Speck, Meet Log
In response to Becky Garrison’s recent dispatch, “Who Will Save Manhattan?” KtB contributor Daniel Silliman wrote in with a livid reply that takes on not only Becky but the culture of the magazine itself.
I sure hope Becky Garrison feels better now. After that avalanche of snark, surely something’s dead, even if it’s not Ms. Garrison’s own Buddha, but only her impression of someone else’s.
That piece really does represent the worst of KtB: snide self-confidence, a sense of superiority and aren’t-I-sophisticated. Ms. Garrison leads us in a reaffirmation of her own cultured orthodoxy in the praying of the prayer “thank God I’m not like them.” It’s gracelessness. It’s very fundamentalist. Really, we’re going to scoff at other people’s understandings and misunderstandings of God? What’s the value in that, except to make us feel better by comparison to the idiots we scorn? We’re going to call them names? “Christian cockroaches,” “summer salvationists” and “faith flies”?
If religion matters, it matters enough to treat it honestly and with humility, with questioning and searching instead of just this ridicule and dismissiveness. If fundamentalism is going to be critiqued, we must first critique it in ourselves. Or else how is it anything more than “sepulcher, meet white wash” and “speck, meet log”? If we’re going to dismiss other people’s faith as stupid and low class, without even trying to understand who or what they love when they love their God, then there’s really no point in having a conversation is there?
Maybe Ms. Garrison’s yearnings after the divine are all quite cultured and refined. But yearning is still yearning, embarrassing and human and needy, and doing it in art museums and planetariums doesn’t separate her from all of us fools and freaks yammering on about the Gods we think we’ve lost and found.
Becky Garrison has been kind enough to offer a reply to Daniel’s letter:
I hope it is clear in the piece that I am not critiquing anyone’s faith per se but rather the means they employ to communicate their belief systems. What I have noticed this summer is that in the absence of people trying to evangelize me, I was able to chill and find God on my own. My hope is others were able to do likewise. This points to a larger issue about global missions that I pray religious leaders will consider moving forward, which is how to most effectively use the limited resources we have (e.g., money, time, carbon footprint) to put their leader’s teachings into practice. As a Christian, I can only speak to my own faith tradition and here I’d like to paraphrase St. Francis that we are to preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words
Where does this exchange leave us? And where does it leave Buddha-killing? Is it so “fundamentalist” to long for a little summer peace and quiet?
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September 6th, 2009 at 10:35 am
The true sound of religion in America, Peter Manseau and I have been preaching for years, is cacophony, not harmony. Harmony is a scam perpetrated by those with the power to choose the tune and set the tempo. Cacophony is the “noise of democracy,” as America’s first gay president, James Buchanan, put it. Cacophony is the guy next to you in the pews who sounds just awful, really, obnoxiously awful. But there he is. You have to reckon with him. You may even have to keep sitting next to him.
Daniel writes: “If religion matters, it matters enough to treat it honestly and with humility, with questioning and searching.”
I’m with you half-way, Dan. Honestly, yes; but humility is a value not everybody shares or should share. For instance, I don’t want more humility at a gay pride parade. Black Power wasn’t the product of humility.
Questioning I like; “searching” makes me squirm. A search implies a conclusion, and KtB wasn’t created to find The Right Answer.
So by my lights, Garrison’s piece is fine. It’s honest, all right, and it’s questioning. It’s not humble, but not everything should be. It’s not searching, because Garrison isn’t looking for God, she’s looking at people who want to tell her about God.
Is it also cranky, crude, and rude? Definitely. A cacophony choir without those qualities just doesn’t crackle.
But Daniel’s rebuttal is fine with me, too. Magazines should be forums, not platforms. I’m glad Daniel is responding with something close to rage. He’s an important voice on the site, too. I’d like to see more writers respond to KtB with a sense of ownership. That’s good.
In short: Keep your dukes up, killers!
September 6th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I had to question David Silliman’s analysis of Becky Garrison’s story, “Who Will Save Manhattan?”, for at the least (I hope), the absence of humor. I think the “iconography” in her story is the background and meant to eventually move the reader away from the well known NY landmarks to other types of “landmarks”, the religious. I almost feel as if David missed this point. Is it too superficial for David to focus on the obvious “religious symbolism” of a religious piece when for myself, I automatically assumed that she was leading me to a different, deeper point? David’s focus is on the texture of the paint rather than how the broad strokes form,if I may, the “big picture”.
