Rod Dreher's Blog, page 547

What You Lose, What You Gain

My son Lucas and I spent the afternoon and early evening working at the Red Cross shelter set up on soundstages at Celtic Studios in Baton Rouge. They’ve filmed Hollywood movies there (Ender’s Game, for example), but now they’re sheltering thousands of refugees from the catastrophic floods in the Baton Rouge area. There is nothing like being among desperate, bedraggled people who have lost everything to give you perspective on your life and the world.

Two nights ago, I was so shocked and despairing over having possibly lost a chapter of my book in a hard drive crash that I took to the bed. I would like to formally apologize to God and the universe for that.

Lucas and I headed over to the shelter with coolers full of chicken, sausage, and jambalaya fixings. You know who was there waving us in outside the soundstage? The manager of the local Apple store, the guy in the galoshes who told me on Saturday morning that there would be no Genius Bar that day, because the store wasn’t opening, because employees couldn’t get to the store. He was a red-shirt volunteer.

“Hey, you came in the other day!” he said, recognizing me in the car. We had a good laugh at that. Who knew we would see each other again in such a place, under such circumstances?

After finding out where we could take the food, we headed back to the car to unload them, and saw a military chopper coming in for a landing in the open green space in front of the soundstages. They were coming in fast with people saved from roofs out in Livingston Parish and beyond. I stopped to take a photo, then Lucas and I realized they needed help getting evacuees out. We ran over and helped folks climb out of the chopper, and carry their bags toward the shelter. I turned around to take a photo of the chopper we unloaded people from, and saw a second one coming in right behind it. This went on all afternoon, and into the early evening.

We took the coolers to the chef, then went into Soundstage 6, where people were settling in for the night. “What can we do?” I asked someone.

“Right now, nobody’s coordinating it,” the person said. “Just find a place here where people need help, and start.”

That was it. That’s how it worked. All the other Red Cross shelters in town were overflowing, so this Celtic Studios thing came together at the last minute. Lucas and I went to the center of the vast building, where folks were serving food, and got busy. I served jambalaya, red beans and rice, hot tamales, and whatever else people brought. We ended up having far more food than we knew what to do with. Folks all over Baton Rouge — churches, individuals, all kinds of people — kept showing up with coolers full of jambalaya, big trays of sandwiches, hot dogs, lasagna, spaghetti, cookies, cakes, cold drinks, ice. Man, I tell you what, in times like this, you see the real goodness in the hearts of so many people. And all day long, people would walk up to me behind the jambalaya station and say, “I’m here to help. What can I do?” I told them what I myself was told: go find a place here that looks busy, and jump right in.

I watched Lucas at the other end of the food station unloading things, taking out the trash, going to get more supplies, and so forth. Adults working the food station would come up to me and say, “Is that your son? He’s working his butt off. Never seen a kid work so hard.” And he was. That makes a father proud. Watching the police officers and National Guardsmen coming in and out, Lucas said, “When I grow up, I want to help people for a living. That’s what I’m about.” Well, okay, brother, if you say so. Good on ya.

Look at this image below that I took from my station. It’s a one-armed man, an evacuee, trying to help a volunteer replace the trash bag in a big barrel:

 

 

It was not a job one person could do on their own, and this guy, despite having only one arm, and despite having had to be rescued from his flooded house by boat, wanted to do something for others. He told me later that he had surgery on Friday, and then all this happened, but he was grateful to have gotten out alive.

The stories people told, my God. I recognized one burly man who came for jambalaya as the head of a family Lucas and I had helped off the chopper. “Where’d you come in from?” I said.

“Denham Springs,” he said. “We lost everything. Our house. Four cars.”

We lost everything. Over and over I heard this. My friend Kim from St. Francisville was working next to me. She served one man who was shaky and teary. “It doesn’t feel so good to lose everything,” he said.

Lucas served one old man a plate of jambalaya. He said to the guy, “Sir, can I make you another plate for somebody?”

“I don’t have nobody to take it to,” the old man said. “I lost my wife in the water.”

Think about that.

The people who came to my station were a picture of humanity. There were Vietnamese and Latino immigrants who barely spoke English. Black people. White people. Children. Lots of elderly. And you know, they were almost all unfailingly grateful. These were folks who had nothing left but the clothes on their backs, and what they were able to get onto the roof before the boat or the helicopter rescued them, but there they were thanking us volunteers for serving them food.

What do you even do with that?

There was a man from Livingston Parish who waited on his roof for a couple of days to be rescued, and when nobody came, he blew up an inflatable raft he had with him, and used that to get out of the flood and to dry land, or at least to a passing boat. He was using his raft as his mattress there in the shelter.

There was this one elderly lady who came to the line for jambalaya carrying a folding chair. That was odd, I thought, then I realized that she was using it as a walker to steady herself. I offered to carry her food back to her spot against the wall in the soundstage. It took forever to get there, because she was having so much trouble walking. But it gave us a chance to talk.

Her name is Juanita Rougeot, and she and her two cats were saved by men in a boat. Like so many of the people I spoke to today, she lives in a neighborhood that had never, ever seen water.

“Do you have flood insurance, Miss Juanita?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Why would I?”

Her spot was a blanket and a pillow on the hard floor, up against a wall of the soundstage. Her cats were with her in a carrier. She unfolded her chair and sat down. I handed her the food, and told her I would send Lucas back with some ice water.

