Jon Krakauer, 2003

Having torn through Krakauer’s earlier books, Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, I had every expectation that this book would be an up-all-night page-turner, and I wasn’t disappointed.  What I didn’t expect, though, was that it would end up being a pretty scathing portrait not just of Mormon Fundamentalism, but the larger Mormon Church as well.  It begins with the discovery of the brutal murder of Brenda Lafferty and her 15-month old daughter at the hands of two of her husband’s brothers, then leaps back to Joseph Smith’s “discovery” of golden tablets in Palmyra, NY from which he purportedly transcribed the book of Mormon.

While I was vaguely familiar with the rather improbable beginnings of the Mormon Church and its repeated, violent clashes with “Gentiles” in Missouri and Nauvoo, Illinois that finally led the “Saints” to the Utah territory, I had been blissfully unaware of the scandalous and often tawdry origins of some of its more controversial tenets, like, say polygamy.  And what do you know, but it turns out that the whole “Plural Marriage” thing came about because ol’ Joseph Smith, like most men, harbored hankerings for comely young lasses not his wife.  Of course, unlike most men, Joseph fancied himself a prophet, so instead of just accepting that he was a pervy heel, he had a revelation, and God told him, unsurprisingly, “Go get ‘em, Tiger.”  He even had a specific revelation addressed to his understandably skeptical wife, who was always threatening him with rolling pins and whatnot.  She didn’t fall for it.

But he did, and in the patriarchal social order of Mormonism, his revelation gained a lot of popularity, especially with the men.  When the official church reluctantly abandoned polygamy in the late 19th century, prodded by an increasingly adamant Federal Government, a lot of middle-aged Mormons who’d grown accustomed to adding a new teenaged virgin to the harem every few years reacted about as you’d expect.  Unfavorably, let’s say.

But despite its authoritarian nature, the Mormon Church has always carried an Achilles heel, the ramifications of which  Joseph evidently gave insufficient thought.  Since all Saints are taught that they can talk to God, and receive revelations of their own, it was perhaps inevitable that many of them would hear different things than did the hierarchy, and when God told them, say, “Of course you can take that 14-year old as your eighth wife,” or “It’s time that you kill a bunch of people so I can complete my work,” well, who’s going to argue with God?

Which brings us to the Lafferty murder.  The five Lafferty boys, hailing from a mainstream (comparatively) Mormon family, became besotted with a book called “The Peace Maker,” which was published by Joseph’s printing house back in Nauvoo.  And what a book it was; unlike those dastardly Muslims, who only get their 70 virgins after death, Mormons could start right in on their virgins, today, if one was handy, and better yet, their wives could either like it or lump it.  Of the five wives involved, none were very keen, and one of them finally left when her husband not only lost everything and refused to work, pay taxes, or obey traffic laws, but also started whacking her around too much.  He didn’t take kindly to such effrontery, and as luck would have it, God came along and told him that the people who helped her escape needed killing, including his youngest sister in law and her baby.

Steeped not only in the Mormon tradition of following orders, but also in the violent history of the early faith, Ron and Dan Lafferty followed through, gruesomely.  The narrative weaves back and forth between their subsequent trials and various Mormon murders and massacres of its pioneer era, and as I read I was astounded that a racist, sexist, homophobic church so drenched in blood and tainted by recurrent scandal could survive to become the globe-straddling behemoth it is today.  I was also amazed at the bravery it took for Krakauer to write such a book, and wondered what, if any, retaliation he faced.

Fortunately, I was reading the paperback edition, so the church’s official response was included in the appendix.  To my surprise, it only differed with niggling details here and there, and books it cited for support were all church approved, and none too flattering, either:   ….”Also, Joseph Smith did tend to marry women who stayed in his house or in whose house he had stayed.”  Indeed.

Mitt Romney had better hope that nobody reads this book, if he is the nominee, because it shows that Christian Fundamentalists are right about one thing, anyway:  Mormonism is a cult.  And a spooky one, to boot.

