One of the reasons I started this blog was to write about other bloggers, especially Rod Dreher. The Crunchy Con himself, the lovable, hate-able quintessence of the guy with an Internet connection whose charm is that you never know what he’s going to write about next. His conversion to Catholicism. His conversion from Catholicism to Greek Orthodoxy. Gay marriage—that’s a big N.O. Enviro-foodie advocacy—yes! His sister’s heroic struggle with cancer—very moving (really). Quantum physics and healing prayer! Christopher Hitchens and healing prayer! Doubts about Darwin—let’s voice them! Countercultural conservatism— dude! Science and religion—we can be best buds! “Trying to build a case that the global Catholic child abuse scandal was actually caused by hippies” (as the Alicublog put it)—you can’t make this stuff up.
But just as my humble blog is going online, Dreher has disappeared, leaving me with nothing. After moving from Dallas and Beliefnet to Philadelphia and the Templeton Foundation’s Big Questions Online site over the summer, the flowing faucet of Dreher started to sputter. His freewheeling ways and urge to hold forth on hot-button political and culture-war topics had already caused trouble during his final months at Beliefnet, where he proved incapable of honoring his vow to avoid politics and stick to spirituality, philosophy, and other higher things. Although at first Dreher’s new Templeton-hosted Macroculture blog simply picked up where his Dallas/Beliefnet gig left off, something happened. On August 20, Dreher posted this enigmatic message:
Folks, I'm going to suspend comments for the time being, both on this blog and all over the site, pending the outworking of some technical and editorial issues. I apologize for this, and ask for your patience.
UPDATE: I will not be blogging for now. I hope to be blogging again soon. You readers are faithful and important to me, so I ask for your patience during this down time. Please continue to enjoy other content on BQO -- but remember, we're not posting comments at the present time.
Dreher-watchers reported that some of his earlier posts had been deleted, and then, on August 23:
The debut this summer of BQO has been a "soft launch" intended to try out our ideas for the magazine, to see how they work, particularly in relationship to Sir John Templeton's ideals. We are still working on the site, and will be changing some things in response to feedback. With respect to this blog, we are reconsidering a style and format that will be more in tune with Sir John's forward-looking, positive, constructive ways to engage the Big Questions. We hope to fine-tune things to make BQO better for you, our readers. So, please be patient, and thanks for reading.
Since then—silence. Nada. A week ago, I emailed Dreher and Big Questions Online editor Gary Rosen to ask about the hiatus and the status of Macroculture, and I haven’t yet received a reply.
It’s hard not to conclude that Sir John Templeton’s ideals and Dreher’s emotive style have clashed, and that forces within Templeton who cannot stand their new guy’s Dionysian messiness have decided not to spare the Rod. The result is the silencing, voluntary or otherwise, of one of the most widely read bloggers in the country. So what if he’s a little nuts? Free Rod Dreher!
Showing posts with label blogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogs. Show all posts
Sunday, September 19, 2010
That Henderson Feeling
[Update below; all of the Todd Henderson links in the first and second paragraphs are now dead links]
The weekend’s most diverting blog eruption, without a doubt, is the hot-lava reaction to Professor Todd Henderson’s sardonic cri de coeur, “We Are the Super-Rich” about the perceived impoverishment and straightened circumstances he experiences living with his family in Chicago on an income of more than $250,000 a year. (That number is one key to this story’s Darwinian meme fitness, its viral potency, since the Obama administration has pegged $250K as the Mason-Dixon Line of tax and budget policy: below it, the middle class and working poor; above, the target-rich wealthy.) Henderson, a professor of law married to a physician, posted his essay four days ago on a collaborative economics blog called Truth on the Market. Since then, whoa Nelly, we’ve got a flame war—which is our moral equivalent of Class War.
A Sunday morning James Fallows post titled “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, 2010 Version” sent me back to a Michael O’Hare takedown of Henderson's post, “The Whining of the Rich.” O’Hare characterizes “We Are the Super-Rich” as a “truly amazing pasticcio of mendacity, ignorance, and small-minded cupidity.” Fallows, who, with trademark mildness, limits himself to calling the offending post an “unwise confession,” also links to Brad DeLong, piling on. Paul Krugman cracks his Nobel medal on Henderson’s exposed pate here. Memeorandum is aggregating the fray, and Henderson has responded to “the overwhelming negative response” with increasingly embattled weariness here and here. Below many of these various posts are sulphuric comment threads unfurling to the vanishing point, so be my guest. (A DeLong reader named will provided the title for this post.)
