“God Has Heard Your Thoughts and Prayers and He Thinks They Are Fucking Bullshit”
A brief history of McSweeney's and guns with editor Chris Monks
Writers are vultures, isn’t that what they say? We’re always circling, waiting for the next hook. But what if that hook is a mass shooting? What if that hook involves private people whose lives have been publicly and forever blown apart? What if you want to use that for your little “humor” piece?
Of course #NotAllWriters are selfish ghouls. Often the act of writing through something as endlessly unfathomable as the continued slaughter of everyday American citizens while the government response falls somewhere on a scale of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is a way to try to make sense of something that is literally senseless.
This brings me to McSweeney’s and editor Chris Monks. In the wake of what felt like the bottomless horror of Uvalde (and Buffalo and the 35+ mass shootings since then not to mention the 940+ school shootings alone since Sandy Hook), I started going through the McSweeney’s archive. My original intention was to share what I thought were the most powerful pieces about gun violence, to demonstrate that when news is on an endless loop and you hear inane phrases like “finding common ground on gun control” — as if the only common ground shouldn’t be MELTING ALL THE FUCKING GUNS — satire can become a weapon in its own right.
Satire provides a fresh framing, a way of understanding situations that are otherwise incomprehensible. Satire upends messaging that we’ve heard over and over again and have grown numb to. And satire doesn’t remotely pretend to be unbiased, as the news often does. Sometimes satire is the only sane thing going. But the powerful pieces that McSweeney’s has run about mass shootings and guns wouldn’t exist at all if there wasn’t an editor both brave and sensitive enough to put them out there. Chris was kind enough to answer a few questions about what it’s like to navigate one of the most fraught subjects in American culture, and for a humor site no less.
KH: In my dive into the McSweeney’s archive, it looks like pieces about guns and mass shootings started becoming more common around 2013, the year after Sandy Hook. Did you make the decision to start accepting these riskier pieces at that time or do you think it was more an issue of writers increasingly tackling more sensitive topics?
CM: A little of both. The subject matter of the stuff we publish is largely driven by what our contributors are sending us. A core of our readership are our contributors, so they’re writing about stuff they want to read about. With that said, in the early days of the site, we were careful not to be too controversial and polarizing about certain issues. But as the political climate evolved over the years (or devolved, as the case may be), it became harder for us not to address all the crazy things that were happening in the world.
One thing that I always remember about you accepting “Please Don’t Get Murdered at School Today” is that your response said in part, “With the gun debate forever in the news I don’t think we ever have to worry about this not being timely. Although we’ll need to be careful about running this too close after the next inevitable school shooting. God, it’s depressing just having to acknowledge that scenario.” And that particular piece was written two years after Sandy Hook. How do you approach pieces that are intentionally written as an immediate response to a mass shooting?
It’s tricky. You don’t want it to look like you’re making a play for traffic by posting something sensationalistic about the latest tragedy, but at the same time, you want to say something about it. Good satire, whether reading or writing it, allows you a chance to vent. Some of our best pieces have clearly been written from sincere places of anger and grief, and they transcend any fears I have of it looking like we’re posting something for the wrong reasons.
Can you talk more about the decision to fully lean in to timely submissions?
The day after the 2016 election, Trump had won, and we had nothing that day to run about it. I was miserable, most of our audience was miserable, and we had nothing to post that morning that could help address and process our collective misery. Then with Trump in office, the speed of the news cycle increased so much that it was hard to keep up. In an effort to stay relevant, we set up a separate submissions email for timely subs. We’ve been addressing and processing our misery in a timely fashion ever since.
What advice would you give writers who are thinking of wading into highly sensitive subject areas like this one?
Definitely be very aware of your audience. We received a lot of submissions responding to the shooting at Uvalde, and some were way too specific to the tragedy. The authors’ hearts were in the right place but the pieces wound up reading as gratuitous and missed their mark. There has to be some editorial distance from the actual event you’re writing about. That’s why I am drawn to pieces that comment more on the general issue — be it gun violence or reproductive rights or systemic racism, or whatever horrible thing is in the news — instead of pieces that are directly about certain events.
Also, another tip: don’t mistake sarcasm for satire. I mentioned how lots of good writing comes from anger, but you have to be careful to rein it in or else it will read like overblown and rant-y.
Are there any McSweeney’s pieces that people have misread as fact or “news” and freaked out?
We purposely stay out of The Onion’s lane, so we don’t run pieces that are formatted as fake news articles, which helps us avoid some misinterpretation. Still, people do misread our pieces from time to time; it’s the way of the internet. Folks either aren’t familiar with us and/or avoid contextualizing and just react to a headline or pull quote. As far as our stuff about gun control goes, I can’t think of any that have set off a chain reaction of ignorance, but every so often we’ll get a comment from someone who will focus on one detail of a piece, like how the language is crude or whatever, when it’s clear that what they’re really upset about is the overall message of the piece.
Which McSweeney’s pieces about guns or mass shootings do you find the most powerful?
Chas Gillespie’s “God Has Heard Your Thoughts and Prayers and He Thinks They Are Fucking Bullshit” is one that sticks with me and that people tend to repost whenever a politician publicly utters that weak, clichéd response. The piece crystallizes our frustration with the gun control debate so well, and I find it incredibly cathartic. Your piece, of course, is one, that as a parent, is hard to shake as well.
Big, big thanks to Chris for his time. Did you know McSweeney’s is a nonprofit? You can support their work here.
Here are some of my favorite McSweeney’s pieces on this subject:
• (2013) FIRST THEY CAME FOR MY ASSAULT RIFLE by Sean Carman
• (2013) BOTH SIDES, NOW by Teddy Wayne
• (2017) THINGS MORE HEAVILY REGULATED THAN BUYING A GUN IN THE UNITED STATES by Sarah Hutto
• (2017) YES, THE RABID WOLVES IN OUR NATIONAL PARK KEEP MAULING HIKERS, BUT THE WOLVES ARE ALL ACTING INDIVIDUALLY SO WE’RE NOT REALLY SEEING A PATTERN HERE by Bob Vulfov
• (2017) YOUR MASS SHOOTING THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS ARE ACCIDENTALLY GOING TO THE ANGRY GOD OF A DISTANT PLANET by Sam Weiner
• (2018) IF BECOMING A TEACHER WERE AS EASY AS PURCHASING A GUN by Ali Solomon
• (2018) COMMON SAYINGS UPDATED FOR AMERICAN CULTURE by … me
• (2019) GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE. IT’S TIME WE GET RID OF PEOPLE by Sarah Hutto
• (2020) GUN OWNERSHIP IN AMERICA: A FLOWCHART by Carlos Greaves
• And this newest one absolutely gutted me: LET’S PRETEND THIS ISN’T ANOTHER SCHOOL SHOOTING by Tori Malcangio
THINGS FROM ELSEWHERE
• The repetition of the same piece over time is why this Onion story is one of the most powerful commentaries on guns and mass shootings in America: “'The Onion' has republished a grim headline about mass shootings 21 times since 2014” from NPR.
• “Peony Season in America: Beauty at a time like this.” by Saeed Jones. “It’s warm and dreary here in Columbus. The forecast calls for storms on and off throughout the day. Usually, I find this weather so defeating, but… sometimes, and this week is certainly one of those times, it’s nice when the outside matches the inside. One less lie for us to have to choke down.”
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