Category Archive 'Paleocons'

02 May 2017

Two Photos

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New Yorker profile photo of Rod Dreher by Maude Schuyler Clay.

Rod Dreher writes prolifically, at some times even well, and his recent book, The Benedict Option, which argues that the secular Left has won decisively, there is no hope for America or Western Civilization, and traditionalist Shventobazdies* like Dreher ought to emulate St. Benedict of Nursia and retreat from the world to private Christian communities resembling the monastery at Monte Cassino attracted enough attention on the part of the wicked, fallen world that he was profiled by the New Yorker.

*anglicized spelling of a sarcastic Lithuanian term for a person of publicly conspicuous piety, for someone sanctimonious, for a holier-than-thou, meaning literally “holy flatulator.”

Maude Schuyler Clay’s New Yorker photo (above) of Dreher makes him look like D.H. Lawrence Jr., like one of those mad British poets or writers (Henry Williamson or T.H. White, Gavin Maxwell or even T.E. Lawrence) who took to living somewhere deep in the English countryside in a thatched-roof cottage with a Goshawk or an otter. In her photo, Dreher looks like the suffering artist or visionary.

The photographer sent along to Dreher photo 2 (below), which prompted Dreher to write up another column, publishing both photos, and confessing that he thinks he really looks more like the latter.

And what a photograph the latter is. Dreher looks precisely like the very typos of the metrosexual hipster. As P.G. Wodehouse would probably observe: His knotted and combined knots part and each particular hair stands end on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine. And he is wearing glasses every bit as hideous as the glasses Marine Corps recruits are issued at Boot Camp, known universally as “Birth Control Glasses.”

Give that man a Pabst.

Hat tip to Maggie Gallagher.

06 Feb 2007

Taki’s Top Drawer

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Things are not going so well for Conservatism today. The movement has fragmented here and there. Libertarians like Glenn Reynolds don’t want to consider themselves conservatives these days. Former comrades-in-arms, like Andrew Sullivan and John Cole, have jumped the fence to the left. And the inimitable Taki Theodoracopulos has wandered off into the Paleocon fever-swamp where Pat Buchanan got lost.

The New York Post today reports that Taki is starting his own blog, titled Taki’s Top Drawer, with a self-described mission “to shake up the world of so-called ‘conservative’ opinion.”

For the past ten years at least, the conservative movement has been dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow-ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in gothic dormitories, while sipping port and smoking their father’s stolen cigars. Thanks to the tragedy of September 11—and a compliant and dim-witted president—these kids got the chance to play Risk with real soldiers, with American soldiers. Patriotic men and women are dying over in Iraq for a war that was never in America’s interests. And now these spitball gunners, these chicken hawks, want to attack Iran—which is no threat to the U.S. at all.

One thing I can tell you for sure, there may well be some atheists in foxholes—but you’ll never find a neocon. They prefer to send blue-collar kids out to die on their behalf, so they get to feel macho—and make up for all the times they got wedgies in prep school. It shall be our considered task to take on the chicken-hawks of this world, and give them wedgies again.”

We want to reflect a traditional conservatism that prefers peace with honor to proxy wars, Western civilization to multicultural barbarism, Christendom to the European Union, and Russell Kirk to Leon Trotsky. This will undoubtedly infuriate many in the mainstream ‘conservative’ movement, who have transferred their loyalties elsewhere. It’s time to raise their blood pressure a few points—and help them burn off some of those five-course meals they’ve been eating down on K Street.

It doesn’t look like all this is going to work out well at all. A highly dyspeptic Justin Raimondo is leading off today with an attack on loveable old Rush Limbaugh (!), along with lots of others on the Right. But I’ve always liked Taki, so I linked it in the Sound Blogs category (for now). We will make a point of giving Taki a chance, before exiling him to join Kos and Andrew Sullivan.

Hat tip to John Brewer.


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