Dreher’s back (and the sky isn’t always falling)
I can’t remember how it happened. I think maybe I asked for a one-week trial so I could read a piece someone else had linked to. But anyhoo, I ended up with a subscription to Rod Dreher’s Diary, his Substack.
He’s back stateside, and although he hasn’t turned into a cockeyed optimist, his writing features a lot of human interest. You’ll probably encounter him here fairly often (I write, after noting that I’ve clipped excerpts from more than one of his posts this time).
Karma?
As we drove back out to the highway, my mother looked to the side at the end of our blacktop road, and exclaimed with horror, “Look at that! They put a trailer there! On top of a cemetery!”
“No, it’s next to the cemetery,” I said, referring to the Starhill Cemetery.
“No, that’s a cemetery. A black cemetery,” she said. “How could they put a trailer there?!”
She told me a story I didn’t know. Back in the 1970s, she said, that site had been a black graveyard. Whoever owned the land ordered the tombstones torn down so it could be developed.
“I was at Miss Lorena’s one day,” Mama said, referring to my dad’s mom, “when this elderly black couple showed up in tears. They asked for her help. They said a man with a bulldozer was over there knocking down the tombstones of their ancestors. Nobody could stop it, it turned out, but Miss Lorena did find a map of who was buried where, and shared it with them. Turns out at least some of those people were able to have their ancestors dug up and reburied elsewhere, even though the tombstones were gone. It wasn’t right, what they did to those poor people.”
Beat.
“Course Mr. ____, who was driving the bulldozer, drowned later up in Lake Mary, in his truck. They found him in the back cab. He was trying to get out.” She said it in a tone conveying the message: don’t mess with the dead.
I doubt the Bulldozer Man died because he disturbed the dead, but me being me, I don’t rule it out. Anyway, I had not known the story of the black cemetery, the memory of which will leave this world after my mom’s generation dies (though I’d guess that the black people around here won’t so quickly forget). It was a painful reminder of what black folks in this part of the world had to suffer, and within my lifetime. I hate DEI as much as any conservative, and believe it makes race relations worse. But you know, it came from somewhere.
Rod Dreher, Wednesday in the Country with Mama
Writing and gardening
A Substacker I follow (you’d recognize the name) has been pretty quiet lately. Some of the best writers are like that. He explains:
I deeply appreciate all those of you who continue as paid subscribers despite my lack of ‘content’ here at present. A writer can’t be on output all the time, which is a drawback of this kind of ‘platform’ for which readers pay a monthly fee. Quite rightly, a lot of people don’t want to pay for nothing, and yet if a writer just pumps out ‘content’ for the sake of it, he or she will soon be dead from the neck up. These days, in any case, an AI can do this job much better than we ever can, and it will provide all the accompanying pictures and films too.
I’ve long thought of writing in the same way I think of gardening. It’s a seasonal process. You need to manure the soil and prepare it in order to have a flourishing, fecund summer of words. Then you need a fallow period. Plants don’t grow in the winter. I’ve been wintering for the last six months or so. Ticking over. Keeping an eye on the green manure. You can’t do anything creative without rest.
For years, I blogged original content pretty regularly and frequently. Then I ran out of things to write like that without repeating myself unduly. Now I mostly curate. But I’m fortunate that I don’t do this to put food on the family table. I don’t have it in me to write interesting things on deadline.
Where I’ll lay my bet
AI is not just another tool (there is no such thing as “just a tool,” as [Anton Barba-Kay] points out, but let that pass). The problem is that AI — like the rest of the digital world, but most especially — changes how we think and who we are as humans. Remember Jonathan Haidt a few weeks ago warning that AI is going to “hack our attachments”? This is the kind of thing Barba-Kay is talking about. We are being merged with the Machine, and don’t even realize it.
…
We need schools, families, fraternal organizations, reading groups, secret societies, oratories, shared houses of civility — a thousand cells as diffuse and decentralized as all those compounding micro-engagements by which the image of a boot stomping on a human face forever is now being replaced with that of a human face slack-jawed and dribbling on itself. These cells of resistance will be different from one another. They may involve a semi-annual meeting, and they may involve the whole of life. They can be organized around reading Boethius or reciting limericks, sharing meals or shooting guns. Some will correspond only by letter. Some will employ Claude to manage their mailing lists. What all will have in common is: an insistence that we, and only we, will decide how we live; an explicit prohibition on new technologies in the spaces and activities where they gently and slowly degrade us; and a pledge to hold each other to the path we have jointly chosen.
Rod Dreher, Sorry, Pope Leo, You Missed What AI Is (bold in original); block quote from Clare Coffey, The Future Belongs to Those Who Resist It.
I wouldn’t bet that Anton Barba-Kay and Rod Dreher have a better grasp of AI than the collective wisdom of the Pope and his advisers, but I appreciate their contribution to the back-and-forth that can’t happen too fast considering how fast the technology is coming on in the part of the population can influence the culture’s direction at a macro scale.
“Do you feel smart?”
For the partisan, inconvenient facts necessitate a kind of rhetorical two-step.
There are proud Trump cultists and there are embarrassed Trump cultists, and, if you press one of the latter on Trump’s viciousness—his dishonesty, his infidelity, his venality, his susceptibility to flattery, his inconstancy—he often will retreat into comfortable pragmatism: “He isn’t running for pope”—well!—“and I like his policies.” Further pressed, “policies” mainly indicates the economic conditions coincident with Trump’s first term in office, pre-COVID, which were only to a very minor degree the result of any Trump policy.