Of course, the predetermined Beck/Teabagger memes will have to be used; Socialism, Death Panels, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, Government Takeovers, blah, blah, blah.   It would be inconvenient, you’d think then, that the Republican “Road Map,” as it were, presented by the naively direct Wisconsin wingnut Paul Ryan, has a whole lot of socialism in it (for rich people, natch), envisions steadily increasing Medicare cuts which will undoubtedly cause premature deaths, incorporates the worst aspects of both Hitler’s and Wilson’s “Internationalism,” and takes the most popular and enduring “Government Takeover” in US history, Social Security, and hands it over to Wall Street.  You’d be wrong.  For Republicans and their fawning cheerleaders in the media, down is up if Jim DeMint says so and FOX News unsurprisingly agrees.

The tinny Victrola of terrorism is of course going to be cranked up anew, to play scratchy recordings of 2002-2003 and somehow claim that we’re not clobbering the Constitution fast enough, not torturing people with sufficient eagerness, and not invading enough countries to Keep America Safe.  This angle may be dropped later because in early rollouts it only fooled Richard Cohen, a feat akin to convincing Tom Friedman that Lexuses are preferable to olive trees.  You heard it here at CHNN first, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the terror well will finally be recognized (by the voters, not the media…) as having run inconveniently dry in a country with 10% unemployment and an economy still collapsing.  Please make a note of it, Rudy.

Of course, the real power behind the GOP, money, has already set the stage, and as such one can expect a lot more unnatural couplings between square pegs and round holes to ensue.  The way to “create jobs” is to abandon environmental regulation, any vestigial remains of progressive taxation, and give more tax-free money to worthless heirs and heiresses.  Neither remarkably nor evidently as a joke, the strikingly unattractive and almost as untalented version of Paris Hilton, Steve Forbes, has a new book out, not entitled “I Got Mine, Fuck You,” but might as well have been, to emphasize these not very new ideas.  Frank Luntz has almost just absentmindedly trotted out the same old anti-government crap that was so successful in perpetuating our third-world health statistics for another decade or three, to stop desperately needed banking reform,  but will people really fall for the notion that Wall Street banks that every day continue to rob Americans blind ought not be regulated?  That’s some pretty heavy lifting, even for the Wall Street Journal and CNBC.

As they always do when they’re in a pickle, the GOP is making a lot of noise about teh ghey, this time about the long-overdue abandonment of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a policy so ridiculous on its face that I have trouble believing it’s been the law of the land for almost eighteen years, and touting the purported “uprising” against marriage equality, financed by a bunch of wealthy churches whose primary concern is avoiding reality, even when it drops on their curiously adorned heads.  But time has shown that since the cynical 2004 “victories” that resulted from gay-bashing have only driven more younger voters away from the GOP, and even if John McCain doesn’t listen to Cindy and Megan, America does, and has.

They think, of course, that they have a new big thing in the Teabaggers, which is the first sign of actual non-astroturf political activity on the right since Tomothy McVeigh, and they understandably don’t want to waste a development like that .  Sarah Palin surely didn’t…  she got half a wardrobe’s worth of Teabagger dough for mouthing vaguely intelligible Randian Haiku in Nashville, just tonight, so I’ll bet she’ll be wearing something extra pretty for the occasion.  Still, given that even some of the craziest Republicans, Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, finally slinked away from the teabaggers, realizing they were already so bought and paid for by Wall Street and the real corporate Death Panelists in the Health “industry” that they might not have much in common with the teabaggers after all. Rotten vegetables are notoriously unflattering to the complexion.   Naturally, they both disingenuously blamed the annoying “big government” intrusion of pesky “ethics” laws for their fortuitous absences from a crowd that in the end, evidently didn’t “share their values.”

No wonder Sarah Palin quit her part-time day job; this evolution-denier can gaily fleece her (socially) Darwinistic inferiors for all they’re worth and not be unduly shackled by silly old “big government” ethics.  The Republican Party, not so much.  The policies they have chosen and continue to fight for are the exact ones that caused and will only merrily perpetuate the very pain the Teabaggers are feeling, and their overconfident claim to Teabagger loyalty is already wearing alarmingly thin, given that their craven, almost Cheneyesque money-grubbing went on lurid display at about week three of their “revolution’s” existence.