“Do you have anybody to come pick you up?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I don’t have anybody. I live by myself.”

So, I tell you readers in the Baton Rouge area: there is a sweet and exhausted elderly lady named Juanita Rougeot who is all alone in the world. She is sleeping on the concrete floor in the Celtic Studios shelter, just her and her kitties. She has nothing left in the world, and nobody to take care of her. If you can help her, if you have a place for her to stay, please do. That shelter is full of Miss Juanitas, but I met one, and I’m worried about her. No one at her age should have to spend the night on the floor of a shelter, facing the rest of her life with nothing, and no one. Just her and her cats. If you can go help her, please do. Can your church give her a decent place to sleep, to rest? For the long term?

It just about killed me to think about her the rest of the afternoon. All the hotels are full around here. What could I do for her? Nothing, except ask you readers for help, if you are in a position to give it. As I said, there so many Miss Juanitas at that shelter. You’d hear a woman’s voice come over the loudspeaker all afternoon, calling the names of people, adding, “You have someone here to pick you up.” Nobody’s going to call Juanita Rougeot’s name, unless it’s you.

A young woman came by the jambalaya station for food. “Where’d you come in from?” I asked.

“Sherwood Forest,” she said, mentioning a neighborhood on the eastern side of Baton Rouge. “Our house is underwater.”

“Sherwood Forest?!” I said. “Whoever heard of it flooding in Sherwood Forest?”

“I know, right?” she said. “It never floods there. Now my husband and I have lost everything.”

Towards the end of the day, I served a plate of jambalaya to a Baton Rouge police officer who was there early this morning when I first went over there. “You’ve been here a while,” I said.

“All day,” he told me. “I’m beat, I tell you what.”

“Didn’t  I hear that other officer say this morning that half the BRPD was taken out by the water?”

“Yeah. A whole lot of our guys live in the flooded areas. Their houses are underwater. They lost everything.”

They. Lost. Everything.

“This is way worse than Katrina for us in Baton Rouge,” the plainly exhausted officer said. “We had a bunch of people from New Orleans in the Pete Maravich Center and the LSU Fieldhouse, but we were all fine here. It’s different this time. This is our Katrina. And it’s gonna be worse tomorrow. The rivers are cresting, and there’s gonna be all this back flow coming at people. A lot of places that are dry today are gonna be underwater tomorrow, and people aren’t even expecting it.”

Around 7 pm, my back couldn’t take anymore, and there were plenty of people eager to serve, so Lucas and I called it a day. We had no idea how long we had been there, because there was no natural light in the soundstage. Two of the last men I served were Louisiana National Guardsmen.

“Y’all must be hungry,” I said, scooping softball-size servings of jambalaya into Styrofoam containers for them.

“Oh man, yeah,” one said. “We been diving all day.”

“Diving?”

“In the water rescuing people.”

Diving. And they were headed back out to the field after supper.

Exhausted and muddy from trudging through the muck, Lucas and I made our way back to our car. And still people were coming in, carrying all their worldly possessions they had left. Driving out, I joked to the Apple store manager, “Hey, you think I can keep my Genius Bar appointment tomorrow?” He smiled and said, “I don’t know, man. We’ll see if we can open.”

 

When we got home, Julie and Nora were gone. Matthew said they had gathered board games and toys and headed for Celtic Studios. That was smart. There are lots of little kids there with nothing to do, and parents who have a lot more to worry about than keeping them entertained. Lucas headed for the shower, and I sat down to check e-mail. None of us on AT&T have had mobile phone service today. A switching station in Livingston Parish flooded. Julie and Nora came in half an hour later.

We told her about all we had seen and heard, and how it tore our hearts out, but also how good it felt to be doing something for people, and to see so many other people doing something for the flood victims. And when Julie told me that it would be hard to hear this, but we have almost certainly lost half of our worldly possessions, including all our wedding photos, baby photos, and all kinds of irreplaceable heirlooms that we had stored in a climate-controlled facility for safekeeping while we spend a year in a small apartment — a facility that is now probably underwater, it being in Sherwood Forest — I was remarkably chill about it. We’re lucky. We didn’t lose a house. We have insurance. That puts us ahead of 99 percent of the people Lucas and I helped feed today.

Tonight I am sitting at home drinking Stoli and getting in touch with my inner Ronnie Morgan, our Starhill friend (remember him from Little Way?) whose camp by Thompson Creek had water up to the roof line. Everything in it is gone. “I ain’t worried,” he told my mom yesterday. “I’m gonna go back to my kitchen and can some more peppers.”

That’s the spirit of Louisiana, right there. And so is this, from Thomas Achord, a teacher at Sequitur Classical Academy, where my wife teaches and our kids go to school. He had to evacuate his parents. He wrote on Facebook:

Louisiana is most beautiful when it is a great disaster. The entire society spontaneously comes together as if joined by familial ties. No one watches his neighbor suffer but all selflessly and voluntarily go about seeking whom they can help. And they do so with their own personal means – trucks, boats, rafts, chainsaws, shovels, food, and often at risk of their lives. We work hard and we eat grand, we are filthy but laughing, we lose our homes yet are welcomed into others. I have seen finer lands but not people. Keep the world and give me Louisiana, even in disaster.

Yeah, you right. We all need some Mr. Ronnie in our hearts right now.

