in many thousands of words of God-gab and crap sociology to make it hard for non-initiates to see clearly. But what makes him even more defensive and obfuscating in DJing this hatefest than he is in the normal course of his writing, apparently, is when someone catches on to the whole rotten shtick -- that the conservative movement (and the white evangelical movement that feeds it votes) is not just touched by racism, but relies, indeed is founded on it. Then he puts on the whole armor of God.

That's probably what drove him to such an extreme: It's a bit early for him and his comrades to reveal themselves -- after all, Trump's only been in six months; there'll be time enough to talk turkey when this godless democracy thing has been weakened sufficiently to be dispensed with. Meantime anyone who's caught on early has to be swatted like a fly.

UPDATE. I see Megan McArdle has gotten in on this, too ("Demonizing School Choice Won't Help Education," LOL), though she brings her own unique bucket-footed style to it:

One could quibble with some of Stewart’s summation. But it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.

Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.

Sure, some people want to get their kids out of public school because they're segregationists, but be fair -- some people want universal health care because they want to gas all the Jews.

FOOD OF THE GOD-BOTHERERS.

Today in What's Rod Dreher On About This Time we find the Get-Ready Man inspired by James Poulos, whose bright idea is that, since America has been ruined for the Godly by atheistic sex freaks, maybe the Godly should leave America and go colonize Europe -- you know, the way religious cults used to take over territories in the American outland and establish monocultural enclaves like Rajneeshpuram and Ave Maria --

...growing numbers in the U.S. may conclude that the only way to retain the essential character of the West is to relocate to Europe...

Not every American will pose that question or act on it. But for those who can match a personal interest in doing so to a more cultural or ideological interest in helping “save” Europe from another traumatizing and turbulent break with its past, returning to the old world for the good of western civilization may hold a unique and powerful appeal.

Poulos briefly acknowledges that "the refusal of large numbers of Americans to seek their fortune outside their country even when it has become effectively impossible for them to live fruitfully at home" may owe in part to the fact that not every Godly-American is a trust fund kid with enough dough to take himself and his quiverful off to Belgium for a Gap Lifetime -- he even brings up drug addiction as an impediment because that's really hot when talking about the poors these days -- but finally realizes paupers don't read shit like this anyway and declares "the primary obstacle to seeking better fortunes overseas is probably a raw lack of imagination — an inability to conceive of a picture of a future outside the new world." So bootstrap your imaginations, Jesus peeps -- maybe run a for-profit education scam like The Leader to fund your travels, or better yet a Kickstarter! Hell, Kim Du Toit did it even before Kickstarter was a thing.

Nutty as that is, Dreher's reaction is ever better. First, he wistfully declares that if he were a younger man, he might do just this:

I don’t want Notre Dame de Paris to become either a mosque or a museum. There’s something in me that wants to resist by loving these things that we Christians in the West have been given, but have for far too long left uncherished.

I assume Dreher's idea of loving Notre Dame is banding together with like-minded morons in front of the place to form a cordon sanitaire against Muslims. Dreher also talks about how he loves all the old things you can see in Europe and "feel[s] at home in Europe in ways that I just don’t in America" -- he's not the only one wearing sandals, for one thing -- and as an unbidden bonus (maybe the old lady walked by, looked over his shoulder, and muttered, "Is it already time for another foodie vacation?"), leaps to a defense of his many gastrotravels:

Yes, it’s true that I love to take vacations to Europe. The food is something I love, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Aside from being delicious, the cuisines of European countries are expressions of deep and abiding traditions. I have a sacramental mentality, which means that I don’t sit down at a table in the Umbrian mountains and eat an antipasti platter of cured meats and experience them as merely delicious. I learn what I can about why cured meats, and cured meats in this particular style, came to be associated with this region, or this village, and what the cooking here says about the local culture and its traditions. I like to eat good local food and drink good local wine or beer. That’s one of life’s great pleasures.

See, when you ignorant peons eat fancy food, you're just gorging, but Rod's sacramental -- meaning, I suppose, that when he says grace he does so in a dreamy voice meant to convey his sacramentality.

No wonder his family didn't want his bouillabaisse; all that sanctimony probably spoiled the flavor.