I have previously criticized the Democrats for running against Bush, after  all this time and so many of their own failures, but the only thing stupider than that would be the Republicans running as “Bush, Only More So.”  I can’t decide which one I want to lose more.  Let the (h/t Jon Stewart) “thinnest kid at fat camp” win.

Oops.  Forget Maryland.  On November 16-19 in Baltimore, the US Council of Bishops is meeting to decide for other people (as they always do, despite their somewhat striking inexperience in their favorite area, matters of intimacy and reproduction…) whether or not indefinitely sustaining vegetative patients should be mandatory at all Catholic hospitals.  Pay the bill, we’ll inject the swill….  Don’t like it?  See you in Hell.

Here, that means almost every good hospital, from the one where I was born to the one where my mother died in 2008.  We were lucky.  A very compassionate and realistic older doctor told my brother and I that we made the right decision when we finally opted, after much anguish, for “comfort only,” meaning that the machines that now kept her alive only on a screen would be shut off except for her morphine drip, after she had endured months of aggressive care, most of which only made her worse.   The Catholic intimidation was palpable for me, though, as I passed crucifixes and Blessed Virgins in the Four Seasons swank of the hospital where I knew my mother would die.  Deep down, I feared that what the US Council is now contemplating was already in force.  Seemingly confirming my fears, a priest appeared at her door one day when I was visiting, and introduced himself.  Joan said, sarcastically, “You’re here to administer my last rites?  I’m not ready for that yet.”  Startled, he said somewhat apologetically, “Your profile says you’re Catholic, so I thought I’d stop in.”  Warming to the ballsy insouciance that imminent death brings, the old Holy Names girl said, “I just wrote that to keep the other religious crazies out.”  Father whatshisname beat a hasty retreat.  I was relieved, and I felt that her display helped to convey to me her wishes.

Three days after she died, we were at her condo, and my brother checked the mail, which contained fresh bills from the hospital, addressed to “The estate of….”  We speculated, jokingly, whether the EKG was hooked up directly to accounting.  Onward, Christian Collectors. and all that.

Basically, I’m getting tired of this.  I always was suspicious of the motives of other seemingly more fervent religions, but growing up my own seemed fairly benign, and certainly not the bible-thumping political player it’s turning out to be.  But now we find it’s just as bad, and maybe worse because of its immense wealth and power.  Like the Mormons and the Evangelicals before them, the Catholics have decided that the potential new recruits are among the most zealous and eager to oppress, and have jumped on the bandwagon to nab them and their collection plate moolah, even inviting antigay Anglicans to join the greedy and bigoted fold, and loudly denying communion to politicians who support others’ rights not to follow Catholic Doctrine.  It seems that the Catholics have embraced the methods of that other great Italian work of art, the Mafia.

Who the Hell do they think they are?  Catholics were once a persecuted minority in this country, having to establish their own schools to shelter their many children from the heretical Protestant bibles then used in public schools.  Mormons had to light out to the territories, twice, to escape violent persecution as well.  Now, they and their imitators are like the last players standing in a particularly lengthy and brutal game of Monopoly, where he who has the gold makes the rules, and they’re ready to party; around the world governments and public policy dance to their tune.

They’re not religions anymore, and should no longer be treated as such by either tax codes or any presumption of virtue.  When I was Sales Manager at a theatrical lighting supply house twenty years ago, our customer base was schools, arts organizations, and churches.  (The ickiest churches put on the best shows, you know..) and among them all, the churches were the only ones who ever asked for a discount, and virtually all of them did.  I would say, privately fuming as a former Oregon Ballet administrator who would never have dreamed of asking for such a freebie, despite our much more penurious state, that “All of our customers have their financial difficulties, and all are good causes; we don’t discriminate among them.”

Today I’d say, “Churches pay extra.  Maybe God will send you that fog machine.”

