Misinformation, disinformation, outright lies and narratives. That’s what we must navigate when seeking information and truth. It’s always been this way – limited human beings can never communicate the entire, whole truth and sinful, self-interested human beings are prone to distort the truth – but of course that beloved and dreaded modern mass communications makes it all easier and more pervasive.
And since my thinking on just about everything reflexively heads to spiritual waters, here’s that part of it: Church leaders would do well to understand this about the people sitting in their pews – and more importantly, the people not sitting in their pews. Distrust of the institutional Church is a given, considering the lies about abuse and the general fatuousness of institutional Church rhetoric in the memories and experiences of those who might consider taking a peak inside, but don’t, of course.
This mistrust cannot – cannot – be waved away with appeals to “beauty” and “vibrant community.”
When Wilton Gregory was in April 2019 appointed the Archbishop of Washington, he pledged to Catholics that “I will always tell you the truth.”
But despite that promise, the Washington archdiocese has not responded to multiple requests to release the financial records it possesses of McCarrick’s slush fund and gift-giving habits. McCarrick, famously, in Washington, foreswore a salary during his term of office there, living instead from a fund that he’d built up through the gifts and support of his benefactors. The archdiocese did not exercise control over that fund, but it reportedly helped McCarrick to administer it, and retains records which could point to the way McCarrick spent money in the years he engaged in abusive behavior.
Gregory has not indicated why he is unwilling to release the records, or make them available for public scrutiny.
In addition to that, as much as we love our technology, many of us also understand the false and forced narratives that these technologies and the institutions (all of them) that utilize them perpetuate and wrap us in.
In short: what the Faith presents is The Real and it seems to me that 21st century evangelism must start with the recognition of the difference between the Real and the narrative web and help people experience the embrace of the former and escape from the latter.
Oh, anyway, the two links that led me down this path, neither of which have anything to do with Church and not even much to do with the digital world, but have everything to do with truth, the ease of weaving lies and the price paid.
They also serve as cautions against believing everything you read as well as against falling for the flavor of the month.
Both are from the New Yorker, and the links are both archived, so no paywall.
It’s a very complex story, with no easily-clipped excerpts to share. It’s mostly a story, I think, about how our flawed memories, trauma and doubts can be reframed and re-formed to shape narratives that we convince ourselves – with the help of others – are true, but are not.
The second is not a tragic story, but more of a jaw-dropping one. Did this writer, who claimed to have been given a mission by playwright Tennessee Williams to “be my witness” (to all nations?) and who published a book of material from Williams himself as well as purported interviews with those who influenced and were influenced by him – as well as a voluminous web presence dedicated to the same – even know Williams in any meaningful way?
So, indeed, what is the harm? Grissom did pay attention to those who might have felt forgotten and gave them the gift of adoration by one of our most beloved American playwrights. And, in videos from his last few years, Williams slurs his words and looks somehow clammy—it would be nice to believe he met an eager student and talked to him about writing instead of about death.
In “Follies,” Williams is certainly energetic, at once bombastic and dewy-eyed: “I try to approach the whiteness of the page, the pale judgment, as if I were a neophyte priest. . . . I touch it gently, a frightened queer faced with his first female breast, a nipple that seeks attention and ministration.”
If you’re a Williams scholar, or a Pinter devotee, or a Brando biographer, though, the issue seems clear-cut: Grissom is confusing an already fragile record. William J. Mann, the biographer, said, “There’s great harm in it. We’re living in a period right now where facts increasingly don’t matter.” That said, he’s willing to give “Follies” a certain place. “I love fan fiction! I love historical fiction,” Mann said. “But don’t pass it off as truth.”
James Frey exaggerated his life story in “A Million Little Pieces”; Clifford Irving invented an entire Howard Hughes autobiography and nearly got away with it. The former was a best-seller; the latter garnered a big advance. The creation of “Follies” and its associated ventures has not been all that financially lucrative. Williams didn’t make Grissom rich. “I never got even poor,” he said. But his connection to Williams has helped Grissom become part of a glittering twentieth-century theatrical legacy. He wanted access to a certain world, and he found it—Katharine Hepburn wrote him, whether or not they ate ice cream together. As I was researching this piece, I ordered a used copy of “Remember Me to Tom,” and two notes from the actual Edwina Williams dropped out. History fell hot into my hands. I can understand chasing that strange, electrical feeling.
When I was in New Orleans, I went to all the places Grissom says he visited with Williams. Most of the cafés were overrun, but there were quiet street corners with personal resonance for the playwright where, according to “Follies,” they spent time. Some looked like their descriptions, some didn’t. I sat in Jackson Square and listened to a mockingbird running through its catalogue of impressions—catbird, car alarm, chickadee. I was trying to summon images of my own. Did twenty-year-old James Grissom ever meet Tennessee Williams at all? John Guare, who delights in ambiguity, thinks he might have (though he said that, given the amount of material, they must have talked “on that park bench for fourteen years”). John Lahr and Ellen F. Brown don’t rule it out, and Brown, who places Williams in Key West and New York around the early fall of 1982, can’t say for sure where the playwright was for about two weeks in mid-September.
At Books & Books in Florida, Grissom told his audience that “I am Tennessee Williams material,” referring to his post-flight dishabille. During our interview, Grissom complained that the constant demands that he show proof were tiring. “All the burden has been put on me to kind of dance and pull things out. And, you know, it’s like Blanche pulling things out of her trunk. And—I’m hurt by it,” he said. In “Streetcar,” Blanche keeps all her papers and costume jewelry in a trunk; her brother-in-law Stanley is rough with her tinsel finery because at first he mistakes it for treasure. But I didn’t see Blanche in Jackson Square, or Tennessee Williams, either. Instead, I thought of the young Jimmy Grissom, the boy who sent short stories to his theatrical idol, looking for advice. Where were all the books and stories and plays that he came to New York to write? He was going to do so much.