Rod Dreher Finds the Subtle Nuances in Mass Murder

Rod Dreher was shocked by the story of a Texas man whose wife and children were slaughtered by his daughter and her friends. But he wasn't shocked by the brutal murder itself. Murders happen all the time. Big deal. What shocked him was a passing remark by the father who survived the attack by Erin, his little murderess. After he moved his family from the small Texas town of Celeste (pop. 800) to the liberal Emory (pop. 1200) his daughter was subject to the horrors of big city debauchery. "Emory has a lot of bisexual kids; it's like it was almost cool to be bisexual. One of the first things that happened was some girl wanted to be Erin's little girlfriend. And I was like, 'That ain't happenin'.' "

Dreher was understandably shocked by this revelation. "This is a tiny East Texas town -- and there's a bisexual culture in one of them, among the teenagers?" he wrote. "WTF? What do I not get about teenage life these days? What do I not get about the cultural air kids breathe? I am so not going to give my children over to this culture, if I can help it." If for some reason Dreher's children decide to murder him, though I can't think of any reason why they would off the top of my head, at least he'll go to his grave comforted by the thought that he saved them from the evils of bisexuality.

But as horrifying as this story of bisexuality is, it does have a silver lining. As soon as Erin's parents realized that the public schools in Emory were cesspools of bisexual Bacchanalia, they took their kids out of school and started home schooling them. When they re-enrolled Erin in public school three years later, she was armed with the values she learned from being home schooled and didn't fall back into a lesbian lifestyle. Instead, started dating an 18-year-old boy, which must have been a big relief to her parents. Unfortunately, it was this boy who then helped her murder her family. But if you look past the murders, this story actually has a happy ending because it shows that it is possible to save our kids from homosexuality and that should give Dreher some solace when he gets over his shock.

Unfortunately, some people willfully misread Dreher's column and claimed that Dreher was saying that bisexuality caused the murders when in fact he was just focusing on the most horrific aspect of the story. Dreher is used to being willfully misread like this and having his values and priorities questioned. Recently, for example, he wrote a column pointing out that our "social decline" did not begin with the Sixties but back in that dark period known as the Enlightenment. "The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad. I answer in the negative," he wrote. Again, some people misread his column to mean that he thinks we should revive slavery or the Inquisition. But if you read his column carefully, you see that he is just saying that on the whole things were better before we had homosexuality, abortion, feminism and horseless carriages even when you balance those things against slavery and torturing heretics.

But Dreher is not the only conservative intellectual who is sadly misunderstood. Unfortunately, a lot of liberals just don't get the subtle nuances of some of Rush Limbaugh's thinking either. Some conservatives, like David Frum, are saying that Rush does not help our cause when he says, for example, that he wants President Obama to fail. Others even claim that we should be disingenuous and talk down to people instead. "The problem is, Americans have short attention spans and don’t always do nuance well," says one of our most nuanced thinkers, Paterico.

But I agree with Jeff Goldstein who says, "I don’t want to have to measure every word I say with the thought in mind that somebody is going to take me out of context. Instead, I’d like to be free to say what I mean." Goldstein is tired of pandering to people who think "it’s just too damn difficult to demand that what we mean be presented honestly, and so rather than fight that kind of complicated battle, it’s best just to learn to self-edit in a way that placates those who don’t do nuance well."

Although I often don't understand what Goldstein is trying to say, it would be a tragedy if he tried to pander to people like me and write things that people can actually comprehend. And I don't think Dreher should worry if people believe that he cares more about bisexuality than murder or that he wants us to return to a time when people who were not Catholics like him were burned at the stake when that is not what he is saying at all. And if some people cannot understand the subtle difference between wanting Obama to fail, plunging America into a Great Depression or wanting Obama's policies to fail, plunging America into a Great Depression, then is it really worth the energy to try to explain to them what Rush really meant?