You see, in our upside down world, those seeking to take away others’ civil rights are now pleading for privacy protections; though backed by huge and powerful churches and wealthy individuals, the anti-gay marriage crowd is deathly afraid of having their eyes clawed out by drag queens, or worse, Rosie O’Donnell driving by their houses and mooning them.  After their bittersweet victory in California, the Mormons and others have hired an armada of lawyers to keep their petitioners secret; well-earned boycotts and social opprobrium is just a bit more than these holier-than-thou shrinking violets can endure.  (They tried to keep their donors secret, too, but that spectacular affront to the idea of open elections was repeatedly laughed out of court.)  So, here we have a bunch of religious zealots attempting to Talibanize America state by state, opportunistically moving their lavishly funded but deceitful and malicious campaign into Washington and Maine, all the while whining about how hurtful it is to be constantly called bigots, just because that’s what they happen to be.

Recognizant of the fact that, like most of their jihads, this one can’t be sold honestly nor fought fairly, the Love Police have chosen the sweet-sounding moniker of “Traditional Marriage” to carry on their war on families not like their own.  You know, “traditional marriage,” like David Vitter’s.  Like all eliminationist movements, the victimizers cast themselves as the real victims, their overwhelming numbers and deep-pocketed (and often tax-exempt) supporters still leaving them with that old beleaguered feeling.

And everyone’s getting on board the freedom train; racists, who know a thing or two about lynching and hate-driven violence, are suddenly quaking in their boots that because someone might call them out on their vicious bile, endlessly whining that they’re being “censored,” simply because their own free speech is wantonly and unfairly also extended to their critics.  Although they’re the ones who historically, and increasingly at present, are the ones resorting to violent rhetoric and even actual violence, their reflexive projection makes them just sure that at any moment those darkies, Habibs, and/or Mexicans are going to suddenly rise up, kick their doughy white asses, and ravage their womenfolk, not necessarily in that order.  Stranger things have happened, after all, especially according to Rush Limbaugh and Fox, so they can’t be too careful.

But what would an Overlord’s Rights movement be without some corporate hangers on?  After all, corporations have a few bones to pick with the rest of us, and they have lots of money and lawyers, so why shouldn’t they put on a slick “We Shall Overcome” tour, too?  Fox News (natch) bravely fought the first battle, winning from the Supreme Court the “right” to lie to the public in their news broadcasts, in the hallowed name of “Free Speech.”  Nike quickly joined the crusade, righteously demanding that the Constitution affirm its right to lie about working conditions in its factories, thus scoring yet another come-from-behind Free Speech victory over which the Founding Fathers must be bursting with posthumous pride.  Not to be outdone, and finding itself with a vexing PR mess after pronouncing every fraudulent pyramid scheme it ever encountered as good as gold, the ratings agencies, Standard and Poor particularly, have decided that bad financial advice also deserves its rightful place in the public square, lest Freedom abandon our shores.  Financially, anyway, S & P thinks that the Constitution ought to be a bit more of a suicide pact, especially for others.

What these new Freedom Riders have in common, of course, is that the only “suffering” they are attempting to use the courts to ameliorate is brought upon solely by their own hateful and/or egregious conduct, which, unlike race or sexual orientation, is, well, their own fault, and freedom decidedly does not mean freedom from criticism, much less legal liability, you would think.  Unfortunately, the courts, with a few notable exceptions, fail to see the difference.

Freedom’s on the march, alright; but to a decidedly different drummer.