Ronnie Morgan, more chill than you

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

My station at the Red Cross shelter at Celtic Studios. Under the blue patterned blanket in the front is an elderly Vietnamese lady who, in the shot, is praying her rosary.

Patriotism

This morning, driving food to donate to the Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge, I got stuck behind a pick up truck towing a trailer with a big pirogue in it. A pirogue is a Cajun-style small boat. Everywhere on the streets of Baton Rouge this morning you see men hauling boats. Seems that every man who has one is answering the police call to deploy to rescue people stranded in their houses. Seeing that pirogue, though, damn near made me want to cry. I love this state. I love it so hard.

The shelter is at Celtic Studios, a big production facility on the eastern side of the city, closest to the flooded areas in Livingston Parish and beyond. I have been told that the other Red Cross shelters in the area are full, so the Celtic Studios folks opened up to take overflow. I could not confirm that, though. I picked up a couple of adults who had walked in from out Greenwell Springs Road in the stifling heat and humidity. “It’s terrible,” the mother said, describing the scene they had departed. “We ain’t never seen water like that.”

That is the story all over this part of south Louisiana this morning. There was a steady line of cars delivering food and supplies, but also delivering people. I got behind a Baton Rouge city bus that had been pressed into service ferrying evacuees. I delivered our stuff, but there was a mix-up about who was to receive it, so I spent some time in the shelter looking for the chef who put out a call for jambalaya fixings. While I was looking for him and pushing a cart full of chicken, sausage, onions, celery, garlic, and rice (no bell peppers at Costco this morning), I was taken aback by the sea of humanity washing through the doors of the vast building. There were people who looked fairly prosperous, people who looked like they had not much more than the clothes on their back, old people on walkers, little children carried by their parents, an old man on a cane who had no shoes — basically, here comes everybody.

The Red Cross was coordinating it, and doing an amazing job. Teams from local churches were already in action, lifting, hauling, comforting. Ran into a guy I know from Healing Place church in south Baton Rouge. Later, when I heard that Healing Place was cooking jambalaya for evacuees in their kitchen and bringing it over to the shelter, I asked another Healing Place volunteer if I could take my stuff over to the church.

“You can,” he said, “but you need a boat to get to it.”

I decided to come back home, ice down the meat, and get on wifi to find a church that’s cooking and can take the supplies. Everybody who has AT&T mobile phone service is out of luck this morning. A switching station in waterlogged Livingston Parish is underwater now. AT&T is trying to reroute calls, but a whole lot of people can’t even call for help this morning. I saw a Baton Rouge Police Department officer at the shelter letting an old man on a walker use his phone. The old man has AT&T. The cop has Verizon. And there you are.

I overheard a Red Cross worker ask that officer for more security at the shelter. Everybody is peaceful, but as the day wears on, and more and more people come in for shelter, there aren’t enough volunteers to manage them. The officer said, “I’ll do what I can, ma’am, but half our force has been wiped out by the flood.” I understood him to mean that they are either on flood duty or live in neighborhoods that are underwater themselves. A lot of Baton Rouge cops live outside the city, in the same areas now being evacuated. Driving back to the house from the shelter, I passed the spot where those BRPD officers and the East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s deputy were gunned down several Sundays ago. Anybody who says anything derogatory about a Baton Rouge law enforcement officer on this day ought to have his butt kicked. A friend who is an emergency room doctor said a couple of days ago that two police officers soaked to the bone brought in a victim they saved from drowning, then headed back to the front, so to speak, to rescue more people.

Driving back home, I reflected on what I was reading at breakfast while having my coffee. It was this:

My rallies are not covered properly by the media. They never discuss the real message and never show crowd size or enthusiasm.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 14, 2016

Checking just now, I see that Trump has put out seven tweets in a row this morning, whining about how mean the news media is to him. Not a single word about Katrina.2 here in Louisiana. To be fair, Hillary Clinton hasn’t said anything about it either, but her Twitter feed is managed by campaign drones. Trump does his twitter feed himself. I kid you not, as I sat at the stop light at the corner of Airline and Old Hammond Highway, waiting to turn, I looked over at the spot where those three law enforcement officers where shot dead last month, and I thought about all the poor, desperate people I had just seen at the shelter, and all the good men and women of Louisiana spending their Sunday morning doing whatever they can to help their neighbor, and I thought Donald Trump can go to hell.

Honestly, with so much suffering in this country now — acutely here, right now, in Louisiana, but people are hurting all over (seen the news from Milwaukee today?) — all that fathead can do is gripe about how mean the news media are to him. It’s disgusting. I have not been a #NeverTrump conservative, and don’t really care to be part of that crowd now, even though I cannot imagine voting for Hillary Clinton either. I believe Trump has brought up some important issues that the GOP didn’t care to address. But as of today, I wouldn’t vote for Trump if you put a gun to my head. The vanity and the pettiness of that jackass beggars belief. If he had any sense, he would be on a plane down here trying to help, or at least showing real concern, instead of sitting there with his smartphone, bleating like a baby.

You don’t need to know what I think of Hillary. If you are a conservative, it’s exactly what you think too. But it makes me really angry that this is what the conservative party has to offer America in the fall of 2016: this ridiculous clown. And we have him in part because none of the GOP regulars could make the sale to primary voters.

