Commentary

The Grumpy Ghey: They're Praying for Us

by / Dec. 16, 2015 12am EST

It’s a tight little corner, being critical of the media while also being a part of it. We don’t always get the reactions we’re hoping for. I got called out for my Christmas rant, but only by one person. And that’s fine. Call me out. But at least show me that you understood what I wrote in the process of doing so.

What was striking about the exchange that ensued (it began on my Facebook page and escalated with a series of private messages, eventually ending in my having to block someone, which isn’t something I often do) was how the point of the column had been missed entirely. There were no heavy metaphors, no difficult-to-decipher wordplay. There was, however, some tongue-in-cheek humor mixed in with a host of ugly observations about what has happened to Christmas in the wake of increasing corporate greed over the last half century or so. 

Briefly, I opined in my piece that for the holiday season to become healed, the Judeo-Christian bodies behind them would need to somehow “take them back.” Judaism and Catholicism would need to reclaim Christmas and Hanukkah as religious holidays, leaving the bookends, Thanksgiving and New Year’s (which are largely bereft of gift-purchasing fervor), as the mass mainstays. This isn’t to imply that these are no longer religious events, but they’ve been loaned to the masses, and the masses have grossly distorted them.

I went on to say that this will never happen. It’s too far gone—a pipe dream. There’s no way to formally extract the roots of these holidays from the overblown shopping circuses they’ve become save, perhaps, in churches, temples, and in our homes. 

To explain further, it would seem that laws would need to be created regulating the use of holiday-related phrases and imagery in any connection with commercial enterprises in order to achieve any sort of compliance. And who’s going to enforce it all? It’s impossible. We’ve made a gluttonous mess and are being forced to live with it. For many, the holidays are something to be endured rather than enjoyed, and I truly believe that many of us feel closer to the former than the latter if we were really to be honest with ourselves. 

My acquaintance wanted me to know he thought Linus had it right in his famed speech about the true meaning of Christmas in the Peanuts holiday special, and he’d be correct. But Linus’s speech ties the holiday back to its biblical origins. At the end of my column, I mentioned perhaps going to midnight mass this year to find some Christmas spirit since going to church brings me much closer to the holiday’s origins than, say, going to Target. 

I’m not sure where the disconnect happened, but from our separate corners we feel similarly. And yet, I was accused of spewing bile. I was also informed that nothing new ever gets covered in my column and that “Grumpy negativity adds nothing to our needy world.” Apparently, the tone of my writing in this capacity—which, for the record, is designed to straddle the lines between grumpiness, humor, and a dismayed, sometimes self-deprecating criticism that hopefully inspires conversation—was completely lost on the reader. Maybe some of that’s my fault, but nobody else I spoke with that read it seemed at a loss for exactly what I was going for. 

The gentleman also expressed his hope that my column isn’t a true representation of my character, that “The Grumpy Ghey” isn’t the real me. When coupled with his earlier statements about hoping I “find the true meaning of the season” and how the lord has blessed him with supportive friends and family, what I hear is that he’s praying for my soul. 

What I write here is from the heart. It is very much indeed the real me. I couldn’t live with myself if it wasn’t. Furthermore, I don’t want any prayers that come from such a critical space. I’m fine, my soul’s fine—together we’ll find a way to get through the tinsel circus unscathed. But we don’t have to like it, and there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way. 

Kim Davis got called out, and now she’s probably praying for all our souls. And that’s not anything we really wanted, either. But that’s what we got. Along with some other things. 

The gay couple that uploaded the viral video of Davis refusing their marriage license has recently come forward as being unhappy with her not-so-newfound celebrity. While they’ve since contested certain aspects of the way they were quoted in the aggregated LGBTQ Nation version of the original GQ profile done on them this fall, their lack of enthusiasm for Davis’s fame holds true (as it should). 

But I would ask them what they thought was going to happen. Did the Kentucky-based couple really think they could shame Davis into mending her ways? How many times in life have you reacted that way when someone called you out? Instead, she dug her heels (probably sneakers or, at best, flats) into the ground.

In the same breath, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that someone found my Christmas rant so offensive, they couldn’t actually see clear to the real point I was making. 

David Ermold and his partner of 17 years, David Moore, regard themselves as “complicit” in Kim Davis’s status as a household name because they’re the ones that originally filmed Davis. But they’re really not the ones who made it happen—that responsibility falls on the mainstream media (which, while we’re here, is the same machine that’s made a monster of Christmas and, to a lesser extent, Hanukkah). 

It’s an unfortunate postmodern ideal, but meaning has less than ever to do with intentions since information spreads so quickly now. Meaning is determined in the minds of viewers and readers (and those playing a game of telephone with news headlines on social media). No matter how specific the intent was, it means little once in the hands of a public with a vast array of reading comprehension levels and diffused attention spans. 

Unfortunately, we cannot hold a gigantic strainer up to public opinion and only let the most well-informed understanding seep through. Writing for the media over the last decade-plus, it’s been one of the hardest lessons for me to learn and it sounds like it’s been a tough lesson for the Daves who took Kim Davis to task. 

“We stopped talking to the press after the first day,” they told GQ. “It was overwhelming, but we thought it would get resolved in a month, because it’s the law. Weeks went by, though, and we found out the governor couldn’t make Davis do her job.”

And that’s really all these guys wanted—for Davis to either do her job or lose her job. Not kick and scream and get arrested. The disparity between the intent and the outcome has never been clearer than when Moore told GQ that upon learning of Davis’ arrest, he was driven to tears. 

“This is not what we wanted,” he recalled saying at the time, adding to the GQ interview that, “When we saw the mug shot—it literally looks like somebody’s mother is being arrested.”

The point I’m attempting to make is that we’ve turned a corner into a world where we have less control than ever over how media-generated information is perceived, interpreted, and understood. It mutates too quickly, our eyes glaze over, we don’t really read things anymore. Instead we skim, get the gist and walk away feeling like we understand. But most of the time, we don’t. Then we run our mouths off and suddenly the lack of understanding has legs. Sometimes, we also sound stupid. 

And then we end up with people like Kim Davis and my aforementioned heckler praying for our souls. But that’s not really what anyone wanted. We wanted you to take the time to understand the point(s) we were making originally. Christmas needs to go back to church. Davis needs to perform her job or lose it. It’s not complicated until you make it so. 

 

 

 

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