TRAMP THE DIRT DOWN. Sometimes people go too far. Your idea of "too far" and mine are probably very different: if, for example, David Broder were photographed working his own asshole with a Kewpie doll while eating Japanese schoolgirl shit, that would only favorably revise my opinion of him.

If there were a formula for what constitutes "too far" for me, I guess part of it would read "insanity + tedium." Many of my favorite subjects here are plain nuts, but their spirochettes, like Shelley's, drive them to poetic arias of insanity. But sometimes they get stuck in ruts, and their previously entertaining madness devolves into depressing monomania of the sort suffered by the madhouse gibberers in old horror movies.

Rod Dreher has reached the end of my patience. Having already declared common cause with the Islamic nuts who want us all to live under sharia law, Dreher today says that when Falwell said God blew up the World Trade Center because of fags, he may have been onto something:

...In fact, as uncomfortable as it is to contemplate, no Christian or Jew can rule out the possibility that God will judge America, and judge it harshly. And perhaps is judging America. The Bible, particularly the books of the prophets, are full of examples of God calling Israel to repentance, and bringing her to ruin when she refused. That God used the Babylonians as an instrument of chastisement does not imply that He endorsed the Babylonian Way of Life...

...When Bush 41 said "The American way of life is not up for negotiation," he was expressing what I think many conservatives (and liberals too) believe: that we Americans are not under anyone's judgment. From a Christian point of view, that's dangerous and wrong. We are under judgment. Humanity is.

Dreher has been a fun toy for a while, but I fear he has entered the realm of smokehouse-dwelling end-of-days psychos. He only perceives culture outside his smokehouse -- that is, the place the rest of us call "the real world" -- as a chimera woven by the Devil to confuse or (in the case of chesty dead blondes) titillate him. If you could wave a hand in front of Dreher's face, the eerie fixity of his gaze would not waver.

He is lost to us, or at least to me. I am reminded of Harry Truman's judgment, in Plain Speaking, of the unfortunate President John Tyler, which if I remember correctly ends, "He wound up in the Confederate Congress, and that was the end of him."

WRITING LESSON. Two interesting views of what was so awesome about 9/11, from two very different writers. First Christopher Hitchens:

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.

Second, the man who quotes him, Rod Dreher:

I didn't, and don't, ultimately value the same things as Hitchens, but in reading this passage, I recognize his sentiment. To walk around New York City on that day and on the days that followed -- and probably to walk around where you live too -- was to see things with crystal clarity. As I've written elsewhere, that clarity, or perception of clarity, was more of an illusion than we could have recognized, and it led many of us to make bad decisions. Nevertheless, whatever one's view of the Iraq War, the feeling all, or nearly all, of us had on 9/11 and in its immediate aftermath was one of ultimate meaning returned to the world. Irony was suspended, and it was possible to feel not only real love for your neighbor, but love for your country, and a recognition of what you really did love, but took for granted -- until it was threatened. It couldn't last, but it was -- I have to confess -- a great feeling. All the usual bitching and moaning we do as part of our everyday lives ceased. We saw pure, uncut evil, and we knew it wanted to kill us, and we didn't know what we were going to do in response, but we knew we'd do something. And we were clear that Everything Mattered. Whatever else life was, it was no longer boring. We lived in interesting times.

One of the things I still admire about Hitchens' writing is that I believe him: not his belligerent analyses, but his portrayal of his own thoughts and feelings. He identifies clearly the personal obsessions that informed his strange reaction to the horrible event -- the multicultural versus the monochrome. He puts responsibility for his feelings on himself, and dares the reader to find him insane, because he doesn't care what the reader thinks. Hitchens seeks not to beg his reader's attention and understanding, but to command it.

Dreher has none of this. To speak in the first place of "the feeling all, or nearly all, of us had on 9/11" is a glaring sign that even in confessional mode, Dreher thinks in groupthink, and his announcement that our group feeling was "one of ultimate meaning returned to the world" shows that he can't even get groupthink right. "It couldn't last, but it was -- I have to confess -- a great feeling... And we were clear that Everything Mattered." Even if you weren't there, you'd have to doubt this, it's so phony. The problem is that Dreher can't take ownership of his own strange thoughts -- he has to project them on all of us. I think in the back of his mind he knew he was saying something awful, and so sought to offload responsibility for them.