Till now, I’ve been laughing sardonically at the two repulsive figures American voters have to choose from this November, wondering how it ever could have come to this. This morning, I’m mad about it and disgusted beyond belief.

But you know what? I am not despairing. This morning, on the roads of Baton Rouge, and at the shelter, I realized what patriotism is. It’s men with boats. It’s women carrying loads of food in for refugees. It’s black people and white people and Hispanic people and Vietnamese people working together to love and to serve black people and white people and Hispanic people who are down and out, and have no place to go. It’s young men from churches serving hot jambalaya to refugees from the flood. Here’s that scene:

It’s the guy I can see right now next door to where I sit now, with his car backed up to his front door, his trunk open, loading it full of things. You know good and well he’s headed to the Red Cross shelter. My son Lucas and I will be right behind him.

I love Louisiana. This is my home. This is our home, my neighbors and me. I think of the great line from Little Steven Van Zandt’s “I Am A Patriot”:

I was walking with my brother

And he wondered what’s on my mind

I said what I believe in my soul

Ain’t what I see with my eyes

And we can’t turn our backs this time

I am a patriot, and I love my country

Because my country is all I know

I want to be with my family, the people who understand me

I’ve got nowhere else to go

What is my country? Today, to me, it feels like Louisiana. Washington is very far away. Baton Rouge is right here. Nothing against America, you understand, but this hot, wet, miserable piece of ground is where my heart is. I feel that this morning in a way I never quite have. Maybe if I had been here during Katrina and seen it with my own eyes, I would have come to this realization earlier. But I didn’t. Nevertheless, I’m glad that I did.

The only politics that really matter to me is the politics of this community — that is, the politics of being a good neighbor. Look, I know that politics as statecraft matter. I’m talking about what matters to me. I’d rather be there with the people from the churches and the community, we who are in dry houses today, helping those who have nothing. If that’s the Benedict Option, then I choose it. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have nothing to say to me that I care to hear. For me, this is here and this is now. Hillary, Trump and the rest of them are people from TV Land.

Hey, if you are in Baton Rouge and have stuff to give, take it to the shelter at Celtic Studios. Or better yet, there are churches all over town taking donations — might even be better to find one near you to avoid big traffic jam at Celtic. If you can volunteer somewhere, do. Give generously to the Red Cross; they need it. And if you have a boat, go to O’Neal Lane or Millerville exits. Men are launching boats off the Interstate, and state police are telling them where to go. A call just went out for boats to show up at the Home Depot on Coursey. This is how we do it.

UPDATE: I’m just back from a day spent volunteering at the shelter. The magnitude of this disaster is breathtaking. I don’t have a lot of good to say about Hillary Clinton, but I’ll say this, and I mean it: if she were president and this happened, she would be competent enough to get short term and long term help to the masses of people who have lost everything. Donald Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office reading his Twitter feed and thinking about his greatness.

Louisiana Suffers, Louisiana Shines

It is hard to find the words to describe what parts of south Louisiana are contending with right now. The flooding is Katrina-like. Livingston Parish, on the eastern border of Baton Rouge, is cut off. Hundreds and hundreds of houses are underwater. Cars and caskets are floating down city streets there. Places that have never flooded are underwater. My mom is hosting my cousin and her family, who got out of Livingston just ahead of the water, and into West Feliciana before Highway 61 was closed again when the water overtook the bridge.

Which has never happened.

If you heard Debbie Elliott’s beautiful NPR story about The Little Way of Ruthie Leming a few years back, or if you read the book, you will remember Ronnie Morgan, our lifelong family friend and neighbor. He’s a good ol’ boy in the very best sense of the word. He would give you the shirt off his back and wouldn’t care. He’s the most easygoing man in West Feliciana, and that’s saying something. Listen to the NPR story to get a sense of who he is. You’ll hear him interviewed at a crawfish boil we had at his camp near Thompson Creek. This camp has for a long time been Starhill’s clubhouse.

It has never flooded, until today. By early afternoon, the water was at the roofline. Everything inside the camp is a total loss. Mr. Ronnie had no insurance. It’s gone.

He came by to tell my mother about his loss. He said, “I ain’t worried. I’m gonna go back to my kitchen and can some more peppers.”

That right there is the spirit of Louisiana. May there always be a Mr. Ronnie.

This below is also the spirit of Louisiana. It is a Facebook post tonight by Thomas Achord, a young man who heads the rhetoric school at Sequitur Classical Academy, the classical Christian school where my kids go and my wife teaches. Thomas Achord teaches Greek there too, among other things. He lives in Livingston Parish, and spent today evacuating his folks and filling sandbags. He posted this tonight:

Louisiana is most beautiful when it is a great disaster. The entire society spontaneously comes together as if joined by familial ties. No one watches his neighbor suffer but all selflessly and voluntarily go about seeking whom they can help. And they do so with their own personal means – trucks, boats, rafts, chainsaws, shovels, food, and often at risk of their lives. We work hard and we eat grand, we are filthy but laughing, we lose our homes yet are welcomed into others. I have seen finer lands but not people. Keep the world and give me Louisiana, even in disaster.

He’s right. Y’all pray for us, and help us if you can. You can be sure we would do it for you. And we would be all Ronnie Morgan about it. Everybody is calling the bateaus and bass boats people are using to rescue their neighbors “Cajun Uber”.

