Rod Dreher: January 2009 Archives

Joe Nocera, in the NYT, on Wall Street bubblehead a**hats:

This week, American companies announced somewhere around 65,000 layoffs. Caterpillar, Kodak, Home Depot, I.B.M., even mighty Microsoft: they are all cutting jobs. Everywhere in the United States, people are feeling the pain of this deepening recession. Even those with jobs worry about their futures. Their 401(k) plans have been decimated. They are frightened and angry.

Which is why Wall Street should not be surprised that oversize bonuses and $50 million jets generate outrage -- and tough rejoinders from the president. "It suggests the selfishness of people on Wall Street," said Charles Elson, a corporate governance expert at the University of Delaware, who sounded pretty outraged himself. "Wall Street has yet to learn the lesson of what happened." What happened, put simply, is that the people who thought of themselves as the smartest guys in the room -- and were paid accordingly -- weren't so smart after all. They brought down the financial system. They lost so much money that only the government can save them. The scolding they got from the president this week suggests that they're going to be paying a price -- richly deserved, I might add -- for a good long time.

More:

If you ever found yourself asking, "I wonder what communes of radical lesbian separatists are up to these days?", well, here's your answer. Getting old and dying out, basically. Building a community based on paranoia against penis people leads to crackpottery like this:

There is strident debate within and across the womyn's lands about who should be allowed to join. Many residents subscribe to strict lesbian separatism, meaning that men are permitted only as temporary visitors and that straight, bisexual and transsexual women are also excluded.

Recently when an Alapine resident received a visit from a 6-month-old grandson, an e-mail message went out to all residents, perhaps only partly in humor: "There's a man on the land."

To be sure, I have no problem in principle with gender-exclusive communities. That's what monasteries and convents are. That's what girls' schools and boys' schools are. And so forth. But no monastery or convent is organized around the principle that the opposite sex is freaky and wicked and must be escaped from -- this, as distinct from the idea that being in a same-gender community makes it easier to study, or live out a life of prayer in chastity. It's just more than a little pitiful when someone is so damaged that they look at the presence of a six-month-old baby boy as an alien threat.

I love Smoove B Love Man, and am pleased to see that he's developed political consciousness. Here's an excerpt from Smoove's Political Goals for 2009:

Smoove is not a political man. However, during the most recent election, something changed for Smoove. He has found a purpose. A new desire.

I will make Michelle Obama my woman, body and soul.

This will be a great challenge for Smoove. I will need to purchase even finer clothes and softer towels. I will have to master the hand-feeding techniques of ancient seduction monks. I must learn compliments that would cause average women to catch fire from the inner flames of desire that the compliments would stoke.

This will have to be handled very carefully. An intriguing note sent with tasteful but exotic flowers, playful chats via text message, and many a sexually charged phone call. And all this will be done in secret, as we work together on my new charity, Smoove B's Homeless Shelter for Attractive but Poor Children.

First Baby, Smoove is coming.

I hear there's a football game tomorrow, and a team I hadn't thought about for a few years, the Pittsburgh Steelers, are playing. Hooray, say I! I do like that quarterback of theirs, the Bradshaw boy, and am confident that he and Franco Harris will carry the day. Somebody please let me know how the match turns out, as I haven't been able to gin up much interest in this sort of thing since I was 10 years old.

Heh (he said, Jackie Harveyishly).

Vanity Fair magazine does a feature at the back of each issue called the "Proust Questionnaire." One of its questions is, "What is your favorite voyage?" When the question was put to him by VF, William F. Buckley answered simply, "Home."

At the time -- I must have been in my twenties when I read that -- I thought it was a lovely sentiment, but one that was alien to me. Home? What about Paris? What about London? What about New York? And so forth. Which is as it should be for a young man.

Well, now I'm a middle-aged man. I just got back from a quick trip to New York, where I interviewed for a Templeton Cambridge Journalism Fellowship. Though I was only in town briefly, I had time to visit old friends, which was, as always, deeply satisfying. Yet I have to confess that I am glad this trip was so short; I wanted to go home to my family in the worst way. There's no distress here at home, but I found myself mildly but strangely disconsolate because Julie and the kids were so far away. I bought them all presents, and took a taxi to LaGuardia without the customary regret when I'm leaving New York.

When I put the key into the front door at home, up went the chorus of shouts: "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" Roscoe the dog came barreling into the living room, barking and howling and rolling. I kissed and hugged the kids then picked up Roscoe, who licked me on the face as if I'd just come back from the war. Dinner was ready. Pork chops with apples, and a salad from our own winter garden.

Home. My favorite people. My favorite place.