The face of the Benedict Option
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| Rod Dreher enjoying the Benedict Option immensely |
Hey there!
Living out that Middle Ages monastic dream like you were told to?
Cashed out your 401(k) to stack your basement to the ceiling with tubs of Wise Foods and good old wholesome white Navy beans?
Powering through another bowl of cold granola as you nod?
Kids still happy with their 538th viewing of the discount copy of Bambi you got them?
Good for you! You'll never be drinking at the horse races in Italy anyway.
Laissez les bons temps rouler, homeboy!
As I had figured, the ongoing hijinks of Dreher and his pal* are even more ...uh...(insert your descriptor here).
ReplyDeleteFor our Catholic readers, that post also includes the bonus of a condescending ("I love me a Catholic country, for sure.") belittling of a relic of St. Catherine of Siena.
*Whom we actually see in a photo this time, as opposed to his mysterious companion on the last trip.
Am also thinking of Mrs Dreher's potential reaction to the photos in that post (which anon also noted here), as she maintains the house and schleps children to and fro, all by her lonesome and in the heat and humidity of south La. (Baton Rouge will be 92 tomorrow, but feel like 103).
DeleteI know what Mrs Pik's reaction would rightfully be. I'd have to come up with something better than I-had-to-do-it-for-the-book-that-I'd-already-written.
Excellent points, Pik. As I mentioned in a previous comment, Julie should be the one peregrinating about the "Catholic country". Accompanied by a traveling companion of her own choosing. Perhaps even a relatively hirsute Italianate cavaliere.
DeleteWomen of her age are exceedingly delectable ripe fruits bounteous in the plucking. Her halcyon days are drawing to a close and she should have a holiday to remember.
But she is a virtuous woman, and would probably have appreciated a trip to Italy with her kids and her husband for the Palio and the cuisine. She did, after all, prepare the fated disprised bouillabaisse.
Carpe diem says our Horace but he means the rose that is still in late bloom (rosa quo locorum sera moretur). Time withers all blossoms. There is a line of Baudelaire .... damn. I gotta go check on google.
And what part of this excursion is IRS excludable? As you point out, the damn book is already written. Maybe there will be horse races in the Opzione.
Oh wait...Roddy did get a notice in Il Foglio which he could not translate correctly even with "Sordello"'s help. The article went on to say what the "opzione" is not, and that McIntyre invented the concept. Dreher only added the "option" moniker. As any investor knows, options are wasting assets.
And Dreher is a wasting asshole.
Choice, RdC. I gonna sign you up yet.
DeleteDon't look here; nothing to see here.
DeleteInstead, look over here. Look! Keep looking over there!
Seriously, though, I'm beginning to think Rod and Julie Dreher have come to an understanding. She's pretty much a captive, an aging, once-impressionable girl ten years his junior with no career possibilities and really no way to protest or stop him from doing anything he wants to do. He's Mr. Lord & Master of the family, with a megaphone, and religious pieties drip from his mouth daily. She will stay in her place and accept the occasional bone as his "Beatrice", because that's the price at which she can be bought.
But she does have her children, their children, the tail of the beard, and no court on earth would award them to an over-sharing, bleating pseudo-intellectual instead of her.
And so the each have their sphere. She lives very well, she has three children, and she and they will always bask in the light the David Brooks' and others shine on the internationally notorious Rod Dreher. He must keep her minimally happy, if not satisfy her. (Perhaps a lady in the audience could explain her virtuous/religious options.)
And so Rod gets his Euro-man-flings - which could easily be chaste - and Julie gets to be queen bee at her personal church while having more time with her children as they grow up than many women get; on occasion, they go on week long trips without him. She eats well and wants for nothing but...
On the surface, the perfect picture of family piety. In reality, probably something much more grim, negotiated day to day with a sound like steel scaping over steel.
I think you're right, Keith. I'd forgotten about the trips she takes with one or two of the kids.
DeletePlus, maybe she doesnt want to go to Europe and looks at Roddy's junkets as a vacation from him and his gastronomic excesses.
Given Roddy's vivisection of his own family in two books (I suppose the BO book will be the third of this mawkish trilogy), there could well be a lot going on under the surface.
Maybe I'll write a roman à clef about a "fictional" family whose conflicts lead to ultimate tragedy. You know, something like the conversion of the paterfamilias from Orthodoxy to Methodism. No, wait, that would be comedy in that case.
Gotta change the names - maybe make them Russian - yes - that way Orthodoxy can get worked in naturally. The chanting scenes will be a highlight of the film version. Maybe mix in a little Lorena McKennitt on the sound track - Dante's Prayer should do it.
Now, the mise-en-scène, mmm, right - a 19-th century landed estate called Zvyozdnaya Gora along the Mighty Mississi... err, Volga. Needless to say, the name means, oh no!, "Starry Mountain." Can't imagine where that came from.
Next, we need a punchy opening line - something that really grabs the reader -- ok, got it:
Florence has the Arno, Zvyozdnaya Gora has the Volga, Paris has the Seine, Boston has the Charles, Albany has the Hudson, Quebec has the St. Lawrence, Topeka has .... wait, this sounds like a geography textbook for middle schoolers. I think I need a copy editor (and traveling companion). OK, here we go:
All happy families are alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. [Hey, it worked for that other guy.]
The Tokarski household was in an uproar. Yulia Matveyevna Tokarskaya had just found out that her husband Rodion Fyodorovich had been having an affair with his traveling companion and editor of his latest self-help book How Cervantes Can SaveYour Life.
Rodion Tokarski had just returned from a tax-deductible pilgrimage to Pamplona for the corrida de toros where he had been gored in the groin by a three-legged bull. He was being carried in on a stretcher while his children gathered tearfully about him staring at the huge bandage encircling his midsection.
Yulia, arms akimbo, fired a "don't-mess-with-me" look at her husband.
"Ah, my darling Dulcinea", gasped Rodion, wincing with pain. Dulcinea was the pet name he used for Yulia.
"Don't you dare Dulcinea me, you scamp!", fumed Yulia, her voice full of buckshot. "Scamp" was the pet name used by women of her class for "son-of-a-bitch", a term then fashionable only among male inverts of the demi-monde.
To be continued. But preferably not.
Will Yulia be wearing a babushka?
DeleteWhat about Rodion?
LMBO. Roland, you rock.
DeleteRdC is greatly appreciated over here. This is one for the Greatest Hits post.
DeleteKeith, yes, definitely, a babushka. "Pussy with a Babushka" sounds like a good chapter title. Though I think it might take a turn that will challenge the tsarist censors. Gotta keep up that Orthodox state-church morality, doncha know!
DeleteAnd parenthetically, I'm thinking that that Polly Amorous bimbo you linked to probably deserves a few walk-on scenes, or at least a few lay-on scenes (pardon the grammar), if for no other reason than we would like to know what hidden attributes attracted Roddy to that image. And sure, I'd polly her little amorous in a heartbeat. Though at my age the heartbeats might be closer to fibrillation.
And Rodion will of course have to wear a fazzoletto -- red and black with a three-legged bull and punctured errr... gonad. Hey, that's better than a Hemingway autograph.
Diane and Pauli - thanks, much appreciated. I don't know why I got carried away on that nonsense this morning. I was debugging some crap in one window and wrote a short reply to the post in the other and it just burgeoned beyond belief. Later I got confused and discovered that "buckshot" was an invalid keyword in Perl. (Yes, I write waffle software to pay the cable bill.)