Hey, please excuse the very light posting here. My laptop is suddenly in a coma and I won’t be able to get anybody to look at it till Monday at earliest — if anything is open. I posted this using my old iPad mini. It took 45 minutes with all the coding, despite it being minor, and I’m not even going to attempt posting a photo. We aren’t going to risk the drive to Starhill tomorrow for church. The way things are rapidly changing here, we might be able to get up there using the back way, but may not be able to get home to Baton Rouge. It’s that bad.

The Perfect Storm

As you have no doubt heard, we are in a serious situation in south Louisiana regarding the weather. Torrential rains for the past few days have caused unprecedented flooding. My family is okay. Our place in Baton Rouge is on high ground, so no problems, and my mom up in West Feliciana is also okay. But I can’t get to her because broad, gentle Thompson Creek has become a raging torrent. The churning water is threatening to overtake the bridge, and has already covered the low-lying approaches on either side of the bridge, rendering Highway 61 impassable. I don’t think this has happened in living memory, not even after hurricanes.

I’m really blessed because the only real hassle I’ve had from the weather is the fact that my smartphone goes off at all hours with BOOOOMP BOOOOMP BOOOOMP alerts from the National Weather Service. The last one came at 2:30 this morning. Hard to get back to sleep after that. But these things are important. My cousin and her husband out in Livingston Parish had to sleep in their car last night so they could escape if necessary. They will be staying with my mom tonight, and for as long as they need to. It’s crazy. Places that have never flooded, at least in anyone’s memory, are flooding now.

But hey, I’m not panicking about that. I’m panicking about the fact that I was sitting in my living room working on the Work chapter of The Benedict Option — the final chapter — when suddenly my computer sort of froze, and the text of my open files began to go crazy, my words being replaced by gibberish.

“Matthew, what’s happening?!” I said to my teenage son Matthew, who is tech-savvy.

He came over and had a look. “Dad, your hard drive is dying. Your file is corrupted.”

I shut the computer down at once. I was so panicked that I just shut down, and went to bed. Got up early this morning, drank my coffee, put on my raincoat, and drove to the Apple store to try to beg my way onto the Genius Bar list without a reservation. When I got there, the store was dark, and there was a man in the back wearing galoshes. He came to the front, opened the door, said he was the manager.

“We’re not going to be able to open today,” he said. “Most of my employees can’t get here because of the water. We might open tomorrow, but it’ll probably be Monday.”

So, here I sit, stewing in a toxic flood of panic, waiting for Monday, and unable to do a thing with the manuscript, because it’s all on a laptop that I’m praying will not completely die before the surgeons can get their hands on it.

The good news is that the entire second draft has been for a couple of weeks in the hands of my editor. Plus, I’ve been saving things all along on a flash drive. I started working on the new chapter a couple of weeks ago, after my editor decided (rightly) that we needed an extra one on Work. But because we were in the process of moving, I didn’t think to save it to the flash drive. Besides, there’s no way a computer’s hard drive would crash at the most inopportune moment imaginable, right? Right?

Wrong.

The Apple manager said there’s a decent chance they can recover the data, but if they can’t, all I will have lost is one chapter. That’s not nothing. I worked hard to get it right, and it was close to being finished. Still, it could have been much, much worse. Fortunately, all the interviews I did for that chapter were via e-mail, which for me is in the cloud, and recoverable — though that will be a massive pain in the rear end.

Let me tell you writers now: don’t ever, ever, ever fail to save your work in the cloud. I have a Dropbox account but didn’t use it. That will never happen again.

Let me also tell you something cool. Last night, I had anxiety dreams. In my dream, I was in Alaska, of all places, trying hard to work on my manuscript, but I was unable to do it. I found myself in a bookstore attached to a church, and was going through the shelves looking at volumes by G.K. Chesterton. I’m not really a reader of Chesterton, but I was amazed because here were slim Chesterton volumes that had never been published. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to open them and read them, but every time I would try to read one, somebody would interrupt me. At some point, there was GKC himself, standing next to me, wearing a three-piece gray tweed suit. He was looking at me, but saying nothing. It was as if he were there to help me get his books open. I can’t remember how that ended.

This morning, dejected by being turned away at the Apple store, I decided to check my Twitter feed. I found this in it, from my friend Marco Sermarini, one of the main figures in The Benedict Option and head of the Italian Chesterton Society. He was replying to a despairing tweet I sent out last night just before bedtime, lamenting the computer disaster:

@roddreher Grande. Chesterton will surely help you!

— Soc Chestertoniana (@Sochest) August 13, 2016

 

I was asleep when Marco tweeted that, so I couldn’t have seen it before going to bed.

Hey, you never know. Mystery! I am going to read some Chesterton today, while I have nothing to do but sit and stew. Headed to the library now.

The Problem Of Uncertain Trumpets

Maybe you heard that our Catholic vice president, Joe Biden, recent recipient of the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame, presided over the wedding of two of his male staffers recently:

Proud to marry Brian and Joe at my house. Couldn’t be happier, two longtime White House staffers, two great guys. pic.twitter.com/0om1PT7bKh

— Vice President Biden (@VP) August 1, 2016

Not a peep was heard from the Catholic bishops about this [UPDATE: Three peeps were heard, and three cheers for these bishops. — RD] — and this got Protestant theologian Carl Trueman to thinking. Excerpt:

Given the two major parties’ nominees for the presidency, we can assume that the future of religious liberty as we have known it in America is not a bright one. Religious liberty would not fare well under the one administration, and it might indeed bid farewell under the other. The time has come for us to make plans for the future. I have made it clear before that I believe Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option seems to build on the most realistic premise: that we must despair of national politics delivering anything for us and refocus on the local. This, as Dreher has pointed out again and again, will require withdrawal from certain spheres.

