The Healings Questionnaire, No. 4: Tommy Craggs
"These protesters, in resisting the manufacture of human disposability ... have a lot more to offer us spiritually than any kind of personal eschatology."
Hello and welcome to another installment of the Healings Questionnaire, a weekly series where I ask folks the same types of Big Life Questions people asked me following my cancer diagnosis and eventual recovery. You can read more about the origins of this series here.
This week’s contestant is writer, editor, and amateur craps instructor Tommy Craggs. My meet-cute with Tommy happened right after I received my first of many verbal beatings by the despotic EIC of the alt-weekly we both wrote for in San Francisco, circa 2003. As I skulked around my office picking up pieces of my ego off the floor, Tommy knocked on my door and asked me to lunch. He’s been teaching me things about journalism and writing ever since, largely that they are both foolish endeavors you should avoid trying to make a career out of at all costs.
Tommy, being a huge fool, has done just that. He served as EIC of Deadspin during its best years, and has helped lead newsrooms at HuffPost, Slate, and Mother Jones. Recently, he was a writer for “Game Theory,” on HBO, and he’s a contributor to Flaming Hydra, among other foolish endeavors. When I told Tommy I especially enjoyed the approach he took here, he replied, “You asked me about god and I answered about communism.” Enjoy!
What happens when we die?
God only knows, and maybe Mitch Albom, too. While I understand the question is about the afterlife, maybe it's better at the moment to read it otherwise. I'm writing in early May. Cops have just been set loose on college campuses around the country, rousting and battering people who, in a sense, are addressing themselves to the same question: What happens when we die? Only they’re putting it this way: We are dying in Palestine, in unimaginable numbers, in unspeakable ways—what happens now? I swear I'm not ducking the question. What I'm saying is, these protesters, in resisting the manufacture of human disposability, in putting their faith in the possibility of something better, have a lot more to offer us spiritually than any kind of personal eschatology. What happens when we die? I dunno. I do know that I want the good stuff, all that fulfillment and flourishing, to happen on this side of the veil and not just on the other.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being terrified and 1 being it’s never crossed your mind, how afraid are you of dying? Explain.
How about: 1, death crosses my mind constantly, but I'm not at all afraid of it. The thing I fear most is creating work and inconvenience for other people. Death is a clerical job for whoever's left behind, and an especially shitty one at that. The paperwork, the phone calls, the replies to condolences, the obituary, the gravestone, the service, the choice of music and readings and refreshments for the service, the death certificate (how many copies? Eight? Ten? A Dozen?), the closing of credit card accounts, and on and on and on. I'm terrified at the thought that, when I go, someone I'd cared about will be tasked with the wageless work of filing me away for good. Sorry to that person in advance.
What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
I was in Charlottesville the day Heather Heyer was murdered—in fact, at the moment she was struck by that car, I was just around the corner, in front of a parking garage where earlier in the day six Nazis had tried to lynch a Black man, DeAndre Harris. What I remember was a feeling of something shifting in the air, a sort of tightening along the length of the protest, and then there was a Dodge Challenger bustling past me, dragging pieces of itself along Market Street. It would be another beat or two before I understood what had happened a couple blocks away, but something about the yelling and the condition of the car made me take a photo:
In no way did I come close to my own death that day, but to witness a political murder more or less firsthand is to feel a particular sense of peril. It hung grayly over the day like low weather. No one knew what to do with themselves. I remember going to a makeshift memorial and flower ceremony that seemed ridiculous and totally inadequate to the moment, and at the same time I knew there was real consolation—and above all safety—in people improvising themselves into little groups in order to feel stuff together. Five years later, I would recognize this mix in me—helplessness and listlessness and bathos and intense hunger for sociality of any kind—when my dad died. Take what lessons you want from that.
Do you believe in God? Explain.
I do not. I was brought up Unitarian Universalist in Urbana, Illinois, though we didn't go to church all that often, and I resented it every time we did. My earliest churchy memory was of a meet-the-new-minister service scheduled the day of the Super Bowl XX, 1986, the year the Bears played the Patriots. I was six, and I remember insisting that proper accommodations be made. They were, and while the service unfolded upstairs I watched the Super Bowl alone in the basement on a tiny black-and-white TV. What I learned early on was that God—even the Flintstones Chewable God of the Unitarian church—could be a terrible inconvenience.
I grew up a nonbeliever, and in my twenties my nonbelief curdled into the conventionally obnoxious atheism of so many young males. Not coincidentally this happened alongside the development of my own George W. Bush–era liberalism. I was certain that people believed in God only because they were dumb or misinformed in some way, and this view mapped neatly onto a lot of commonsensical liberal notions about Bush and his supporters. Lord was I insufferable about it. I was laboring under the impression that there was no more politically urgent work than to hurl myself against the pieties and superstitions of all faiths. The most generous interpretation I can offer you is that I was committing the common mistake of conflating certain reactionary articulations of religion with religious consciousness itself. A less generous one is that I was a dick.
That faith, for all its corruptions here in the temporal realm, for the obvious flaws in its more formal containers, might also cultivate in people a utopianism that the dominant U.S. political culture was busily suppressing—that faith might be emancipatory—simply never occurred to me. I couldn't tell you how or why I began to appreciate my error. I read a lot of Garry Wills and Cedric Robinson, weird as it may seem to pair those two writers. And I guess somewhere in my thirties—let's say it was roughly half past Jeremiah Wright—I came to understand the role of the Black church in America's most successful revolutionary movements.
I am no more a believer today than I was as a teenager, but I am at least open to—if I'm not already influenced by—any forms of consciousness outside of Western frameworks. We're gonna need something if we're ever gonna get free. This Earth isn't about to re-enchant itself!
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
I do not. The closest thing to it that I can think of is a phrase I repeat to myself, mantralike. It's an old line, much abused, straight out of the collegiate Marxist starter kit, but it has served me well even if it may no longer be suited to our politics. "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." Gramsci said it, though in fact Romain Rolland seems to have gotten there first. It's a reminder that doomerism can lead to quietism, that any leftism worth its name requires a faith in the power of people to change the conditions of their world. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Say it soft and it's almost like praying.
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Further Reading:
I can relate to so many things Tommy said, especially the part about the clerical work surrounding death and the way it inconveniences those left behind.