So I hope that conservatives will say more things that can be taken out of context by the liberal media and continue to make subtle distinctions that can't be understood in 30-second sound bites. It is time for us to gird our loins (whatever that means) and fight complicated battles. Sure, we might lose a few elections and we might give people the false impression that we are homophobic or racist or misogynist or that we want America to fail and be punished for its decadence, but that's a small price to pay to hold on to our integrity, which is what is really important. Instead of making compromises, the way to get back into the good graces of the American people and start winning elections again is to stick to our guns and not be afraid to call Americans who don't understand what we mean "idiots." And if you don't think this is a winning strategy, then you're an idiot.

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Rush Limbaugh Gives Republicans Hope Again

When Barack Obama won the election by appealing to voters' hopes, Republicans were surprised that it actually worked. There didn't seem to be that much to be hopeful for, especially with Obama as President. A lot of us were pretty down in the dumps. But then Republican leader Rush Limbaugh came along and gave us hope for the future, too. "I hope he fails." Limbaugh said of Obama. "We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president."

While Obama seems like a nice young man, kind of like a young Sidney Poitier, is handsome and polite, seems well educated and articulate, and even brought Republicans candy and flowers, Limbaugh was not fooled for a minute. If Obama succeeds, who knows what kind of man America's daughters will bring home to dinner next? Since Obama is trying to seduce Americans by giving them hope, Limbaugh knows that we Republicans must have our own message of optimism and hope. So here are some of the things that we are hoping for:

We hope Obama fails change the tone in Washington.
The worst thing Republicans can do is to join President Obama in any bipartisan effort to make things better. If he succeeds, he'll get all the credit and then he'll be free to turn America into a socialist country and no one will be able to stop him. And if he fails, who will Americans turn be able to turn to? So Republicans finally realized that they have to be against whatever Obama is for, whether it is the stimulus package or delaying the transition to digital television.

We hope Obama fails to fix the economy.
If Obama succeeds in fixing the economy, Americans will get the wrong idea that socialism works. Although the next few years will be difficult for some people if the economy gets worse, most Republicans will do fine thanks to President Bush's tax cuts. The rest of us will just have to suck it up until America comes to her senses and elects Sarah Palin in 2012. By that time some of Bush's tax cuts should have trickled down to us anyway. The worst thing we can do now is panic and put into place all kinds of programs we will be stuck with for years to come, which is what happened during the Great Depression. Economic depressions aren't all bad since they sweep away the dead wood in the economy and force the government to cut worthless programs. And at the same time, the people who do get hurt we'll blame Obama for it.

We hope Obama fails to get people to stop hating gays.
Despite all of Hollywood's best efforts, there are still a lot of people who hate gays and we need to encourage that as much as possible as it is our best wedge issue. One of the reasons we succeeded in ruining Clinton's first term was because of his attempt to allow gays to serve in the military. Although we suffered a few major setbacks in our efforts to marginalize gays when Clay Aitken and Lance Bass came out, we have to remain vigilant. We must encourage a huge outcry if Obama tries to allow gays to serve openly in the military or supports gay civil unions, which will just lead to gay marriage and people marrying their pets and livestock. And we can encourage homophobia among African-Americans, which shouldn't be too hard since we have a lot of preachers and rappers on our side. It may be our best chance to win blacks over to our side again.

We hope Obama fails to institute universal health care.
The reason America has the best health care in the world is that we don't just give it away to anyone. It stands to reason that the fewer people who have health care, the better it will be for those who have it. Republicans should not only resist any efforts by Obama to give more Americans health care, we should try to limit health care even more, which will only make our country stronger by weeding out the weak and sick, who mostly vote for Democrats anyway.

We hope Obama fails to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Surely, this is not too much to hope for. Although President Obama claimed during the election that he supported Israel, his overtures to Arab countries, like his giving his first interview as President to al-Arabiya, shows that he is not 100 percent behind Israel. Republicans know that peace in the Middle East will require Israel to make some sort of concessions, such as the creation of a Palestinian state. The only way to safeguard Israel's security is to discourage any kind of peace. So Republicans should encourage Israel not to back down. Of course, that means there will probably be a few terrorist attacks in Israel and it will have to defend itself occasionally by bombing the hell out of the Palestinians and probably the Lebanese as well, but Israelis are used to that by now.

