Don’t worry – the incendiary headline is strictly for Google’s benefit.

My most popular posts, in which I supposedly reveal the innermost secrets of the Order of the Arrow (OA) AKA the pseudo-Taliban wing of the Boy Scouts of America, continue to attract an unreasonable amount of attention from angry Boy Scouts who think I have violated a sacred trust I established when I was hazed by white guys in Indian headdresses thirty-plus years ago.

If you need a history of my squabbles therewith, the original post can be found here; my follow-up where I discover I’m top-ranked in OA ordeal Google searches is here, and a particularly nasty follow-up on the subject can be found here.

I always find myself amazed at the incoherence of the comments that show up after all these years. You can see them yourself in the comments section in the sidebar, but some of them are just too delicious to avoid calling more attention to them.

Witness today’s excursion into rhetorical genius from our new friend “AnnoyedScout”:

Ordeal is not really a horrible thing and if you had any sense you would take this down; or at least edit it. You make it seem like they kill you just so you can get ordeal level. Having gone through ordeal it is not as horrible as people may think. If you actually got to first class and above without your parents doing everything for you like me it is easier than if your parents did. I do not think this reflects the OA at all. There are a lot of fun things about ordeal. Also ruining OA secrets for people just seeing how wretched this site is like all of the others is not okay. If I sent this to national you would be in so much trouble. If you remember in your induction you promised not to tell anyone any of this.

Except I don’t remember. Anything. I remember people smacking me in the back of the head if I peeked while they led me around on a rope, and I remember freezing and starving and doing slave labor, but if there are super secret loincloth secrets, I don’t remember what they were. And I haven’t revealed them here – not out of principle, but out of, you know, not remembering any of them.

I asked AnnoyedScout if he would, in fact, report me to the BSA national office, and that I’d be happy to print any nasty letter they send to me in its entirety. I shudder to think what other “trouble” I might be in. Can the BSA slash my credit rating? Or just revoke my neckerchief privileges?

Here’s another party recently heard from – someone who playfully refers to themselves as “Order of the Arrow member.”

That is a time honored ceremony going back hundreds of yours you disgrace the brotherhood by reveling these secrets

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, no, it does not go back hundreds of mine. Or yours. Or even years, for that matter. It goes back to 1915, when the Order was first established. Am I supposed to presume that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were Order of the Arrow members and were given a carrot and a gumdrop for dinner?

But I love reveling secrets. Revelry is always fun, unless the Order of the Arrow is involved.

Here’s “Zach Ness” from late last year:

I didn’t think ordeal was that bad i’ve been through worse not that i care a whole lot for the organization i just think if kids wanna be in it its their problem and if parents wanna force their kids into it shame on them but the order deserves better then this…

Better than what?

These are the bad eggs that deserve whatever Dixie Cup boiling they get. But I also had a pleasant exchange with a guy named Randall Cone from Atlanta, who was gracious enough to use his own name, proper grammar, and reasonable arguments. Here is his summation:

[The] OA just wasn’t for you at that time. Just as people who don’t skydive aren’t defective and people who smoke aren’t ALL dangerous (just a few of them). The guys that elected you may not have known you very well and the responsibility of the vote is to select the boys that WILL fit in with OA. I was inducted at age 16. When I was 14 I would have hated every second of my ordeal. If you completed ordeal then you are entitled to maintain your membership. Maybe you should attend a few functions and be one of the people that insure that ordeal isn’t the experience that you had. They still camp but most of the time it’s in permanent shelters with mattresses and good food.

Randall Cone
Atlanta, GA

Fair enough. And I have received a number of off-blog reports from people I respect that much of the hazing extremes that marred my own experience have been curtailed in the current order. So more power to them.

I should note, however, that the good Mr. Cone has revealed just as much detail about the OA as I ever have. Are you reporting him to “national” too, AnnoyedScout? I’d hate to be the guy that kept Randall Cone out of a neckerchief.

I continue to receive messages
from my well-intentioned lefty friends about what we besotted Republicans could or should do to improve our electoral fortunes the next time out. The latest, which three people have sent me, is a link to a New York Times article that claims the GOP is doomed due to its technological obsolescence. I’d link to it, except I haven’t bothered to read it, not do I think I will.