But I suggest that it will mean more than simple withdrawal. It will also require the drawing of certain lines and thereby the exclusion of certain people from church circles. We cannot bring clarity to the identity and testimony of the church unless we draw some pretty clear boundaries about who belongs and which beliefs and behaviors are legitimate. If nothing you say or do can merit your removal from the Church, then the Church really has no distinct identity and ultimately no distinct mission.

As Carl says, if the most prominent Catholic elected official in the country can voluntarily preside in a secular capacity over a same-sex wedding, and not get disciplined by the Catholic hierarchy, something has gone very wrong. It’s not that the Church — Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, whatever — has to weigh in on every single issue. But come on, this is the Vice President of the United States. Carl is right: a church that will stand for anything stands for nothing.

I have never met Carl, though we’ve become e-mail friends, but you should know that he’s a very conservative Reformed theologian. Keep that in mind as you read this. It’s something I’ve said from time to time on this blog, even though I’m an ex-Catholic:

As of this moment, the leadership of all of our churches in the U.S. leaves much to be desired. Mainline Protestant denominations sold out to the world two generations ago. Evangelicalism is full of vibrant enthusiasm but lacks any intellectual depth or consistency when it comes to social teaching. Confessional Protestants are such a small minority that we are barely noticeable. Key to the religious future of the United States is the Roman Catholic hierarchy. It alone has the status and the potential cohesion to make a difference. All of our hopes depend upon the Roman Catholic Church taking a clear and bold stand.

Yet therein lies the problem.

To repeat my own view: though I am a convinced Orthodox Christian, I live in the West, and I deeply believe that the future of the West depends on the vigor of the Roman Catholic Church above all. But no church — not mine, not yours — can afford to be laissez-faire about church discipline. This is a point I make in the Benedict Option book I’m working on. Carl says it well here:

Whatever option we choose in the future—Benedict or otherwise—if ecclesiastical discipline remains optional, it is really all over for Christian orthodoxy.

Along those lines, a Catholic reader e-mailed this remark by Tryphon, an Orthodox abbot on Vashon Island, Washington. The Catholic reader said he much prefers this to Pope Francis’s mealy-mouthed response to Father Hamel’s murder. Excerpt:

The recent comment by the Roman Catholic pontiff, Pope Francis, following the barbaric beheading of an elderly French priest, while serving mass, betrayed a sad response response to an event that was a replay of what Christians have experience for hundreds of years, at the hands of fundamentalist Moslems. Pope Francis compared this evil slaughter of 85-year-old Jacques Hamel, by declaring to the world, “I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence, because every day, when I browse the newspapers, I see violence, here in Italy. This one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law, and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics! If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence . . .”.

This statement is particularly shocking when compared to the response of His Holiness Pope Tawadros II, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt. Following the beheaded in cold blood of 21 Coptic men, only because they are Christians and refused to deny Christ, Pope Tawadros II granted them instantaneous recognition as martyrs. Following the ancient tradition that anyone who dies shedding their blood for Christ, martyrs go straight to heaven, regardless of their personal sins.

More:

We should never give in to a litany of mercy, excusing religious fundamentalists simply because we desire dialogue and peace between religions. Mercy must always be a balance between law AND gospel, otherwise it becomes nothing but a trivialization of the evil that comes about when people give themselves over to fundamentalism. Pope Francis, in his desire to promote Islamic-Christian peace, has failed to recognize the martyric death of this French priest, relegating it, instead, to a simple act of violence, not unlike the murdering of one’s wife.

Read the whole thing. Pope Tawadros, the Coptic patriarch, actually lives in Egypt, a Muslim country, and puts himself at great risk by calling those slain Christians martyrs.

Seems to me that a church leader who cannot stand up and call a priest slaughtered by Muslims at his own altar while serving the Holy Mass a “martyr” is an uncertain trumpet, to put it kindly. Same goes for the matter of church discipline. We have so many of uncertain trumpets all over Christianity in the West in these dark days. Don’t you be one of them!

Inside The Head Of Trump Voters

 

 

Here is the keynote speech the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt gave to the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association last week. It’s about an hour long, and well worth your time. If you only have time to watch half of it, start at around the 29 minute mark:

Haidt devotes his address to the theme “The Centre Cannot Hold” — which is, of course, a line from the famous Yeats poem The Second Coming. Haidt’s point is that we are at a dangerous time in American public life, one in which everyone is “filled with passionate intensity,” to quote Yeats. And Haidt can back it up with data.

He says three graphs demonstrate the reality of our situation. I can’t figure out how to reproduce them here, but if you click on the PowerPoint page on this Haidt post, you can see them. The first shows that Congress is more polarized now than it was in the Civil War. The second shows that the American people are also highly polarized, but only by political party. And the third shows that we really hate the Other Party.

One of Haidt’s point is that while the lower middle class and the working class really have suffered economically, the real divide in our country (and throughout the West) right now has to do not with income, but with moral psychology. So yes, it’s still the culture war, stupid. It’s just that the battlefield and the terms of engagement have shifted dramatically.