We hope Obama fails to prevent a big natural disaster from devastating an American city.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans got the impression from Hurricane Katrina that there is something government can do to help people when there is a natural disaster. Republicans, of course, know that it is blasphemous to try to fight acts of God. So far our efforts to convince people that there was nothing we could do to save New Orleans, or at least to blame local officials, have not been very successful. So it looks like the only thing that will convince people that they are on their own is if an American city is destroyed despite all of Obama's best efforts. Since God is on the Republicans' side I'm sure He already has something in the works, but it wouldn't hurt to pray a little.

We hope Obama fails to prevent a terrorist attack on American soil.
Although this is one thing we shouldn't actively hope for, at least out loud, a terrorist attack on American soil would go a long way to restoring George Bush's image by proving that all of his efforts to prevent another one after 9/11, which President Obama is unraveling, worked. Americans will undoubtedly blame Obama for a terrorist attack especially if we point out that it was probably due to his closing Guantanamo and ending waterboarding of suspects. This is something that Republicans should quietly pray for, especially if it happens in a place where there are a lot of Obama voters like New York, then deplore it when it happens and unite behind the President for a week or so before we point out through anonymous spokespeople that it was Obama's fault. Rush Limbaugh, however, can start blaming Obama as soon as it happens. That's why Republicans are lucky to have him as the voice of the party. He's the only one who can say what we are really thinking.

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The Triumph of Derrièrism

Last year I identified an important new school of film criticism, which I called “derrièrism,” since all schools of film criticism are supposed to have French names. Derrièrists are inspired by Jack Warner (though some say it was Harry Cohn), who once said that he judged movies by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them. Like Warner (or Cohn), a derrièrist film critic judges movies by his ass. As I wrote last year: "Derrièrists are tired of liberal elites telling us what is good for us. They are tired of movies that are depressing and pretentious and difficult." At the time Variety magazine hailed derrièrism as “provocative” theory and said my piece “represents to some degree the thinking of the younger male online film community that recently voted for their Top 100 films,” whose virtues I extolled in my piece. While derrièrism was once an esoteric school of film criticism championed by a few forward-thinking critics, this year it has triumphed. Not only has Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Hollywood critic behind Breitbart.com, announced that he will start a new website, Big Hollywood, which promises to be a hotbed of derrièrist film criticism, such respected film critics as Roger Ebert and the critics at Cahiers du Cinema have jumped on the derrièrist bandwagon.

Breitbart’s site will feature film reviews and criticism from some of this country’s leading derrièrist film critics, people like House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner, Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor, Reps. Thaddeus McCotter, Mary Bono Mack and Connie Mack, former presidential candidate Fred Thompson, MSNBC correspondent Tucker Carlson and conservative commentators Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and others. According to The Hill, “If Boehner, for instance, sees a movie, ‘I’d like for him … to do a movie review,’ Breitbart says. ‘Not everything is going to be a political dissertation,’ he says. In that vein, Cantor spokesman Rob Collins says he could see his boss writing a post on the television shows his three teenage children watch and how those programs affect them.” Breitbart wants to bring back the kind of crowd-pleasing movies Hollywood used to make, which encouraged people to pay their credit card bills on time. “The movies used to reinforce good behavior — that you should pay back your loans,” he says, apparently thinking of such films as The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life and Salt of the Earth. Because Breitbart's site will not pay its writers that should encourage good behavior like thrift.