The fact is, I don’t care if a Republican ever holds the White House again.

That’s not to say that I have become a Democrat, or a Joe Biden fan, or that I’m all on board the Hillary Express. It’s that I now have a clearer, albeit bleaker, picture of where the country is, or, more specifically, where it has chosen to be.

This is a country that is careening toward insolvency, and, barring some unforeseen cataclysmic shift in public sentiment, it will never elevate anyone to the highest office in the land that has the cojones to say as much. Any Republican that can conquer the overwhelming demographic obstacles that stand in the way of a Republican victory in the electoral college will also have to advocate positions that will make him or her part of the insoluble problem.

As squabbles continue about guns or abortion or global warming or taxes or defense spending or health care gay rights or foreign policy or Benghazi or the president’s vacations or what Michelle O’s hair looks like, it feels more and more hollow.

None of it matters. None of it matters at all.

Does anyone care now what the Soviet Union’s position on gay marriage was? No? So why should we care what the United States policy is on gay marriage or anything else if there’s not going to be a United States?

Because, you know, there isn’t going to be a United States.

This is not wild-eyed alarmism; it is a statement of fact. The course we are on with the demographic trends that drive our mandatory spending will bury us in debt to the point that we will no longer be able to function as a nation. The amount of money necessary to meet our entitlement obligations in the future does not exist. If we don’t acknowledge it now, the math will make it happen for us. And it will happen, regardless of how high we raise our taxes, how much we cut our discretionary spending, and who’s sitting on the Supreme Court.

That doesn’t mean we’ll all die and the country will be sucked into a black hole. It does mean, however, that we’ll have to start over. Neither you nor I know what that looks like, and maybe it won’t be apocalyptic. But it will have to happen. Nobody holding office in any party is even thinking about taking credible steps to stop it. And the longer we wait, the harder it will be to slow the gathering inertia.

So I’m supposed to rally around the flag? Come to the aid of the party? Call the guy with the donkey on his shirt a monster while making excuses for idiots that think the national discussion should focus on laws forcing women to carry the children of their rapists?

Yeah, no thanks.

This is bleak, I know. But I’m not trying to get all Glenn Beck on you. Don’t head for the hills and hunker down in a heavily-armed bunker with your food storage. The life that’s coming for the rest of us left behind in civilization won’t suck as hard as bunker life will. The Soviet Union is gone, but Russia is still there. We’ll still be here, too.

So, bottom line, understand that I have zero party loyalty and no enthusiasm for a political process that has put the destruction of the nation on autopilot. And I will jump back into the fray the moment that any guy in any party demonstrates both a willingness and a capacity to steer the Titanic away from the iceberg instead of rearranging the deck chairs.

I have not seen that guy. I’m certainly not that guy. In fact, I don’t think there is such a guy.

I’m bracing for impact.

(Thank you! I’m here all week! Tip your waitresses! Try the veal!)

Surprise! There isn’t one.

“What the church requires is only belief that Adam was the first man of what we would call the human race,” said LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley in a comment cited in the book Where Darwin Meets the Bible: Creationists and Evolutionists in America. He then went on to say that “scientists can speculate on the rest” and that, with regard to his own studies in both geology and anthropology, ”Studied all about it. Didn’t worry me then. Doesn’t worry me now.”

That’s exactly where I am on the issue. I find it somewhat interesting, but I don’t attach any theological import to it. Whether the earth was zapped into existence in 24 hours on October 15, 3004 BC, or if it’s been around for the four quadrillion years L. Ron Hubbard thinks it has, neither scenario poses any intellectual or spiritual obstacle to my faith. The same is true with regard to humanity – if we popped up like daisies a few thousand years ago, great. If generations upon generations of ancestral apes were involved, great.

Of course, not all my fellow Mormons feel that way.

“Is the theory of evolution compatible with the doctrine of the Fall?  No,” wrote Joseph Fielding McConkie, an emeritus professor at BYU, a very bright and personable man, and my mission president when I served as a full-time missionary in Scotland a couple of decades ago. (I know the guy; I like him a lot.) He continues: “We can tug, twist, contort, and sell our birthright, but we cannot overcome the irreconcilable differences between the theory of organic evolution and the doctrine of the Fall.”

