Sing-Song Conservatism

...and a woman who used to think she was the only person in the world who owned a copy of The Moosewood Cookbook until she discovered that Dreher owned the other one...

...Dreher never does explain, so we will have to conclude that his dictionary is not as other dictionaries, which wouldn't surprise me a bit...

...In his book Hitler's Pope, John Cornwell calls Pius XII the "most dangerous" cleric in modern history...

...So outspoken was it that the Royal Air Force and the French air force dropped 88,000 copies of it over Germany...

...I see many of the political agendas today as being a total failure to understand life, seasons, accountability, and the connections of life and people to our community...

...I tried two dictionaries and a thesaurus but all of them relate "crunchy" to loud chewing or grinding, or to accounting, as in numbers crunching...

...But no...

...Several factors--the Supreme Courts Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision reaffirming Boev...

...What passes for conservatism today is actually destructionism: Agribusiness is destroying the family farm, suburbia is destroying old urban neighborhoods, the car culture is destroying the air we breathe, and television is destroying everything...

...Thomas Aquinas: "Wine may lawfully be drunk utque ad hilaritatem" (to the point of cheerfulness...

...he's grateful to Reagan for restoring optimism and confidence, but now we need to change the culture to "reclaim a way of life that's--[sway alert]--richer, more satisfying, more grounded, more sustainable, more meaningful and, in the end, more authentically joyful...

...Florence King's books include Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, The Florence King Reader, and, most recently, STET, Damnifl: The Misanthrope's Corner, 1991 to 2002 (National Review Press...

...Over the next few election cycles, pro-lifers gained dozens of congressional seats, a few governorships, and eventually the presidency, but it wasn't until John Kerry's failed presidential bid ten years later that political strategists began to question whether abortion might in fact be a losing i s s u e - f o r Democrats...

...In between affirming 'n' connecting to a richer 'n' fuller meetedness, he takes obvious pleasure in describing in lurid detail the slaughtering techniques at agribusiness holding pens...

...It would be so easy to do nowadays, Dreher rhapsodizes, because of--the Internet...

...Don't get me wrong," he hastens to add...

...This senior Muslim prelate met Hitler several times during the war, called openly for the destruction of European Jewry, and intervened with Hitler to prevent rescue efforts...

...He has decided that Jimmy Carter got it right in his famous "Malaise speech" and regrets that ignorance and ideology blinded him to it for so long...

...D ALIN DRAWS ATTENTION in this book to the man whom he regards as the missing personality in the story: Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a position of influence in the Muslim world to which Hajj Amin had been appointed by the British in 1922...

...he couldn't possibly mean earthy as in blunt speech in view of his rapture-on-every-page tendency to cascading wordfalls...

...JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73 BOOKS IN REVIEW Now an editor with the Dallas Morning News, Dreher used to work for National Review, where he was teased about his practice of buying organic vegetables from a co-op...

...His thesis is that conservatives ought to conserve something, but that all too many of them would pave over the Garden of Eden and fill it with shopping malls and McMansions in their kneejerk obeisance to growth, progress, and the free market's sacrosanct law of supply and demand...

...Learning the names of the small farmers, and coming to appreciate what they do, is to reverse the sweeping process of alienation from the earth and from each other that the industrialized agriculture and mass production of foodstuffs has wrought...

...Said one: "There is a wisdom that comes into a culture when many of its people have a direct connection to the land and to life, to the living cycles...

...Just as the Democrats are the "Party of Lust" who refuse to limit sexual freedom, Republicans are the "Party of Greed" who refuse to limit economic freedom...

...a couple, both engineers, who not only baked their own bread but ground the wheat themselves...

...After Ribbentrop rebuked the Pope for "siding" with the Allies, the Pope responded by reading from a long list of German atrocities and religious persecution against Christians and Jews, in Germany, and in Poland, which Germany had occupied six months earlier...

...He sometimes seems to suspect it himself, and falls into the trap of protesting too much...

...It takes an unusual writer to, confuse his readers before they even finish the title, but Rod Dreher, as we shall see presently, is never at a loss for confusion...

...A co-worker called him a "lefty," while the other customers at the coop did a double-take when he loaded his vegetables into his National Review tote bag...

...Shopping at the farmers market is almost too much for him to bear: ...when you've seen the face of the woman who planted it, and shaken the hand of the man who harvested it, you become aware of the intimate human connection between you, the farmer, and the earth...

...He Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher (CRowN, 259 PAGES, $24) Reviewed by Florence King has written a book about conservatives with hippie tastes, so knowing that Birkenstocks are hippie sandals, I thought "crunchy" had to do with granola...

...There's just no connection...

...Hopefully, his account will replace the divisively harmful version of papal neglect, and even collaboration, that has held the field for far too long...

...JULY/AUGUST 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75...

...The GOP had a choice between becoming pro-choice and preparing to lose more elections...

...How do you like them unsprayed, unwaxed apples...

...The brave new world of uncontested pro-choice rule lasted exactly two years, until the Republicans took control of Congress and both houses had pro-life leadership...

...The piece drew hundreds of enthusiastic letters from the kind of readers NationalReview never knew they had: a pro-life vegetarian Buddhist Republican...

...Democratic consultants could have W. James Antic III is a senior writer for the American Conservative...

...All of his crunchy con friends talk the same way...