As expected, the especially intelligence-challenged icons of the right, that is, former beauty queens Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean, are undoubtedly the most audacious and comical about employing this tactic, often having to invent or exaggerate these unconscionable slights for dramatic effect.  Palin thus had to darkly extrapolate that her many, self-created  ”enemies” wanted her to abort, and later euthanize, her  oft-touted “special needs” child, which she had relentlessly used as a billboard for her dogmatic embrace of the forced birth movement, and then conflate David Letterman’s joke about her demonstrably unchaste daughter to a loudly proclaimed call for “statutory rape” of her younger daughter, who luckily enough hasn’t yet started dating redneck hockey players, as far as we know.  Smooth move, Caribou Barbie; even Matt Lauer didn’t fall for that one.  Prejean, in hot pursuit of an even thornier crown than her Miss California bauble, is now tearfully suing Miss California officials for “religious discrimination” as the clock on her fifteen minutes of fame inexorably winds down, finding that being merely a disposable darling of those tacky bible thumpers will never pay the bills, nor does it get her anything close to the TV time she craves.  Cruelly stripped of her tiara, she’s vengefully turned tattletale, a look which is decidedly less flattering on her than a bathing suit and high heels, but what else is a girl of no discernible talent and an IQ rivaling Trig Palin’s to do?  Work?

But Prejean is merely following in the footsteps of other “innocent” religious fanatics, who are constantly under attack, to their minds, merely because they feel a need to take away the rights of others, and pour their considerable money, muscle, and political clout into this Godly and worthy pursuit.  The Mormons did it after their carpetbagging “victory” on Prop. 8 brought them deserved opprobrium from most normal people, the radical Zionists do it after every carpet bombing of Palestinians, and now the Catholic League’s cuckoo leader, Bob Donohue, is certain that “militant, dogmatic, fundamentalist atheism” is on a Hitlerian blitzkrieg against them, too, because somebody said something mean about the Vatican on Showtime.  Well, Hail Mary, full of something, which doesn’t exactly smell like grace.

Fox News, America’s Crybabies, have always employed this technique, and through the magic of creative editing, they conveniently erase their astonishingly provocative and inciteful statements that led to the horrible name-calling and derision they’ve unfairly suffered, while they endlessly whine about and exhaustively repeat every mean word ever said about them from even the obscurest of sources, every damn night.  Poor little Glenn Beck, as popular with advertisers these days as crabs in a whorehouse, even had a chart made up, which although misspelled, was surely heartfelt and timely.  The poor little lunatic race-baiter just can’t get a break from the leftist barrage. (I just tossed that in in hopes of getting on the next chart…)

This cynical attempt by some of the worst people on the planet to garner the kind of sympathy of which they themselves are utterly incapable has two goals: to increase the feelings of victimhood and desire for revenge amongst their slow-witted, violently inclined followers, and to make their critics look as hateful as they are.  And after eight years of Bush, who gloatingly behaved like a Nazi at least in part to get someone to call him one so he could bathe himself in righteous victimhood, it’s not at all surprising that they would, as always in unison, be stooping to such loud and transparent demagoguery for both political gain and another undeserved moment in the spotlight.  It’s what they do.

The only thing they always conveniently forget to tell Mommy is who hit whom first.

Clinton’s election in 1992 was accompanied by the first rollout of anti-sex fervor to manipulate elections, dividing to conquer such pernicious forces as women and gays from the rest of the electorate to win elections for Republicans.  Here in Oregon, we had a stunningly sweeping and un-American ballot measure that would have essentially mandated discrimination against gays in every area of life and two draconian measures against abortion on the ballot that year, championed by a ragtag group of misfits who finally had found a way to make a living selling hate and sexual frustration to the rubes, the Oregon Citizen’s Alliance.  Founders Lon Mabon and the even spookier Scott Lively, allied with disturbed redneck politicians like Marylin Shannon and Eileen Qutub scooped up tons of money and bedeviled gay and women’s groups in Oregon for years, foreshadowing the eliminationist and hate-mongering that would become the right’s stock and trade from those days on. They eventually lost a case they supported surrounding “The Nuremburg Files,” a righty website that kept a tally of which targeted doctors had been righteously eliminated, of which there were several.  Luckily, most of them collapsed under the weight of their own corruption and court defeats and are irrelevant now, but lo and behold, Miss Lively (not to be confused with Miss Congeniality…) is now in Uganda promoting, with evident success, persecution of gays.  Join the Nazis and see the world, I guess.

