Well, it seemed like a delightful story.
A New York Times freelancer decided to visit contemplative sites and institutions in greater Los Angeles and make a travel story out of it.
I was in LA for few days in January. And after experiencing the region’s numbing traffic several days in a row, I hid out at a friend’s home in a gated community in Buena Park. I was thanking God that I had never gotten a job in this region. I thought commuting in DC was rough. This was the Beltway on steroids.
But this writer gave a positive spin to all the craziness. Thus, we follow him as he explores what Los Angelenos do to escape the maddening crowd.
The key: Finding vaguely spiritual sites that help people calm down and deal with stress. But are all "spiritual" places created equal? Are some "spiritual" activities linked to, you know, religion?
This meditative mind-set was fitting for my 3 p.m. appointment, which I was now 45 minutes late to. I was supposed to be visiting the Peace Awareness Labyrinth & Gardens as part of a larger quest to seek out spaces of refuge and retreat across the city’s endless suburban sprawl. I wanted to find the quiet, contemplative Los Angeles, the hidden pockets of reverence, reflection, silence; places Angelenos repair to in order to recharge their batteries so that they are ready to face another day, another traffic jam, another screaming child, another vindictive boss. A city is not necessarily defined by its landmarks or its flashiest moments but by all the subtle ways its citizens forge the necessary solitude that allows them to live in proximity to their neighbors. ...
He showed me how to walk the labyrinth, a circular pathway of travertine marble. Have you ever walked a labyrinth? Labyrinths, unlike mazes, are unicursal -- they have only one way in and one way out. Each step becomes a purposeful movement. They are an ancient form of meditation; this one is based on the labyrinth at the Chartres Cathedral in France, built in the early 13th century. As you walk, the city becomes a distant dream, a movie half-remembered. In a way, it is bit like the festina lente of Interstate 10, but without the cars, the smog, the man in the neon-yellow Dodge Charger listening to Whitesnake’s “Here I go Again” at peak volume. One way in, one way out.
The writer introduces the reader to the concept of shinrin-yoku, which is immersing oneself in greenery, as in a forest. Stay with me for the next lengthy passage:
As you walk, the city becomes a distant dream, a movie half-remembered. In a way, it is bit like the festina lente of Interstate 10, but without the cars, the smog, the man in the neon-yellow Dodge Charger listening to Whitesnake’s “Here I go Again” at peak volume. One way in, one way out.
What is strange is that many Angelenos I talked to echoed this view of interstate gridlock as a kind of contemplative lacuna. I was told on multiple occasions that in order to be truly at home in this city, you had to make peace with your commute.
“My car is my safe space,” one person told me.
“It’s all about the podcast,” said another.
For many, the car, that private palace of glass and steel, is now the place where we perform the majority of our essential business; the place where we make up, break up, wake up.
Maybe it is the East Coaster in me, but I find this slightly dispiriting. Have our automobiles replaced our churches? Can you practice shinrin-yoku in a Chevy?
Probably not, although the writer wonders if that piece of weirdness is what the local residents actually do. The writer does find some at the Japanese garden at The Huntington in San Marino (pictured with this blog), an ultra-cool refuge downtown known as the Last Bookstore, a Hindu-influenced “Self Realization Lake Shrine” and finally, various places outside of the city, including a “hot spot” for “seekers of transcendence.”
I won’t go into what all that was, but the piece was sort of about religion –- at least the kind embraced by the "Nones," in terms of an agnostic-y sort sort of faith for people seeking something "spiritual," but nothing with commandments or creeds. For example: He did leave out places connected to organized religion, like the stunning Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Some folks think it’s too modern but I liked it.
Now, there’s a lot of monasteries and convents scattered about southern California, so I’m curious why the writer only chose sites that didn’t align with more conventional -- in an American context -- belief systems. Still, there aren’t a lot of travel stories out there about religion, so I thought the piece was a novelty.
But the writer got into big trouble for this story. Why? In the midst of it was this paragraph:
I emerged from the cavernous, Art Deco masterpiece of Union Station into a neighborhood where each shop seemed to be peddling only one thing: the shop selling Jesus statuettes was next to the shop selling giant stuffed bears was next to the shop selling soccer uniforms for babies was next to the shop selling piñatas. It soon became clear to me that these three blocks were the source of all useless items in the world.
There was a ton of reaction to the last sentence for being “dismissive of Latino culture,” as an apologetic note from the editors said. The offending paragraph was the one above.
We’ve all seen these junky markets where tons of plastic items are sold. So if you put a Hispanic edge to it by mentioning piñatas, that’s dismissive of Latino culture? When I think of the latter, I think of food, of music, of what people wear and speak. It’s certainly not what’s in some low-budget collection of shops.
The key was probably the dismissive reference to Jesus statuettes -- a clear reference to Latino Catholic culture. Is this an image of a "useless" item?
What was so interesting was not so much what the erring travel writer wrote, but the groveling that the Times editors did in response. Again, please read the apology memo. (It also didn't help that the Times had to insert three corrections at the bottom of the piece. A real no-no for travel writers).
But the writer probably thought of that offending sentence as a throw-away phrase. Is Latino culture only soccer uniforms, Jesus statuettes and piñatas? No? Then why would such a sentence be construed as mocking an entire culture? Again, it helps to be careful when making wisecracks about Jesus.
We live in very strange times.