Here’s something critical: at around the 22:30 part of his talk, Haidt says you can’t blame Bush or Obama for this polarization. There were ten deep cultural trends that started in the 1990s that pushed us to this point, and neither man could have done anything to stop them.

Then Haidt gets to the gist of his address: the dilemma produced by the axiom that morality binds and blinds.

If you look back far enough in humankind’s history, you will observe that you don’t see civilizations starting without their building temples first. Haidt, who is a secular liberal, is not making a theistic point, not really. He’s saying that the work of civilization can only be accomplished when a people binds itself together around a shared sense of the sacred. It’s what makes a people a people, and a civilization a civilization. “It doesn’t have to be a god,” says Haidt. Anything that we hold sacred, and hold it together, is enough.

The thing is, this force works like an electromagnetic field: the more tightly it binds us, the more alien others appear to us, and the more we find it impossible to empathize with them. This is what Haidt means by saying that morality binds and blinds.

Haidt quizzes the 700-800 people in the hall about their Hillary vs. Trump feelings. The group — all psychologists, therapists, professors of psychology, and so forth — were overwhelmingly pro-Hillary and anti-Trump. No surprise there. But then he tells them that if they believe that they could treat without bias a patient who is an open Trump supporter, they’re lying to themselves. In the America of 2016, political bias is the most powerful bias of all — more polarizing by far than race, even.

Haidt turns to the work of social psychologist Karen Stenner, and her 2005 book The Authoritarian Dynamic. The publisher describes the book like this (boldface emphases mine):

What are the root causes of intolerance? This book addresses that question by developing a universal theory of what determines intolerance of difference in general, which includes racism, political intolerance, moral intolerance and punitiveness. It demonstrates that all these seemingly disparate attitudes are principally caused by just two factors: individuals’ innate psychological predispositions to intolerance (“authoritarianism”) interacting with changing conditions of societal threat. The threatening conditions, particularly resonant in the present political climate, that exacerbate authoritarian attitudes include, most critically, great dissension in public opinion and general loss of confidence in political leaders. Using purpose-built experimental manipulations, cross-national survey data and in-depth personal interviews with extreme authoritarians and libertarians, the book shows that this simple model provides the most complete account of political conflict across the ostensibly distinct domains of race and immigration, civil liberties, morality, crime and punishment, and of when and why those battles will be most heated.

Haidt says Stenner discerns three strands of contemporary political conservatism: 1) laissez-faire libertarians (typically, business Republicans); 2) Burkeans (e.g., social conservatives who value stability); and 3) authoritarians.

Haidt makes a point of saying that it’s simply wrong to call Trump a fascist. He’s too individualistic for that. He’s an authoritarian, but that is not a synonym for fascist, no matter how much the Left wants to say it is.

According to Haidt’s reading of Stenner, authoritarianism is not a stable personality trait. Most people are not naturally authoritarian. But the latent authoritarianism within them is triggered when they perceive a threat to the stable moral order.

It’s at this point in the talk when Haidt surely began to make his audience squirm. He says that in his work as an academic and social psychologist, he sees colleagues constantly demonizing and mocking conservatives. He warns them to knock it off. “We need political diversity,” he says. And: “They are members of our community.”

The discourse and behavior of the Left, says Haidt, is alienating millions of ordinary people all over the West. It’s not just America. We are sliding towards authoritarianism all over the West, and there’s really only one way to stop it.

At the 41:37 point in the talk, Haidt says that we can reduce intolerance and defuse the conflict by focusing on sameness. We need unifying rituals, beliefs, institutions, and practices, he says, drawing on Stenner’s research. The romance the Left has long had with multiculturalism and diversity (as the Left defines it) has to end, because it’s helping tear us apart.

This fall, the Democrats are taking Stenner’s advice brilliantly, says Haidt, referring to the convention the Dems just put on, and Hillary’s speech about how we’re all better off standing together. Haidt says this is actually good advice, period. “It’s not just propaganda you wheel out at election time,” he says. If we don’t have a feasible conservative party, we open the way for authoritarianism.

To end the talk, Haidt focuses on what his own very tribe — psychologists and academics — can do to make things better. They can start by being aware of their own extreme bias. “We lean very far left,” he says, then shows a graph tracking how far from the center the academy has become over the past 20 years.

Haidt says we don’t need “equality” — that is, an equal number of conservatives and liberals in the academy. We just need to have diversity enough for people to be challenged in their viewpoints, so an academic community can flourish according to its nature. But this is not what we have. According to the research Haidt presents, in 1996, liberals in the academy outnumbered conservatives 2:1. Today, it’s 5:1 — and the conservatives are concentrated in engineering and other technical fields. Says Haidt: “In the core areas of the university — in the humanities and social sciences —  it’s 10 to 1 and 40 to 1.”

The Right has left the university faculties, he said — and a lot of that is because they got tired of the “hostile climate and discrimination”

“People who are not on the left … are often in the closet,” says Haidt. “They can’t speak up. They can’t criticize. They hear somebody say something, they believe it’s false, but they can’t speak up and say why they believe it’s false. And that is a breakdown in our science.”

Until they repent (my word, not his), university professors will continue to be part of the problem, not the solution, says Haidt. He ends by calling on his colleagues to “get our hearts in order.” To stop being moralistic hypocrites. To be humble. To be more forgiving, and more open to hearing what their opponents have to say. Says Haidt, “If we want to change things, we need to do it more from the perspective of love, not of hate.”

