RON RUSE PLUS
Hodges decision and the ne plus ultra of Mr. Then came the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Dreher admitted he might have been wrong about peak oil. In a 2007 blog post, he said, “Post-peak-oil conditions would reverse globalization… Culturally, all Americans would have to undergo a Great Relearning of skills and social habits that our ancestors developed to survive in community.” When the price of a barrel of oil hit zero a few weeks ago, Mr. The pitch was that oil production had hit the limit at the same time global oil consumption was spiking with the inevitable result that the world would shut down. Dreher’s apocalypse de jure was “peak oil,” a crisis I missed entirely. Dreher’s many existential fears.įor a long time, Mr.
While I cannot confirm this, it fits perfectly with Mr. Dreher had succumbed to the Y2K hysteria, that the world was going to end when our computers ticked over into oblivion at midnight 1999. Writing at Splice Today, trenchant Dreher critic John Harris claims that Mr. It’s a staple of his writing going back more than a decade. Dreher has carried his “The End is Nigh” sign through the public square. The coronavirus is not the first or only time Mr. Dreher finished it this way, “It is deeply ironic that for many of us, the only thing worse than apocalypse is the thought that we are condemned to muddle through.” Apparently, those are the two possible fates he sees before him: mass extinction or simply “muddling through.” It’s a choice between dire and direr. Eight years ago, he explained himself in a blog post (also at TAC) called “Why we Love Apocalypse.” He says that, after the 9/11 attacks, “The world was clear and crisp and full, in a way that it hadn’t been before.” He says it was “kind of like a high.” Mr. Dreher seems to long for the end of the world. Dreher publish such a dream for his readers-and the wider public-is unknown. She dreamt she was with her children and her husband and it was night, and she expected to die in the morning. She had this dream a year ago, before any of this happened. He posted a crazy and frightening dream his friend, noted Orthodox writer Frederica Matthews-Green, where she saw literally everyone dying from a cloud that was enveloping the world and sending little spiked nodules into people’s lungs. But the catastrophic reduction of my family into poverty, and the radical instability that comes with it, because of this virus? I don’t know.” He continues, “I think I could live bravely and with stability through the death of my wife from cancer. I’m not that far removed from poverty, historically. I’m old enough to remember my father’s stories about his rural Depression childhood. Poverty, and all the insecurity that comes with it, frightens me too. I don’t have any marketable skills that don’t involve writing. None of us can count on our jobs being here through this. I’m just trying to make sure we’re honest with ourselves…. “I’m not trying to troll people,” he writes