The anti-sex movement is sort of like a balloon; squeeze it here and it bulges out there, though, as we’ve been seeing just lately with this, the fourth right-wing act of terrorism since Obama’s election. (Pittsburgh, Little Rock, Wichita, where was the other one?)  Clearly, people who are obsessed with other people’s sex lives are crazier than most, but isn’t it kind of dangerous for a political party and the vast majority of its spokesmen to speak of political disagreements in terms of how much those people who believe differently ought to die?  I mean, there are plenty of my fellow Americans that  I don’t like, but I’m completely okay with the fact that they are allowed to live.  I just don’t invite them over.  I guess that’s what makes me a liberal.  Righties take a different approach, as we see.

When they aren’t dehumanizing Muslims, calling Supreme Court nominees “racists,” randomly picking countries that ought to be bombed, they’re calling some midwestern physician who deals with one of the most stressful and difficult types of practice, “Tiller the Baby Killer.”  Of course, the peculiar pathologies that allow these vermin to to treat other human beings this way, conveniently enough, blinds them to any sense of responsibility for the eventual and increasingly inevitable slaughter of their targets.  One can hear the orchestra swelling to the strains of that hit tune,  ”No one could have predicted….”  Maybe Bill O’Reilly should get Condi on and they could do a little duet.

We have a terrorism problem problem in this country, alright.  Too bad we’re fighting it “over there.”  I wonder who the next victim(s) will be.

And why wouldn’t they?  Like the other growing corporatized religions, Catholics recently having joined Evangelicals in jumping into conservative politics, the Mormons have decided that what’s good for the political Right is good for the Saints.  Perhaps the less doctrinaire religions, who don’t tell their adherents what to wear, how large their families should be, and which politicians not to vote for, are seen by this bunch, let’s call them Big God, as a tired, slow-growth model they emulate at their peril.  Or perhaps they just can’t mind their own business.  But at any rate, it’s a dumb, mean, and disastrous strategy that makes a mockery of Christian teachings, and pegs their future to a failed and discredited political movement, which will eventually show up the only place they’ll notice: the collection plate.

Back in 2004, when Catholic bishops went whole hog for Bush, even refusing communion to Kerry and his supporters, I had an easier time understanding it.  After all, the only growth in the Catholic Church is among the most conservative, not to say sexist, parts of the world, and “tort reform” is an awfully tasty-sounding sweetener to a wealthy organization with a whole lot of tort liability.  Never mind what the Pope said about Iraq.  Better yet, get a new Pope with a touch of the Nazi, and suddenly Bush almost seems like the prince of peace himself.  Leaving aside that namby-pamby New Testament for the moment, were I a shareholder in Catholics, Inc. at the time, I could at least see I the rationale for the move.

Of course, the founders and high priests of Big God, the bible-thumping nitwits who drove the Republican party off a cliff, got in the game early, and amid the usual sex scandals and financial improprieties, are suffering from their choice to render unto Caesar, and maybe have Caesar do a little rendering for them, too.  Younger members are now either discounting hateful claptrap about gays, or more often, protesting the demented notion that God wants us to destroy the planet.  Others are simply leaving.  It is telling that the remaining white evangelicals are the only group on earth who still hold a favorable opinion of Bush, who knew what he was talking about when he said, “You can fool some of the people all the time.  And those are the ones we have to focus on.”  A few years later, the Crystal Cathedral itself may go on the block.  Coincidence?

For Catholics as well as Mormons, the idea of ruling, if not a country, at least a political party, was obviously too great a temptation to resist, and it was clear which party it would be, given both church’s deplorable histories regarding race and minorities, and stupendous untaxed wealth.  Too bad they got there a little late, when massive electoral defeats and economic collapse were about to leave turds floating in the holy water….  But then again, the Catholics just got around to pardoning Galileo a few years ago, and the Mormons, who didn’t allow blacks in leadership positions until the 1980′s have never been able to resist hitching their wagon to another bigoted star.

The good news is that this could be, with a little help from pending lawsuits, the beginning of the end of Big God thinking it’s well, God.  And it’s high time…  Bush’s little “crusade” didn’t turn out so well; let’s hope the Mormons’ little “Mission Accomplished” moment in California meets a similar fate.