Andrew Sullivan: Model of a Modern, Bearded, Gay, Tory Blogger

November 16, 2011 By Max Lindenman Leave a Comment

I don’t read Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish on a daily basis, or even on a weekly basis. (God knows nothing I’ve ever written has turned up in it.) But most of what I’ve seen, I’ve liked. Sullivan was one of the first to recognize the musical “Book of Mormon” as a backhanded salute to faith and good works, rather than simply a backhand. When it emerged that Michele Bachmann’s old church identifies the pope with the Antichrist, he observed that, in the UK (where he’s from), and in Ireland (whence hail his parents), “the Pope is the Antichrist” is nothing but a family-friendly thing to chant from the stands when certain football teams battle on the pitch.

In other words, the man is a confirmed non-hysteric in matters religious — a type I aspire to imitate.

That Sullivan is also gay, and HIV-positive, and a Tory, and a Catholic, I also knew, but only in the way I know, say, that Al Franken is a Minnesotan. How, exactly, he was able to resolve the contradictions inherent in those identities I had no idea. The English-Irish thing sounded like trouble enough, as Shane McGowan could probably confirm, given a few cups of espresso.

In his Esquire profile, Mark Warren tries to do it all justice. He credits Sullivan and his conservative outlook with redirecting the gay rights movement (or, if you prefer, the gay agenda) toward those markers of solid citizenship, the rights to marry and serve openly in the armed forces. In 1988, when Sullivan first unveiled his vision, in an essay for the Advocate, he didn’t win himself many friends:

Sullivan was accused of wanting to assimilate gay culture out of existence. He was called a “collaborator” and “the gay Antichrist.”… The following year, when the idea of domestic partnerships first began to take root, Sullivan saw the very real danger that these well-meant laws — Aww, the liberals are doing something nice for us! — would actually have the effect of establishing a permanent status for gays as second-class citizens. A separate-but-equal legal ghetto. All my liberal friends were saying, How can you possibly not like domestic-partner laws? I was in an editorial meeting at The New Republic railing about it, and finally Michael Kinsley said, Maybe you should write that down.

“And because [Sullivan] was going to die, “ Warren continues, “he undertook to argue the idea of homosexuality from every angle…And through the book that came of it, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality, Sullivan in a sense redefined homosexuality and argued himself into existence at the same time, just as he feared he would cease to exist.”

Being a knee-jerk liberal and obsessive underdog champion, I don’t particularly enjoy hearing that I should take my paternalism and do something Robert Mapplethorpe-ish with it. Nevertheless, I admire swagger and intellectual rigor. Sullivan’s got both, so two points to him. It’s on the third point, though, that I consider myself indebted, and that is his status as a blogging pioneer. When Sullivan started the Dish, Warren writes, “nothing but pornography and the Drudge Report” was on the ‘net:

Once he learned the basics, Sullivan would blog from ten or so at night until two or three in the morning, reading The New York Times and other papers as the next day’s editions went online, teeing off on something stupid from Maureen Dowd — I’d have a go at her before anybody’d read her column. It was fun! — writing his pieces and posting them all at the same time for people to read over their second cup of coffee. And those posts would just sit there for the

Ever the rebel, Sullivan found it “all the more exciting because the traditionalists thumbed their noses.”

It pained me a little, though, to read that Sullivan “soon realized that it wasn’t enough to have your say once a day, that for this form to work, it would have to be ongoing, never-ending, to be updated as often as humanly possible.” Not all of us are machines, sir. As for me, I’m lucky to commit one bad idea to print per day. Pushing the envelope of human possibility would mean blogging more nonsense even than the Internet could easily stand.

Also, Sullivan greets Warren in boxers. True to the blogger-as-slacker stereotype, he really works in them. I’m not sure I’m ready to dress up that much.

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In Support of Deacon Greg

July 18, 2011 By Max Lindenman 33 Comments

This past week, Deacon Greg Kandra announced that he’s closing down comments on his site for an indefinite period. As his junior colleague at Patheos, I want him to know I understand that move and support it wholeheartedly.

It’s amazing to see the things Greg goes through over at the Deacon’s Bench. In my month and a half of blogging, I’ve tended to choose quirky topics over controversial ones. As a result, I’ve built up a relatively small but invaluable core of regular readers — nearly all of them generous, and better yet, fun-loving. Greg takes a different approach, casting a wide net for news on every imaginable subject, covered from every imaginable angle. For his troubles, he’s gained a readership that, like the Church herself, might fairly be described as “Here comes everybody.” Only in Greg’s case — at least lately — I’d change that to: “Here comes everybody, including a few hardheaded trolls.”

As blogging strategies go, Greg’s ranks among the very bravest. If it pays its dividends in the form of high traffic, it also extracts a price in the form of stress. From those few occasions when I’ve broken form and jumped into a controversy, I’ve come to understand the variables involved well enough that I can explain them to anyone requiring an explanation.

