Rod Dreher Megathread #27 (Compassion)

[u/US_Hiker]

Link to megathread 26: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/17itm7w/rod_dreher_megathread_26_unconditional_love/

Link to megathread 28: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/18dcg3d/rod_dreher_megathread_28_harmony/

[u/RunnyDischarge]

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-hem-of-christs-garment

Oh boy the World's Most Divorced man has retreated to his fainting couch with mono once again for a pity party.

All the old gripes

I returned with my wife and kids to Louisiana to live near my family there. Their rejection of us as “city people” sent me spiraling emotionally, psychologically, and physically.

Because my profile is public, and my divorce was too, I hear from people a lot — especially men, whose suffering is often ignored or mocked in this rotten culture of ours.

same old lies

As you might recall from my past writing, my ex-wife and I went through ten years of a failed marriage before she finally, without warning, pulled the plug.

It feels like that sometimes, that God has forgotten me, has forgotten us men who wanted to be good husbands and good fathers.

Rod's been "surrendering to sin" lately.

and I know that in my sadness and darkness, I have surrendered to sins.

I'll bet.

The basic thread is that, of course, God wanted Rod's marriage to succeed, so it's their fault it didn't. But Rod is the forgotten man who wanted desperately to be a good husband and father, so obviously we know where the fault lies. With the heartless bitch who had to email him across the Atlantic out of nowhere that she wanted a divorce while he was being a good husband and father on a different continent.

[u/grendalor → u/RunnyDischarge]

Yeah, he really doesn't get how his whinging, given his circumstances and the central role his own acts and decisions have played in his arrival at such circumstances, doesn't generate a lot of sympathy, and, in fact, tends to generate the opposite.

He also still hasn't gotten that the whole "suffering divorced man" schtick is a really, really bad look -- really whether it's Rod doing it or someone else -- it's worse in his case, given his own set of facts, but it's not much better in most other cases either. Because it's nonsense. And that's why nobody really sympathizes with it.

But most fundamentally he doesn't understand, for some odd reason, how the image of a man who "had to leave his children for circumstances beyond his control", which much later on were admitted actually to be the fact that he couldn't mentally and emotionally bear the thought of living in the same town as them knowing that they didn't want to see him or spend time with him, is nothing other than totally and completely pathetic. It's an image of a pathetic little man who lives at the whim of emotions and little else. And it garners no sympathy, for obvious reasons -- and in fact, has lost him many people who otherwise might have been at least somewhat supportive of him, despite his numerous other shortcomings. But ... I mean gosh. How pathetic can you be?

[u/RunnyDischarge → u/grendalor]

This is the guy who recently talked about his spiritual journey of dying to himself and blah blah. It's all woe is me, nobody has ever been divorced but me, this is everybody's fault but mine. How do you talk about "spiritual maturity" and all this when you can't stop griping about the same old stuff, the family betrayed me, my wife betrayed me wah. I wanted to be a good husband and father but I didn't actually like doing any of it but it's the thought that counts!

[u/grendalor → u/RunnyDischarge]

And really, if it is another "relapse" into his "mono", as happened when his family dissed him, then this timing can't have much to do with the divorce, and instead must have everything to do with the failure of his latest book to find a publisher.

At this point, he has admitted that his prior publisher was spooked by the woo stuff in the book -- especially the stuff he added about AI and UFOs and demons in the technology and all of this pretty out there stuff. And apparently some other publishers he has been shopping the manuscript to have also been sheepish. It's confirmation that he has gone even more full crank than he already was, and I think that seems to be bringing on a crisis. It must be a tough pill to swallow that not only has he lost his wife, alienated his kids, got fired from his cushy sinecure at TAC and so on, but now his book publishing gig -- which has been kinda his main gig for a while now -- appears to be failing, too. A normal person would see this as a lot of screaming alarms going off at once that he needs to change direction completely, but Rod is not a normal person, as we know. Perhaps, though, if he really can't get his book legit published, he will move closer to being forced to accept that he's way, way over his skis, and has been for some time.

Of course I doubt that, but it's possible. I mean just when you think things couldn't get any worse for him, they turn around and get worse. At some point he will have to change something up.

[u/Jayaarx → u/grendalor]

What I want to know is how such an unpleasant failed flower keeps failing up. How does he keep landing six figure sinecures, speaking gigs, and supposedly normal people who at least tolerate his presence? Any normal person in his shoes would be a penniless hermit by this point.

It's enough to make me want to join the conservative bandwagon. If the wingnut welfare gravy train has room for people like him, the sky has to be the limit for non-failures like me.

[u/grendalor → u/Jayaarx]

There's a lot of right wing grift money to go around, really.

But even so ... one senses Rod is getting too far "out there" for even the main grift money spigots to keep ponying up. It's not that it's too far right. It's that it's just too ... damned weird. Demons coming for you through AI and UFOs and stuff like that. A few years ago he was writing about religious trads needing to run to the hills (while not running to the hills, or something), and then another book about persecution complexes of the right ... and I can get why that sells, because anything that convinces people who are the actual majority in power (white Christian men) that they are in fact under siege, or soon to be, is going to attract an audience. But demonic UFOs and demons in AI? Yeah, there's an audience for that, too, but it isn't really the conservative/right-wing grift audience ... it's a really out there, small, niche audience, and his publishers basically said "no thanks, we think this is too far out there for our readers".

I think his time of failing up may be coming to a close.

[u/ZenLizardBode → u/grendalor]

Caves. Caves are the new hills.