It’s an extraordinary speech by a brave man who is a true humanist. Watch it all here, and read more about it. 

Here’s what I think about all of this.

I don’t think the center can hold anymore. It’s too late. The cultural left in this country is very authoritarian, at least as regards orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. On one of the Stenner slides, we see that she defines one characteristic of authoritarians as “punishing out groups.” Conservative Christians are the big out group for the cultural left, and have been for a long time.

We are the people who defile what they consider most sacred: sexual liberty, including abortion rights and gay rights. The liberals in control now (as distinct from all liberals, let me be clear) have made it clear that they will not compromise with what they consider to be evil. We are the Klan to them. Error has no rights in this world they’re building.

If you’ll recall my blogging about Hillary Clinton’s convention speech, I really liked it in theory — the unity business. The thing is, I don’t believe for one second that it is anything but election propaganda. I don’t believe that the Democratic Party today has any interest in making space for us. I wish I did believe that. I don’t see any evidence for it. They and their supporters will drive us out of certain professions, and do whatever they can to rub our noses in the dirt.

I know liberal readers of this blog will say, “But we don’t!” To which I say: you don’t, maybe, but you’re not running the show, alas.

The threat to the moral order is very real, and not really much of a threat anymore; it’s a reality. As I’ve written in this space many times, this is not something that was done to us; all of us, Republicans and Democrats, Christians and non-Christians, have done this to ourselves. At this point, all I want for my tribe is to be left alone. But the crusading Left won’t let that happen anymore. They don’t even want the Mormons to be allowed to play football foe the Big 12, for heaven’s sake. This assault is relentless. Far too many complacent Christians believe it will never hurt them, that it will never happen where they live. It can and it will.

There is no center anymore. Alasdair MacIntyre was right. I may not be able to vote in good conscience for Trump (and I certainly will not vote for Hillary Clinton), but I know exactly why a number of good people have convinced themselves that this is the right thing to do. Haidt says that the authoritarian impulse comes when people cease trusting in leaders. Yep, that’s where a lot of us are, and not by choice.

This week, I’ve been interviewing people for the Work chapter of my Benedict Option book. In all but one case, the interviewees — lawyers, law professors, a doctor, corporate types, academics — would only share their opinion if I promised that I wouldn’t use their name. They know what things are like where they work. They know that this is going to spread. That fear, that remaining inside the closet, tells you something about where you are. When professionals feel that to state their opinion would be to put their careers at risk, we are not in normal times.

The center has not held. I certainly wish Jon Haidt well. He’s a good man doing brave, important work. And I hope he proves me wrong on this. I honestly do. Because if I’m right, there goes America. On the other hand, reasoning that this must not be true therefore it is not true is a good way to get run over.

Benedict Option Covers

Ben Op Blue

Ben Op Black Mountain

Ben Op Blue or Ben Op Black Mountain: Which one of these do you prefer? Why? There are a couple others we’re considering, but choose from these two. Remember, your opinion matters. I asked y’all’s opinion of two Little Way covers, and the strong preference you showed for the rocking chair image really affected our thinking.

View From Your Table

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

The rain may be coming down in great torrents outside, but inside, we are cozy with our warm breakfast from the great Tiger Deauxnuts. Notice the bits of real bacon atop a maple glazed donut on the right. Pure bliss. Wish you were here.

Hillbillies Of France

A reader writes from France:

Thanks for the very interesting interview with J.D. Vance. I just bought to book after reading your interview and it seems refreshing.

What strikes me is the cultural issues described seems so close to what we experience in Europe (and at least in France). You could almost write the same about the “Nord Pas de Calais” Region in France : White people completely hopeless, destroyed both by their own destructive culture and external factors.

If you can read French, there is an amazing book on the same subject : “En finir avec Eddy Bellegeule”. JD Vance may be interested in it. The guy, Edouard Louis grew up in a very poor family in Picardie (a derelict region in the north of France), yet he managed to graduate from Ecole Normale Superieure, a prestigious French university. More about him here. I’m sure that both authors might be interested in talking each other. Even if the two books seem really different.

As we have seen in the past, growth won’t restore things; it may even worsen then up. During the last high growth period in France in late nineties and early 2000, our liberal prime minister lost the presidential election big time and finished third behind far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. Everybody was surprised. But this growth added jobs and money in Paris and the big cities. Meanwhile, the countryside continued to collapse.

The growth period in the mid 2000 was more of the same. And the crisis was total economic destruction in rural regions while life went on normally in Paris. In fact, we understand more the minorities who work with us than poor white people from our own country. It has become easier for many of the French elite to understand a Chinese from Shanghai or someone from the Tunisian upper class than it is to understand poor white people from France. We do have more contact with the upper class from all over the world than we have with the poor people of our own country.

What I read about Brexit tells the same story and the next presidential election in France is smelling bad. Neither French conservatives nor our liberals really understand what is going on in the country. More and more people from the big cities (where the elite live) are disconnected with poor people (who can’t afford to live in the cities anyway). We just don’t live in the same world. We don’t know, we can’t understand.

Like many of your readers I’m more liberal than conservative but deeply appreciated to read thought provoking stuff that may benefit the whole political spectrum.