Think of a combox as a bar. Leather-lunged bullies are like bikers or drag queens. Singly or in small groups, they’re easy enough to tolerate. Certainly their patronage is appreciated. When in the minority, they tend to conform, more or less, to house norms of behavior. Diversity enriches the place; ideally, it becomes a kind of Toots Shor’s, where Supreme Court justices drank side-by-side with members of Murder, Inc. (If I may boast, my own joint has shown potential to develop in that direction. My most loyal readers include a sedevacantist and a co-operator in Opus Dei.)

But the pushy types have a way of multiplying until they form a critical mass. When that happens, they scare everyone else off — for the simple reason that fairly few people think of the internet as a verbal gladiator school. Your average reader would sooner hold his tongue than have it torn out by the root. Since being scared into silence is no great inducement, the more pacific types will, eventually, find a friendlier place to play.

Once the 800-lb gorillas have claimed all the seats of honor, they begin to demand the place be changed in accordance with their tastes. Returning to the bar analogy, they’d insist the owner cover the floor with sawdust, or install a disco. They begin, in short, to act like shareholders, rather than ordinary patrons. I’ve seen posters demand that I — or Greg, or Elizabeth — adjust our editorial policies. We mustn’t write on this subject, or in that tone. Or, better, they’ll insist we apologize for posting something that offends their sensibilities. On a particularly rough day, moderating a thread can feel like dealing with so many Abe Foxmans.

In a way, it’s easy to understand where they find such cheek. A regular reader might spend hours on his favorite blog. If a discussion gets on a roll, he could end up writing more words on the subject than the blogger has himself. To a point, he can even become one of the site’s attractions: some readers will show up hoping to deflate him or win his approval. (In fact, the surest sign a thread’s taken off is that respondents have forgotten about slitting the blogger’s throat and abandoned themselves to slitting one another’s.)

But in the end, the relationship between blogger and readers, though intimate to an unprecedented degree, cannot be a relationship of equals. A blog is not a corporation or a limited partnership; it has a sole owner and proprietor, and that person deserves the exclusive right to make decisions. He’s earned it by doing the most important work. Filling a combox with thousands of words of commentary takes skill and intelligence, to be sure. But choosing and framing topics so as to incite that kind of verbal effusion takes skill and intelligence, plus a special kind of informed discretion. Add the fact that the blogger is posting under his own name, usually with his own photograph, and has scattered more than a few key biographical details to the winds, and it becomes clear that blogging also takes a certain amount of guts.

Now here comes the part that’s unfair to readers: this sole owner, proprietor, content-generator and decision-maker is also human. That means he has a limited threshold for badgering. Anyone truly determined to fracture his peace of mind or puncture his ego stands a fair chance of doing either. But that could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. Readers and their right to express themselves deserve a high priority, but the blogger must assign his own autonomy the very highest priority. Push a blogger to the point where something’s got to give, and that thing could be you.

A few weeks ago, I was talking this over with a woman who blogs on Patheos’ pagan forum. She told me, “My blog is my house. I’ll give the bum’s rush to anyone I think deserves it,“ adding that this is a characteristically pagan way of seeing things. Vas heil, and pass the hammer, thinks I. Right away, I squashed a couple of troublemakers, and have eighty-sixed one or two per week ever since. In case anyone’s curious, my traffic has been improving steadily.

Greg’s solution, I think, is much more charitable, and yes, more Christian. Whereas I rely on my intuition to spot an incorrigible turd, he calls everyone to conversion. It’s the best deal in town, folks. I wouldn’t hold out for anything better.

Enjoy your vacation, Deacon. You’ve earned it.

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Here I Blog; I Can Do No Other

May 31, 2011 By Max Lindenman 15 Comments

You won’t know about me without you have visited the blog of Ms. Elizabeth Scalia during the last week of April or the first two of May. Elizabeth was away from her terminal — initially in order to travel to Rome for the beatification of John Paul II, later to nurse herself back to health after picking up a nasty case of pneumonia. Rather than let her tillage lie fallow, she turned it over to a hungry rookie — me. I found blogging to be such a romp that Elizabeth prevailed on the good folks at Patheos to set me up with a blog of my own.

In that sense, Diary of a Wimpy Catholic is an Anchoress spinoff. God willing, it’ll fly like The Jeffersons or Mork and Mindy, not sink like Maud or Joanie Loves Chachi. But before I start jumping sharks, I’d better pause to explain what I mean for this blog to be.