...Years ago, Republicans suicidally carried on :The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life by Ramesh Ponnuru (REGNERY, 320 PAGES, $27.95) Reviewed by W. James Antle III against the New Deal long after it had been accepted by most citizens as part of the fabric of American political life," the columnist Charles Krauthammer averred...

...Reading Dreher is like re-reading The Organization Man, The Lonely Crowd, Tbe Affluent Society, and all the various Split-Level-this and Two-Car-that alienation scenarios that poured off the presses during the Eisenhower years...

...Hitler's pope is myth...

...In one of his many broadcasts from Germany to the Middle East, Hajj Amin said of the Jews: "They cannot mix with other nations but live, as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals...

...Traveling to German-occupied Yugoslavia, he helped raise a Muslim Waffen SS company, which turned its savage attentions against both Jews and Serbian Christians...

...Hitler found the Mufti a useful tool...

...The only one it does not resemble is The Crack in the Picture Window, which was mordantly funny...

...How...

...Wade, the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency, and the "Year of the Woman" that swept several outspokenly pro-choice Democratic women into the Senate-were widely seen as signals that abortion opponents were no longer an effective political force...

...Only one such sentence is to be found in the entire book, when, miraculously, he quotes St...

...Feeling misunderstood all around, he wrote an article called "Birkenstock Burkeans" to prove his contention that true conservatives are countercultural...

...Only a pithy classical sentence could break the spell, a polished maxim by someone who understood the rigorous use of language, i.e., someone Dreher does not know personally...

...Benedict, who in the late Roman Empire urged citizens of collapsing Roman cities to leave and establish monasteries in the countryside...

...Take to the hills, he advises, except that he classes it up with the story of St...

...As Dalin writes: "Hitler's mufti is truth...

...I F THIS ALL SOUNDS FAMILIAR, it is...

...Even his wife's explanation of why she chose to get pregnant--"...this instinct welled up in me: We should be bearingfruif'-took on the same undulatr4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW ing rhythm, like a ripe pear tree yielding to an insistent wind...

...crunchy" is slang for "earthy," he states, and leaves it at that...

...One strong piece of evidence that Dalin produces against the concept of "Hitler's Pope" is the audience granted by Pius XII in March 1940 to the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the only senior Nazi official to visit the Vatican during his papacy...

...After spending an entire book condemning heartless modern innovations that zap us with so much alienation and unconnectedness that we can't tell life's aching wonders from a hole in the ground, he now wants to build his brave new world on the device that keeps more people glued to more screens for more hours than television ever did...

...The moment you come across one of his launch words you know the rest will follow, and you start to sway.., authenticity, stability, spirituality, connectedness, instinctive, traditional...

...Makes you wish for She by H. Rider Haggard, doesn't it...

...Making people feel guilty is the liberal's specialty, and it sounds as if he's turning into one...

...Except for i t s hosannas to homeschooling as a means of strengthening the family, Crunchy Cons is a 9ack-to-the-future trip to the 1950s when similar books were all the rage...

...Having been given an office in wartime Berlin, Hajj Amin mobilized political and military support for the Nazi regime...

...Or better y e t , / t by Elinor Glyn...

...Yet somehow 1994 didn't alter the consensus that opposing abortion was a losing issue, even though no pro-life incumbent of either partylost that year to a pro-choice challenger...

...The reader is left to assume that he means "earthy" in the agrarian sense of "the good earth...

...Republicans had better not do the same with legal abortionY A writer for the Boston Globe Magazine summed up the lesson of'92 more bluntly: voting women "don't want to be told they can't have an abortion...

...In answer to Daniel Goldhagen's charge that the Roman Catholic Church remains a danger to the Jews today, Dalin writes: "It is radical I s l a m - Hitler's overt ally in World War I I - n o t the Catholic Church, that threatens Jews today...

...To do so is to become aware of the radical giftedness of our lives...

...This kind of sing-song bliss quickly becomes hypnotic...

...Both parties are driven by materialist ideologies in the sense that both stand for "the multiplication of wants and the intensification of :lesire" that have brought Americans to our present state of"empty consumerist prosperity...

...Thanks to broadband, everybody can now work at home, making it possible for crunchy cons to form virtual monastic communities...

...Stand by, here come some more.., timeless, preservation, nature, richer and fuller, living and breathing, enhancing, treasuring, and above all, community...

...Life's Recovery I N 1992, THE PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT was pronounced dead...

...The New York Times, under the headline "JEWS' RIGHTS DEFENDED," wrote on March 14, 1940: "The Pontiff, in the burning words he spoke to Herr Ribbentrop about religious persecution, also came to the defense of the Jews in Germany and Poland...

...Obituaries for the rightto-life cause often contained warnings for the Republican Party...

...The earnest Dreher, by contrast, is prone to unintentional humor ("Cheap chicken is not worth a compromised conscience"), and describes his every emotion and experience with such lyrical excess that he seems to be ever on the verge of groaning"Oh, the achingwonder of it all...

...Professor Dalin's book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the reality of Pope Pius XII's support for Jews at their time of greatest danger...

...Dalin feels that the Mufti is the one who deserves this title...

...He blames the Reagan era for promoting the kind of conservatism that holds environmentalism in contempt, and for popularizing mockery of environmentalists as "tree-hugging kooks" as a means of proving one's right-wing bona tides...

...D ESPITE THE VERBAL ECSTASY squirting out of him like ink from a squid, cheerfulness is not Dreher's long suit...

...Sing-Song Conservatism T HE COMPLETE TITLE OF THIS BOOK IS Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party...