Crunchy Reactionaries

I have been mildly amused by the vitriol spewed out by the Wal*Mart and Velveeta set over Rod Dreher's Crunchy Conservative book. I am, of course, mostly in favor of the Crunchy Conservative folks, but take the whole thing with a grain of bemused detachment.

Of course most "conservatives" in this country are nothing more than Liberals with a couple of conservative ideas. Around here, you will find more genuine conservatives in Berkeley than you will in the Republican strongholds, where the radical autonomy revered by the Liberals reigns supreme.

I like Dreher, albeit in a sort of patronizing way. He just strikes me as such a little man (no, I don't mean that he is short, just sometimes shrill) that I have trouble taking him seriously in cultural matters, but he is trying hard to do the right thing, and points in the right direction. In many ways he reminds me of Joseph Pearce (or does he spell it Pierce? I never know with these Englischer): they are fumbling in the right direction, but ought to learn a bit more before writing books about it.

So, what exactly is a Conservative? Let's have that be the theme for the week, now that I can spend time writing on stuff like this (the last two weeks were full of cooking for our parish's St. Joseph Festa, which went quite well).

Speaking of the St. Joseph Festa, I will be posting recipes from it, too, so if you were there and would like to know how to make one of those things, just wait and they will all be here later tonight. Or tomorrow. You know the drill. Paid writing trumps free writing.

Just don't offer to pay me to maintain the blog, because then it would be work, and I would feel guilty taking money to sit down after a couple of martinis to rage against Ron Dellums. One should rage against Ron Dellums simply for the joy of it.