The title, many of you will know, is a reference to Diary of A Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney’s insanely popular series of graphic novels for preteens. (Or maybe I should say the books are about preteens; I’ll be turning 40 next year, and I’ve been known to body-check hockey moms on the way to the display table at Barnes & Noble whenever a new installment comes out.) The hero, Greg Heffley, is actually an antihero –a chronic shirker of work, an exploiter of his best friend, Rowley, and a tormentor of class brains. The essential amorality of Greg’s worldview has chilled certain critics — but amazingly few of them. With real genius, Kinney has suburbanized and domesticated Greg to the point where parents can forget he has more in common with Sir Harry Flashman and Eric Cartman than with Tom Brown or Butters.

Me, I require no such beguiling – I like antiheroes in general, and Greg Heffley in particular. Though the humor often relies on the contrast between Greg’s expectations and life’s realities, he’s too shrewd to need that much deflating. Trapped between a slacking brute of an older brother, a father his own with inflated expectations and a mother designed by Sikorsky himself, he doesn’t need Denis Leary to tell him that life’s life’s going to suck. He knows it fairly well already. That he’s shown no sign of slipping into gothhood attests to a certain scrappiness. Life may suck, but it’s still life. Better to snatch at crumbs than starve.

Greg’s relationship with the world is a little like mine with the Catholic Church. After burning through my convert’s zeal in the space of a year, I looked around me and realized that life in the Mystical Body of Christ is okay — a few things are very good, and a few very bad. But on the average, a post-conversion day rates a solid B-minus, which is pretty much what the pre-conversion days rated.

That may sound like a big, fat “duh,” but for me it came as a surprise — a rather liberating one. People who write about the Catholic Church tend either to love or hate it (or, more likely, they love their peculiar vision for it — traditionalist or progressive – and hate whatever stands in the way of realizing it). They write with such intensity, positing such extremes of good and bad, that I find myself wondering what planet they live on. I couldn’t hack it as a polemicist or an apologist; if I had to go around all day feeling enraged or exalted, I’d drop dead from nerves.

It was just when the bloom started coming off the rose that I found the Anchoress blog. I trust most of you will know exactly what I mean when I say I fell quite in love with Elizabeth’s authorial voice. It has a gritty authenticity I’ve found in few other places in the Catholic blogosphere. That’s not to say her style is in any way unpolished, or that her manner is anything but ladylike, but both clearly belong to a person who is unafraid to do the undone thing. Elizabeth can speak Church-speak and cite encyclicals with the best of them, but far more than most, she writes with the street savvy that can only be won through personal experience.. She may write with the team — her thinking is entirely orthodox, as far as I can tell — but she speaks for herself. Many Catholic writers default to the first-person plural; Elizabeth writes from the “I.” That’s gutsy.

I want to do the same thing — write about the life of faith from a distinctly (and distinctively) personal perspective. Don’t worry — dispatches from my navel won’t account for all my posts, or even for the majority. Its contents just aren’t that fascinating, even to me, and in any case I look forward to trying my hand at punditry and cultural criticism. But even on subjects of general interest, I’ll be writing from a personal slant — that of a Catholic convert who gets touched by grace, but very rarely; who believes that God is, but finds Him very far away; who detests his sin because he fears the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, etc., but still can’t help recalling some with a smile.

My writing won’t be to everyone’s taste. No one will mistake it for the broadcasts of Mother Angelica. If you’re one of those people who gravitates toward red-hot culture warriors, I doubt I‘ll make your list of favorites. I make no bones about my ambivalence toward much of what I’ve seen and learned in the Church. Getting to work through that ambivalence is one of the perks of writing, and to my own ear, my voice is at its most authentic and convincing when I address it head-on.

One thing I will not do is misrepresent Church teaching — at least not on purpose. In Rome, Elizabeth told a gathering of colleagues that the Catholic blogosphere needs clarity. Indeed. If the Church teaches X, it does no good for a blogger to pretend she really teaches Y, just because he might prefer it that way. There are, I understand, certain questions about which teachings have been defined infallibly and which still afford the believer some wiggle room, but I freely admit to being out of my depth in most of those debates. If I ever blog on such an issue, I’ll probably present both sides (or all sides, if there are more than two) and let some of you theology whizzes hash it out for yourselves. Might be quite an education for me.

Though I can be as earnest as the next thinking and feeling person, my humor can get pretty tangy.. It is not, however, cruel. There’s a real difference. To name two vastly more talented people, I’m a lot closer, in tone and technique, to Stephen Colbert than I am to Maureen Dowd. Judging by the number of people who protested when Matt Emerson endorsed Colbert as a stealth catechist, I expect that to cause problems. All I can say is, without license to crack myself up, I’d see no point in writing. If you read something you don’t like, you know where my combox is — tell me so. You probably won’t change my mind, but at least you’ll have had your day in court.

So you’ve been warned. Hopefully, you’ve also been enticed. Now that my colors are nailed firmly to the mast, let’s try to have fun with this.

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