A few weeks ago during the discussion of Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons, someone posted a rather irritated comment complaining of the way Dreher sneered at NASCAR and Gretchen Wilson (a country or country-pop singer whom I’ve never heard her as far as I know). I was pretty sure that the commenter was confusing Dreher with someone else, as I had heard the blogosphere echoes some time earlier of an attack by a conservative on conservative populism, as exemplified by a taste for NASCAR and Gretchen Wilson’s music. But since I hadn’t yet finished Crunchy Cons, it was possible that I was wrong, nor had I read the piece which I thought was actually the culprit, so I didn’t go any farther than suggesting the possibility that the commenter was mistaken.
I thought of this after I finished CC, which indeed contains nothing at all about NASCAR or Gretchen Wilson, and went looking for the anti-populist piece. Turns out it’s by Mark Gavreau Judge, who writes for the American Spectator and is also the author of a well-regarded book (which I have not read) called God and Man at Georgetown Prep. Here’s the article in question.
Now, let me say first that I have some sympathy with Mr. Judge’s fundamental point, which is that there’s nothing admirable about crudity. I even share some of his opinions about the militantly sloppy way people tend to dress these days, and I haven’t even owned a pair of jeans since the ’70s, when I suddenly realized I was sick of seeing them and they weren’t really even all that comfortable. (This does not make me well-dressed. My mode of dress can probably best be described as nondescript, with a tendency toward shabbiness.) I have zero interest in NASCAR, and I prefer my country music straight up.
But, man, does he ever choose some bad ways to make that point. So I have to say:
–To hear a man talk about "pampering" himself is a bit creepy to me–to say nothing of his calling himself a "metrosexual."
–A young mother with a baby on her hip is one of the sweetest sights this world has to offer, regardless of whether she’s wearing shoes or not.
–If I thought being a conservative had anything whatsoever to do with "pour[ing] out the Old Spice and [going] to Nordstrom’s for a bottle of Truefitt and Hill of London," I would never stand for having the term applied to me, much less apply it to myself.
UPDATE: Mr. Judge revisits the topic and makes a much better job of it.
—Maclin Horton
Having read the second piece, I can definately understand the author. I don’t think the designation uncrunchy is fair. The logical place to go with the article is to assume that this pertains to the gentry or city folk. In many respects this would have applied to common folk, at least as it is romantically portrayed. When speaking to the older generations (like my grandparents) often they have few prized possessions, but they are quite valuable, and not necessarily in the monetary sense. Even the more oppulent today tend to have vast numbers of things, but nothing truly valuable or beautiful. I digress.
Needless to say, there seems to be a great hesitancy to describe any given good as superior. Almost everything is measured in cost rather than value. Many people aren’t even willing to say that cohabitation is ugly compared to marriage. You will certainly hear people complain of the sinfulness, but very few are quite willing to say it is disordered and ugly.
Having read the first article now, I’m confirmed even though I detest the term metrosexual.
“confirmed”? Not sure what you mean. In “metrosexual”ness?
By the way, I didn’t intend “un-crunchy” as negative, just an observation.
Judge’s exemplars of Matisse, Van Gogh and Hopper as artists whose art approaches the objectively beautiful are rather surprising. And perhaps telling.
Compare Matisse’s “Carmelina 1903″ or Hopper’s “A Woman in the Sun” with Leighton’s ‘Fisherman’ or Waterhouse’s “Hylas and the Nymphs” or Bouguereau’s “Nymphs and Satyre’s”.
Leighton, Waterhouse and Bouguereau all use women as visible images of an inward struggle in men against their disordered passions. But yet all three treat the figure of the women with dignity and grace according to her nature while using women as an image of disorder. Leighton, for instance, uses the figure of a women as a outward sign of the inward struggle in the fisherman where the combat with corruption actually exists, but in so doing Leighton does not disfigure the women and by disfiguring reduce the natural dignity due to all women.
In contrast, the women portrayed by Matisse and Hopper are grotesque. The women are portrayed with all the dignity found in Degas’ L’Absinthe..
As Mr. Forrest points out, fornication is ‘ugly’ and well as ‘disordered’, and so while Leighton and co. could have reason to portray women as ugly as visible signs of sin, but don’t do so. Matisse and Hopper in contrast and without cause portray women as ugly where they would be expected to be portrayed as naturally beautiful.
If the portrayal of women in art is a window to the soul of a culture in the manner that the eyes are the window to the soul of a man, then what do the choices of Matisse, Van Gogh and Hopper as exemplars in art tell us?
If the classical period portrayed women’s platonic perfection, and medieval art portrayed women’s transcendent beauty, what does Hopper and Matisse portray? Certainly not an objective good, but perhaps a disordered ugliness mistaken for objective goodness.
I’m not sure which is worse, Judge’s prissy “metrocons” or the uncouth rednecks he loathes.
Hilarious that he equates things like moving up from Old Spice to Polo with von Hildebrand’s spiritual progress! Talk about dense.
And Maclin- you probably don’t like jeans because they are miserable in hot humid weather, like you have in Alabama most of the year. They are comfortable in cooler climes, unless they get wet, when they are clammy and chilling.
Jeans became the uniform of the counterculture because they were originally the garb of workers…
Mr. Nichols writes : “Hilarious that he equates things like moving up from Old Spice to Polo with von Hildebrand’s spiritual progress! Talk about dense.”
I agree. Hildebrand’s spiritual progress is much more in keeping with moving down from Polo to Old Spice. Not that I would want either within a fair number of yards from me, although Lauren is rather pleasing to the senses.
As for wearing jeans, I have a pair of logging jeans from college still sitting on the shelf in the closet, but always looked at them differently after a teacher looked at them while I was doing the laundry one day and reminisced of his childhood on the farm.
I’ve done well at misunderstanding and not writing clearly. I was confirmed in my impression of what the author was getting at as outlined in my first paragraph.
I detest the term metrosexual, because it strikes me as vanity and femininity.
Mr. Salazar, you should know by now that I read an inch deep. I tend to read rather superficially.
Mr. Forrest,
With rare exception, we’re all in at about the same depth of the baby pool just barely getting our toes wet. Which is probably why I like the web so much.
Where else can we have the pleasure of watching people making a gruesome spectacle of themselves drowning at such a depth? And where we in turn risk doing so likewise?
Yes, Daniel, that’s exactly right about jeans in the hot humid south. Even with that they’re useful for any kind of somewhat rough work, because they’re so tough, or at least the original jeans were. I used to wear them working on my uncle’s farm when I was growing up. But for just hanging around–nah.
I hope everybody read the second piece I linked to–it’s really quite good, and I don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression. Mr. Judge says he was really trying to make a point about the objective reality of beauty, a point on which I very much agree. I didn’t get that from the first piece, though.
Actually, you could say that the second article is very much in line with the heart of Rod Dreher’s concept of crunchy conservatism. When I picked that title for the post I was thinking of the more superficial associations of the term “crunchy.”