I didn’t find any religious position in her piece Becky could be a fundamentalist of, just that she was raised Episcopalian, which doesn’t necessarily mean she’s one now. She could be any or no religious persuasion for that manner. It also brings up the question, what humor in KtB is appropriate? Religious humor, at least according to Silliman (no pun intended)is not.
I’ll share my take on her story and perhaps it may be wrong but, in any event, is one embedded in literary criticism. Her story is about CHANGE. Being that her worldview has a religious core, its “dressed” in religious observations discovered on her summer walks through Manhattan described in NY humor- a bit cade. Included in her religious landscape description of NY are divergent proselytizers. Life goes on … until one summer, they’re no longer “accosting” her. However, that’s not the point: it’s her self-realization that perhaps the various proselytizers no longer see her as a potential convert anymore for some undisclosed reason: is it her age, a different route she takes, new proselytizers that don’t know her? She doesn’t say. This change (interacting with another soul she secretly cherished) left her “feeling left out” from her daily “ritual” on the streets of NY, and by extension “left out” of religious discourses with people. In this newly discovered “void”, she finds herself gravitating toward a more solemn religious experience that is still “Manhattan”, ie, MOMA. There she finds a new vision about herself, people, and NY she overlooked in her previous summers—err, salvation? In this existential way she still connects to God and to Manhattan: the two things she loves and is most familiar with.
September 6th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Sometimes people like Joel Osteen need to be taken down a peg. Jesus took whips into the Temple. As far as street evangelists, go, i’ve yet to see one that didn’t express hate for some group; which if you believe in a loving God makes them blasphemers.
I’m all for respectful and productive exchanges between the liberal and conservative wings of the Christian church. In fact I’ve had some terse exchanges with fellow Presbyterians(USA) over what I see as their casual dismissal and superiority to evangelical theology. But let’s be honest here. The evangelical right has hardly been a model for civility and charitable debate. Some of them have recently been suggesting that God sent a tornado to the Lutherans in Minnesota because they let gay people preach. You can’t have a humble, civilized exchange with people like that.
September 6th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I agree with David here, little as I like to find myself on the side of David Denby-style snark bashing. The snark here is not, however, just a rhetorical stance; instead, it disguises an argument that comes down to class. When the author is on the Upper West Side wearing her Yale gear while on her way to the Met, she would rather not be accosted by buffoons from farms. The snark, that is, disguises a lack of any real religious or theological argumentation. This is OK, of course, as this is a short and light piece that doesn’t pretend to be the Summa. But it’s not obvious that the implied theology of the piece is superior to that of the evangelicals, and thus the argumentation relies on, or is constituted by, gestures towards knowingness and class-ist superiority.
As to the issue of fundamentalism: The “religion” that seems so self-evidently superior to the author is not “fundamentalist,” according to any sense of the word that I’m familiar with, but rather so religion-lite that it forecloses the sort of radical potential inherent within religion (the properly religious thus vanishes, leaving class in its place: maybe Marx was right). That is to say: if true religion requires being left alone and allowed to go to museums—and should avoid the kind of embarrassing enthusiasm that gets people to sit in hot basements—then maybe religion isn’t worth fighting for.
It’s not that I want to defend the evangelical movement or its practices. I do think, though, that there are more productive ways to slay this particular Buddha: nourished as it is by anti-intellectualism and proud provincialism, cosmopolitan intellectual-ism will only fuel its flames. Maybe we need to expand our notion of the Buddhas needing killed: what about slaying the Buddha of the knowing liberal intellectual that informs many of the contributions to this site, as well as this comment? What would that look like?
September 6th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Funny, I found the site about six months ago, and this piece is the first one that struck me as not up to snuff. So, yes, I agree, not worthy of the real estate. Snark without soul and humility and wisdom and intelligence, and all those things I’ve come to expect from Killing the Buddha.
September 7th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Maybe it’s just a fun, evocative piece, not needing an overly intellectual analysis and denunciation. Through Becky Garrison’s words, I could picture Central Park and the street corners she described in my mind.
She reminded me of when I lived near Dupont Circle in DC in the 1970s. I enjoyed just hanging out there and watching people and talking with some. It seemed like very proselytizing religious group in the world had their posse out trying to win us over, including the devotees of Sun M. Moon, the Scientologists, and Christian fundamentalists.
And, of course, no one is “saving” anyone. We can only save ourselves. We might be moved by how others live their lives or by what they say, but it’s up to us to determine our beliefs and how we live.
So bravo to KtB for publishing the piece and to the commenters for responding. And kudos to Becky for stirring it up.