Rod Dreher's Diet Snapple Pandemic Saga

Finally, a Rod Dreher story with a happy ending

It’s hard to know where to begin with Rod Dreher, if you’ve never heard of him before. He’s been profiled by prestigious media outlets, criticized in prestigious media outlets, mocked in prestigious media outlets, and mocked a lot more by less prestigious media outlets. The fact that he’s already been a subject of so much media coverage is why I was reluctant to cover him in a proper G.O.T.H.S. piece, but I will say this: I have criticized other conservative Catholic opinion writers for being boring and unoriginal, and I would never in a million years make that criticism of Dreher. Sure, he peddles homophobia and Islamophobia with a pseudo-intellectual glaze on it, and his book The Benedict Option goes against everything I know about the Catholic ideas of charity and hospitality (Dreher practices in the Eastern Orthodox rite, but I’m pretty sure they also practice charity and hospitality), but no other writer has can give you quite the same level of demonic panic as the man who regularly relates his favorite stories about exorcisms.

Dreher loves apocalyptic imagery - not “oh, Western civilization is bad now because of porn”, but literal, actual, “this is a demon making this happen, and I think his name is Wormwood, and he has at least three horns”. He thinks the current pandemic is in fact portending the end of the world as foretold in the Bible, but he’s thought a lot of things were the apocalypse before.

As much as I disagree with most of the things Dreher has written, I can say that his daily pandemic diary on The American Conservative is definitely better than R.R. Reno’s, mainly because he’s just answering reader letters and taking naps instead of openly advocating for sending millions to their deaths in the name of the stock market. Actually, Dreher is taking social distancing very seriously; as he put it in one of his articles on a viral video of a COVID patient, “If you’re starting to wonder if social distancing is worth it, watch this. If, like me, you are tempted to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal to go out to the grocery store to buy some more diet Snapple, watch this.”

Good for Rod. I’m glad he’s taking it seriously. However, his need for Diet Snapple has not abated, and he will get it in his body by any means necessary.

Here’s Rod’s Twitter, March 23rd:

Oh no. Thankfully, Rod knew exactly where to address his concerns:

And yeah, we should clear that up, he hates lemon, DON’T YOU DARE TRY TO GIVE HIM A LEMON SNAPPLE, HE ADDRESSED THIS MONTHS AGO:

Adding to Rod’s sense of general panic, a Costco run wasn’t enough to fix the problem for him:

Finally, a sign of hope came last week:

In his pandemic diary on the same day, Dreher re-worded this as “there was great news today: Nora found six bottles of diet Snapple today in the back of the pantry! Hallelujah! Three raspberries, two peaches, and fortunately, only one lemon.” I’m glad that his outlook had shifted to more of a bottle-half-full on the lemon.

Finally, success came on April 5th:

Pandemic Diary, April 5: “Look at that! My wife went to Target today and bought me three six-packs of diet Snapple (peach flavor). Boy, was I ever happy.”

Congratulations, Rod. Stay safe and hydrated, you friggin weirdo.