Breitbart also wants Big Hollywood to change the image of conservatives in Hollywood, where they are cruelly oppressed. “We’re not bigoted, homophobic, racist, sexist monsters,” says the new blog’s editor-in-chief, John Nolte, the proprietor of Dirty Harry's Place. Nolte, who says that gay marriage “has nothing to with ‘rights’ and everything to do with hate, the tearing down of tradition, and seeking yet another excuse to attack conservatives and religion,” and who wrote after J.K. Rowling outted Dumbledore, “English and Gay is like Japan and China: you can’t really tell the difference,” is known for his trenchant film criticism. Although he has never seen such minor, really old movies as City Lights and The Passion of Joan of Arc, that hasn’t stopped him from weighing in on such important questions of film scholarship as whether Deuce Bigelow or The Searchers is the best film ever made.

While Big Hollywood should be a welcome relief from critics who think they know a lot about movies just because they have seen a lot of them, even some of the most respected film critics in the world have succumbed to derrièrism and are pulling film criticism out of their asses. Roger Ebert has seen his influence wane since he left At the Movies and was replaced by hipper, younger derrièrist critic Ben Lyons, who called I Am Legend “one of the greatest movies ever made” and named Superbad, which he just happened to have an acting role in, one of the ten best movies of last year. Then in October of this year Ebert joined the ranks of derrièrist critics with a big splash. He wrote a savage one-star review of the gay film Tru Loved after sitting through only eight minutes of it. It was only at the end of the review that he revealed he hadn’t watched the whole thing or even very much of it, so if readers got bored and decided they didn’t want to sit through Ebert’s entire review, they wouldn’t know how much of the movie he hadn't seen. Although Ebert’s editor wanted him to disclose this fact at the beginning of the review, Ebert argued that it would ruin his carefully constructed artistic prose if he did that. “I thought that would have made the review anticlimactic,” he said.

Ebert was slammed by some critics such as Margaret Nowak, who gave a derrièrist critique of Ebert’s derrièrist review: “After learning that Roger Ebert defends writing a full-column review based on an 8-minute scrap of film, I don't feel so bad about not reading movie reviews. I give a cursory glance to the score rating the movie received, and move on.” Ebert, however, was not amused: “I find it charming that Margaret Nowak was able to arrive at her scorched-earth opinion of me without reading either the review in question OR my linked blog entry that was posted simultaneously with the review on the same page.” He called her review of his review a “cheap shot.” If Nowak had just spent eight minutes reading the beginning of Ebert's review, she might have seen the error of her ways.

Unfortunately, under pressure from anti-derrièrists, Ebert eventually apologized for the review, watched the movie and wrote a new review. Derrièrist Ann Althouse was disappointed by Ebert’s capitulation to the anti-derrièrist mob, writing, “Walking out is an important form of judgment.” Althouse is one of the leading proponents of the idea that you don’t have to see or read something or really know much about it at all to criticize it, which has given hope to other aspiring critics who, like her, have the attention span of a two-year-old.

Unlike Ebert, Cahiers du Cinema had the courage of its convictions and defended its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. Abandoning its support of the tired old theory of auteurism, the critics at Cahiers put together a list steeped in derrièrism, which included not a single boring Tarkovsky film or any British movies at all, relegating such tedious efforts as Brief Encounter, Lawrence of Arabia, The Third Man, and The Red Shoes to Le ashbin de l'histoire.

But it wasn’t just snooty French critics who embraced derrièrism. Entertainment Weekly published a list of 100 “classics” of the last 25 years that included only six excrutiatingly dull foreign movies. By redefining the word classic, EW was telling us that we don’t have to bother watching dreary old movies when we can watch such new and improved “classics” as The Breakfast Club, Naked Gun, The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Ghostbusters instead. Meanwhile, Premiere.com, which started out as the website for a print magazine whose articles no one ever finished, this year introduced a new and improved template for film reviews made up of what bitter former Premiere writer Glenn Kenny calls “thematic modules.” But even Kenny could not resist the derrièrist onslaught and gave this ground-breaking approach to reviewing a shot, applying it to one of the most boring films ever made, Au Hasard Balthazar:

"The Pitch: A donkey in provincial France gets passed from owner to owner until it, like, dies.
What It Really Is: Apparently, a "meditation" on life, suffering, and grace, and that kind of stuff….
Can We Be Serious For A Moment?: Seriously? What this movie really needed was for Andy Samberg as Mark Wahlberg to show up and have a nice little chat with Balthazar."