Expressions of upscale anxiety, defined by shifting and purely relative notions of affluence, are stringently policed by standards of seemliness and discretion, even in the wake of an economic collapse that wiped out $5 trillion in household net worth. Henderson is guilty, like British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward before him, of saying he wants his life back. But blurting out the wrong thing can be both offensive and illuminating. Henderson has given voice to the gnawing sensation of relative poverty that is imposed on middle-class Americans with overwhelming cultural force, not only by the neighborly pressure to keep up with the Joneses, but by saturation media portraying luxury as normative and attainable. Actual income almost doesn't matter; the greyhound will never catch the rabbit. In movies and television the camera adds 20 pounds of fat to the body and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the net worth of characters whose houses, apartments, furniture, and clothing are ridiculously beyond their real-world means. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to advertise to the rich without broadcasting to the not-quite-rich and further down the scale, and all those surplus eyeballs absorb the flickering message that just a little more will bring within reach those beautiful discretionary things people like me should own.
My own meddling get-richer-quick advice to Professor Henderson is to invest $10,000 in non-luxury travel in the Third World, say, Southern Africa. Perhaps make it a working vacation to support a cause: conservation, agrarian modernization, health care, evangelizing, anything will do. It will subsequently add at least $125,000 per annum to his relative income, and in my experience it does wonders for bursting the most persistent bubble in the American marketplace, the one inside our heads.
[Update: Todd Henderson, in manifest despair over the "firestorm" his original post stoked, has deleted "We Are the Super-Rich" and his two follow-up posts. He has apologized, renounced blogging, and revealed that his wife was appalled by what he had written:
The reason I took the very unusual step of deleting [the posts] is because my wife, who did not approve of my original post and disagrees vehemently with my opinion, did not consent to the publication of personal details about our family. In retrospect, it was a highly effective but incredibly stupid thing to do.
Brad DeLong has re-posted a version of "We Are the Super-Rich" retrieved from Google's cached pages here.]
The weekend’s most diverting blog eruption, without a doubt, is the hot-lava reaction to Professor Todd Henderson’s sardonic cri de coeur, “We Are the Super-Rich” about the perceived impoverishment and straightened circumstances he experiences living with his family in Chicago on an income of more than $250,000 a year. (That number is one key to this story’s Darwinian meme fitness, its viral potency, since the Obama administration has pegged $250K as the Mason-Dixon Line of tax and budget policy: below it, the middle class and working poor; above, the target-rich wealthy.) Henderson, a professor of law married to a physician, posted his essay four days ago on a collaborative economics blog called Truth on the Market. Since then, whoa Nelly, we’ve got a flame war—which is our moral equivalent of Class War.
A Sunday morning James Fallows post titled “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, 2010 Version” sent me back to a Michael O’Hare takedown of Henderson's post, “The Whining of the Rich.” O’Hare characterizes “We Are the Super-Rich” as a “truly amazing pasticcio of mendacity, ignorance, and small-minded cupidity.” Fallows, who, with trademark mildness, limits himself to calling the offending post an “unwise confession,” also links to Brad DeLong, piling on. Paul Krugman cracks his Nobel medal on Henderson’s exposed pate here. Memeorandum is aggregating the fray, and Henderson has responded to “the overwhelming negative response” with increasingly embattled weariness here and here. Below many of these various posts are sulphuric comment threads unfurling to the vanishing point, so be my guest. (A DeLong reader named will provided the title for this post.)
Expressions of upscale anxiety, defined by shifting and purely relative notions of affluence, are stringently policed by standards of seemliness and discretion, even in the wake of an economic collapse that wiped out $5 trillion in household net worth. Henderson is guilty, like British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward before him, of saying he wants his life back. But blurting out the wrong thing can be both offensive and illuminating. Henderson has given voice to the gnawing sensation of relative poverty that is imposed on middle-class Americans with overwhelming cultural force, not only by the neighborly pressure to keep up with the Joneses, but by saturation media portraying luxury as normative and attainable. Actual income almost doesn't matter; the greyhound will never catch the rabbit. In movies and television the camera adds 20 pounds of fat to the body and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the net worth of characters whose houses, apartments, furniture, and clothing are ridiculously beyond their real-world means. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to advertise to the rich without broadcasting to the not-quite-rich and further down the scale, and all those surplus eyeballs absorb the flickering message that just a little more will bring within reach those beautiful discretionary things people like me should own.
My own meddling get-richer-quick advice to Professor Henderson is to invest $10,000 in non-luxury travel in the Third World, say, Southern Africa. Perhaps make it a working vacation to support a cause: conservation, agrarian modernization, health care, evangelizing, anything will do. It will subsequently add at least $125,000 per annum to his relative income, and in my experience it does wonders for bursting the most persistent bubble in the American marketplace, the one inside our heads.
[Update: Todd Henderson, in manifest despair over the "firestorm" his original post stoked, has deleted "We Are the Super-Rich" and his two follow-up posts. He has apologized, renounced blogging, and revealed that his wife was appalled by what he had written:
The reason I took the very unusual step of deleting [the posts] is because my wife, who did not approve of my original post and disagrees vehemently with my opinion, did not consent to the publication of personal details about our family. In retrospect, it was a highly effective but incredibly stupid thing to do.
Brad DeLong has re-posted a version of "We Are the Super-Rich" retrieved from Google's cached pages here.]
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