If you can't take responsibility for what you're saying, you might as well shut up.

CULTURE WAR: FIRST TIME AS FARCE, ELEBBENTY-'LEBBENTH TIME AS CHRISTIAN PUPPET SHOW RUN BY ANGRY METH ADDICTS. Attention: all little culture warriors must file into the auditorium to have their penises painted blue and to attend a lecture by Mr. Ace O. Spades on why Iron Man, though not overtly patriotic, is still acceptable to the Board:

And whatever sort of muddied moral [Director Jon Favreau] might be attempting to suggest (or avoid suggesting, more likely), he presents the US military itself as a positive force for good, entirely composed of professional, patriotic, and very human folks just trying to do what's best for America -- and the world, too...

Like any action movie that might attempt to push pacifism as an ideal, [Iron Man] can't avoid the crushing contradiction forced upon it by the action genre: Force works, and some people just can't be dealt with any other way.

Careful, comrade Spades! That sort of world-historical thinking smacks of quietism, implying as it does that popcorn aesthetics will lead inevitably to the dictatorship of the prattletariat, when what is wanted is struggle. You big 'mo.

At least Comrade Spades is tackling important subjects: Michelle Malkin is carefully calculating the limits of acceptable deviation from orthodoxy in her fucking coffee. Malkin got "hooked" on Starbucks in Seattle (no doubt while still an innocent young girl, and by jive-talking beatniks), but "the company’s ridiculous policy barring gift card purchasers from customizing personalized cards with the phrase 'Laissez Faire'" -- and, ahem, a price increase -- unhooked her. "Lots of other consumers are coming to the same conclusion," she says, "Starbucks’ profits are down 28 percent." From this you might get the impression that ordinary people are boycotting Starbucks' socialism rather than its absurd prices. Perhaps they're also turning to Dunkin' Donuts, as Malkin did, because they're "unapologetic supporters of immigration enforcement." I mean, Americans just don't make important decisions like this based on money, especially when the economy is doing so great.

Amusing as we may find the image of Malkin tearing, Harry Caul-like, her kitchen to pieces in search of treasonous condiments, imagine how much worse it must be at the home of Crunchy Rod Dreher. First he credulously repeats the story of a family that fell victim to "synergistic toxicity" of "chemicals dispersed in regular paint," varnish, and stuff like that. Rod can relate: "I know that there are certain cleansers that I can't be in the presence of for more than a minute without getting a splitting headache." But Brother Rod really gets nervous when it is suggested that chemicals in ordinary soft plastic "mimic estrogen" and may "feminize male children." The quoted material posits "a reduction in the length between the anus and the sex organ as an external marker of feminization" -- bedcheck at the Drehers' will soon become a memorable event. An obviously shaken Dreher "went into the kitchen last night and looked around to figure out how we could clear out these plastics ... and was overwhelmed by the difficulty of the task. And that's just the kitchen." I expect Dreher will soon launch the Big Decontamination in earnest -- no phthalate is gonna make a hermaphrodite of my boy! -- and the poor kids will end up lugging water in wooden pails and playing with toys made out of clay and straw. Dreher'd convert to Amish if he weren't afraid his boys would get involved with Hershey's Chocolate.

YOUR MOMENT OF DREHER.

Rod Dreher:

It’s a pet peeve of mine when NPR’s Hispanic on-air reporters conclude their pieces by pronouncing their names in a strong Spanish accent. It’s a gesture that calls attention to itself. I’m not sure why, but sometimes you hear American reporters — and not just Hispanic ones — pronounce the name of Latin American cities with a distinct Spanish accent... 

The identity politics of liberals spoil everything.

Throughout his post, you will find hundreds of words about how Dreher is really just talking about proper communication, and hey, he softens his accent when he goes on the radio so what's the big deal, and "who gets to define what is an authentically black sound, anyway? And why are the broadcast-neutral voices of most NPR personalities considered 'white'?" etc. He seems to be afraid the big bad multiculturalists want to make his beloved NPR sound like a ghetto barbershop.

But it's the quoted bit that really lives for me. Imagine Dreher bristling as some insolent Dominican pronounces his own name too Spanishy! I suppose he gets it from this:

The rest of his posts are about political correctness, natch.