His position is consistent with the writings of his prolific father, Elder Bruce R. McConkie, who served as an apostle in the church. In Mormon Doctrine, his encylopaedic approach to the faith, he stated unequivocally that ”There is no harmony between the truths of revealed religion and the theories of organic evolution.” He labeled Latter-Day Saints who accepted scientific evolutionary theories as having minds that were “weak and puerile.”

Both men can trace their intellectual pedigree on this issue to the writings of Joseph Fielding Smith, the elder McConkie’s father-in-law and the younger McConkie’s grandfather who, like Gordon B. Hinckley, also served as President of the Church.

“This idea that everything commenced from a small beginning, from the scum upon the surface of the sea, and has gradually developed until all forms of life, the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, the fishes of the sea, and the plants upon the face of the earth, have all sprung from that one source, is a falsehood absolutely,” he wrote in his seminal work Man: His Origin and Destiny.  ”There is no truth in it, for God has given us his word by which we may know.”

Well, that’s authoritative, no?

No.

In a letter to Dr. A. Kent Christensen,  Department of Medical Anatomy, Cornell University Medical College, then-church president David O. McKay, who happens to be my great-grandfather, wrote the following:

_____

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
47 E. South Temple Street
Salt Lake City, Utah
David O. McKay, President

February 3, 1959

Dr. A. Kent Christensen
Department of Anatomy
Cornell University Medical College
1300 York Avenue
New York 21, New York

Dear Brother Christensen:

I have your letter of January 23, 1959 in which you ask for a statement of the Church’s position on the subject of evolution.

The Church has issued no official statement on the subject of the theory of evolution.

Neither ‘Man, His Origin and Destiny’ by Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, nor ‘Mormon Doctrine’ by Elder Bruce R. McConkie, is an official publication of the Church. . . .

Sincerely yours,

[signed]

David O. McKay
(President)

______

President McKay was a firm believer in organic evolution as well as the principles of geological time. Other prominent church leaders on the pro-evolution side of the ledger include apostles James E. Talmage, who penned the official church publications The Articles of Faith and Jesus the Christ, as well as B.H. Roberts, one of the finest theologians the church has ever known. The fact of the matter is that the Lord has not yet seen fit to reveal the specific process by which either the earth or humanity was created, and anyone taking a hard line one way or the other is doing so on their own initiative, regardless of the church office they may hold.

All this, however, is prelude to my attempt to clarify and record my own personal and ill-informed theories on the subject, which probably won’t make either side happy at all.

I’ve wanted to write this up since a friend of mine on Facebook posted a link to a site called “Conservapedia,” which posits that a penchant for limited government also goes hand in hand with Adam and Eve riding on the backs of dinosaurs six thousand years ago. 

I don’t understand why one goes with the other, but to each his own, I guess.

Frequently, I claim that I don’t care, or that it doesn’t matter, or that everyone is free to believe what they want. Well, that’s all well and good, but what is it that I actually believe?

Keep in mind that I have absolutely no background in biology, so what I believe is colored by a hefty dose of good old fashioned ignorance. That said, I think there is much in my faith that is uniquely consistent with evolution and at odds with an orthodox Christian worldview.

The first and most significant difference is in the rejection of “Ex Nihilo,” or “out of nothing” creation.

I wrote about this extensively before, but, in a nutshell, most Christians believe that for a long time there was Nothing, and then, at some point God decided there should be Something, so then the universe popped in to existence. Mormons, on the other hand, have scriptures that teach that “[i]ntelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be,” (D&C 93:29) and that “[t]he elements are eternal.” (D&C 93:33) So the act of creation wasn’t about wiggling the divine nose a la Samantha from Bewitched; it was about fashioning things out of stuff that was already there, and, indeed, had always been there.

This is the way it works in our own experience. When we talk about people who make cars, we don’t assume Ford pickups are created ex nihilo. We understand that the creators actually fashioned steel and rubber and whatever else to make what they make. So when God created the world, He fashioned pre-existing raw materials into what we have now.