Turn around and press the embarrassed Trump cultist on the pragmatic questions—like that $270 fill-up—and he often will retreat into moralism, albeit a negative kind of moralism based in the perceived deficiencies of the Democrats rather than in any of Trump’s particular moral virtues, which, it is plain, simply do not exist.
The “woke” phenomenon, by attaching a kind of quasi-religious energy and rhetoric to ordinary progressive clichés, was a great boon to Trump and to Trumpism, providing a spiritualized target of opportunity: the infidel, or, in the case of anti-Trump conservatives such as myself, the heretic. The Democratic embrace (in some quarters) of socialism, in name and in fact, has been similarly fortifying for Trump-era Republicans: To be against is simpler than to be for, and socialism is a simple (and proper) thing to be against.
And so when We the People cough up a corrupt imbecile such as Ken Paxton, whom Republicans mean to put into the Senate, or when proximity to Trump debases and degrades such infinitely plastic men as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, the rationalization is: “Well, think of the policies!” But I wonder what those beneficial policies are. The illegally initiated and incompetently executed war in Iran that is the proximate cause of that $270 diesel bill? The obviously criminal massacres of civilians on the high seas? The gross self-dealing and corruption? The elevation of wildly unqualified yes-men such as Bill Pulte to high office? The deepening debt? The rising inflation? Steve Guest, a servile hack of the sort that gives servility and hackery a bad name, believes it is very important to appreciate the … refinishing of the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. Failure to be impressed by this titanic achievement represents an “incurable case of TDS,” he writes, providing yet another (superfluous) example of the fact that writing about “TDS” is a nearly foolproof indicator of brain death.
The even more corrupt return of “Sue and Settle”
Remember sue-and-settle? It’s coming soon to a dirtbag near you:
It will not surprise you to learn that Blanche lied by omission to senators when he said the slush fund wouldn’t move forward. That might be technically true, according to The Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick, in the sense that the original mechanism for paying out money to criminals will change. But have no doubt: The Trump administration still intends to see to it that those criminals get rich.
I spoke with eight people familiar with the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund—including current and former Justice Department officials, current and former members of Congress, a defense attorney, and political operatives close to the administration. All said that Justice Department officials and people close to the White House have indicated that the payout idea has not actually been scrapped. Rather, they say, officials are exploring whether elements of the fund can be reactivated while also examining alternative arrangements to make sure loyalists get compensated.
…
Officials told me that those who believe they were victims of a weaponized government may ultimately need to file lawsuits so they can then receive settlements from a previously established Justice Department fund. Suing the government is not a new idea. But typically the government looks for ways to defend itself; in this case, officials are exploring proposals to facilitate litigation and to expedite payments without requiring an expensive and lengthy process that might draw attention. One former DOJ official told me that discussions are happening about how to provide legal support at scale to those who want to file lawsuits. “They’ll sue, and they’ll settle,” the former official said of the plan.
Instead of a dedicated “anti-weaponization fund” handing out millions to January 6 degenerates like candy on Halloween, there’ll be a pseudo-adversarial process in which each degenerate will need to file a formal legal complaint to receive his candy. (Assuming it survives a court challenge, of course.) Thank Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who did nothing to prevent this heist when they had the chance.
…
I’ve always thought Trump was lucky in one sense to be an American and unlucky in another. He had the good fortune to live his life in a country that worships wealth, celebrity, showmanship, and crude machismo, and he took full advantage. But he had the bad fortune to be born an authoritarian demagogue within a constitutional system that still somewhat limits his ability to rule as he’d like.
Nick Catoggio, Black Marks.
“Sue and settle” was a disreputable practice whereby the Obama administration made end-runs around Congress by settling lawsuits brought, almost collusively, be ideologically compatible “adversaries.” Apparently, if Catoggio’s right, Trump will wink and nod and settle when, say, January 6 rioters sue for getting their feelings hurt.
Mergers and acquisitions
I’m not breaking any new ground here, but just in case you’d overlooked this sort of pressure, let me be explicit:
- Newspapers and television networks increasingly are becoming part of multi-billionaire’s portfolios.
- Those billionaires do a lot of business with government, either as contractors or as suppliants.
- To an unprecedented extent, Donald Trump is openly transactional in his governance. People who aren’t nice to him don’t get any favors.
- Corporations whose media subsidiaries aren’t nice to Trump don’t get favors.
- Billionaires and corporations who depend on government for many of their billions therefore are careful to be (as) nice (as possible) to Trump.
- Therefore, many newspapers and television networks are relatively toothless.
This is one reason I read the New York Times: it has not been rolled into a larger portfolio, and is not obliged to be nice or even to pull punches. Yes, the owner’s are very rich, but their riches come from the newspaper.
And, of course, I selectively read in the wild, wild west of the internet, where investigative depth may be rare but great fortunes rarely compromise coverage.
Shorts
- Trump said something deranged, and Republicans rallied to his side. In other words, it was a day ending in y. (David French)
- There is, of course, no one that Silicon Valley loves more than a “builder” and nothing, ever since the word first escaped containment in its cramped wet market of ideas, that it loves more than the builder’s agency. (Clare Coffey, italics added)
- Incredulous at a “ceasefire” where the sides keep firing at each other, a New York Times writer (Scott Anderson, I think) referred to it as a “postmodern ceasefire.”
- No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. (Fernando Pessoa)
- [F]aith in progress is just as basic to modernity as the Second Coming was to Christianity. (Rod Dreher, Live Not By Lies)
- The origins of this book lie in my curiosity about how and why a particular statement has come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful: “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body.” (Carl R. Truman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 