Kenny has a long way to go before he reaches the scholarly heights of one of the deans of derrièrist film critics, John Podhoretz. Podhoretz didn’t bother to see Stop-Loss, yet another anti-war-in-Iraq movie, before he reviewed it because what would be the point? “It is high time to cease the armchair analysis of those who refuse to attend war-in-Iraq movies and ask them directly to explain their behavior,” writes Podhoretz, who then moves from the armchair to the divan to begin his analysis by interviewing himself. “I'm about to turn 47. I have seen thousands of movies in my time. Life is too short to spend even two hours in a theater watching Stop-Loss. Its virtues are, I expect, that it is very well made, with vivid scenes of terrifying battles in the streets of Karbala or Falluja--and touching moments of reconciliation. There's probably a well-done scene in or just outside a Wal-Mart. Its failings are that it tells a schematic story that stacks the deck.” Podhoretz was able to figure all this out from “three trailers and a few minutes watching Showbiz Tonight.” Podhoretz also wrote an entire column extolling the virtues of watching movies on an iPod: “Say you're watching a bad or boring movie on a subway train, a movie you nonetheless want to get to the end of. A distraction or two is not a bad thing; the movie turns into a radio show for a moment as you survey the other passengers. And if a homeless guy comes through asking you to help him in the name of Jesus, you can turn right back to the iPod, confident he will pass you by.” Isn’t that what movies are for anyway, to distract you from homeless people?

Sadly, one of the great proponents of derrièrism, Libertas, went defunct this year, but not before its founder Jason Apuzzo denounced the film WALL-E, which attacked everything derrièrism stands for. “Conservatives are understandably up in arms about what is apparently depicted in this film,” wrote Apuzzo before he had actually seen it. In the film humanity is depicted as a bunch of dim-witted, materialistic couch potatoes, which derrièrist film critics saw as a personal attack on their lifestyles.

Patrick Goldstein said the film slandered “the American way of life.” “If Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone, or, God forbid, some effete French director, had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don’t you think there’d be some sort of notice taken?” wrote Bill Wyman, who is no film theorist. “I’m no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.” Shannen Coffin lamented, “From the first moment of the film, my kids were bombarded with leftist propaganda about the evils of mankind.” And a reader of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog helpfully pointed out the film’s fascistic elements, such as the use of the color red, which was one of the colors on the Nazi flag and should never be used in a film unless accompanied by the colors white and blue.

Next year promises to be even better for derrièrism as many critics realize, like John Miller, that you don’t actually have to sit through all four hours of Ché to attack it. And who really wants to see crazy left-wing actor Sean Penn kiss a guy in Milk no matter how good his performance is supposed to be? I’m sure most critics would rather watch over and over again the oiled-up, musclebound actors of 2006's 300, a “classic” that brought back the “lost art of cinematic masculinity,” according to John Nolte, and wasn’t the least bit homoerotic no matter what left-wingers say. Why doesn’t Hollywood make classic movies like 300 anymore?

Crossposted at Newcritics

Update: The left-wing New York Times weighs in. And Roger Ebert replies: "The acid test of the ancient distributor's definition of a great picture--'a tukkus on every seat.'" Meanwhile, Josh Taylor writes "Note To Awards Givers: Ignore The Dark Knight At Your Own Peril," which may come to be known as one of the great manifestos of derrièrism: "Film critics can no longer afford to champion pet films which no one has ever seen, at the expense of what even they have to know is probably the better film. Here’s why: They’re all about to be out of a job....For print critics, a vote against The Dark Knight is a vote for your own irrelevancy. It’s a vote for the unemployment line."

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