Given that premise, it’s very hard for me to understand how any Mormon can get behind the idea of a “young earth.” Whatever it is this earth is made out of, it’s been around for pretty much forever, and we ought to embrace the idea that the raw materials are very, very old indeed. I think I’m on solid-and-uncreated ground in assuming that a lengthy geological history is intellectually consistent with the Doctrine and Covenants. So let me leave solid ground for a moment and speculate a bit.

This is one of my weird little theories that may sound slightly Scientological, but bear with me. Since the elements are eternal, why isn’t it possible that parts of this earth are recycled from something that may have gone before? Chunks of this planet could have been cobbled together from previous planets, and some of those previous planets could have had dinosaurs on them billions of years ago. Wouldn’t that be an explanation that could be consistent with any theory of life or death this time around?

Of course, my wife, the lovely Mrs. Cornell, thinks this supposition is the height of ridiculousness, and she refers to it as my “Dinosaurs-fell-from-the-sky” theory, as if God littered the earth with old bones to confuse us, much in the same way the Flying Spaghetti Monster claims to have done. Pastafarians who worship the Noodly Appendaged One claim that “[t]he Flying Spaghetti Monster buried dinosaur bones under earth’s crust to give the appearance that these creatures really existed long ago, when in fact he’s just hiding the fact that dinosaurs walked along the side of men. He does this all for ‘His Divine Amusement.’”

I think both are misrepresentation of my own crackpot theory, of which I, myself, am not fully convinced. I entertain the possibility that, yes, dinosaurs walked the earth, but it was the previous earth to this earth, and some of them were left over from the earth that was.

OK, actually typing that out for the first time actually made me realize how goofy that sounds. That’s not to say I don’t believe it, sort of, only that I have no factual basis for it and no stomach to defend it. Moving on…

It’s noteworthy that the Judeo-Christian creation story is already suggestive of some sort of evolutionary process. If God created Something out of Nothing in an instant, why did he bother to create the earth in phases, with lower forms of life being created prior to higher forms of life? How did that happen? How much of the story is figurative, and how much is literal? It’s interesting to note that the McConkies, who insist that evolutionary theory should be given no leeway, also believe that the story of the Fall and the eating of the apple is, itself, figurative and not literal. How do they know that? They don’t. And neither do I. But it doesn’t seem too difficult to extrapolate some kind of evolution inherent in the creation story, even if it’s one that doesn’t line up note-for-note with Darwinian theory.

The McConkies, who, again, I like and respect immensely, would reject these arguments and play what they consider to be a scriptural trump card, namely Doctrine and Covenants section 77:6, which contains the following Socratic exchange about the Book of Revelation:
_____

Q. What are we to understand by the book which John saw, which was sealed on the back with seven seals?

_____

Well, there it is. Silly me; the earth is only 7,000 years old. Sorry I wasted your time. The end.

But, hey, howsabout all that stuff about eternal elements and intelligence that I cited earlier? Surely the dirt of which the earth is made is older than 7,000 years – it’s so old, in fact, that it can’t really be measured. Is that what D&C 77 is saying – the physical planet has only existed for 7,000 years? Because that’s not just inconsistent with science; it’s inconsistent with scripture.

7,000 years isn’t the chronological age of dirt; it’s the length of earth’s “continuance” or “temporal existence.” So what does that mean?

I think of it in these terms. How old is the city of London?

According to Wikipedia, the source of all wisdom, the city was founded in 43 AD and first referred to as “Londinium” a little less than a century later. Did London exist prior to 43 AD? Well, physically, yes, of course it did. The Thames was flowing, but it wasn’t called the Thames. All the dirt was presumably there, too, but it wasn’t called London, because there was no one there to call it London. So it really wasn’t quite London yet, despite its geographical relationship to the town and then city that would later occupy that spot of ground.

History is concerned with chronology and where there is no chronology, there isn’t really any history to speak of, either. Anthropologists refer to the era prior to man’s arrival as “pre-history,” as in “prehistoric times.” So when does history begin?

Specifically, if the chunks of matter that make up the earth have always existed, at what point did they participate in earth’s “continuance” or “temporal,” i.e. time-based, “existence?” I submit that the criteria is the same as that of when London began.

History began when people showed up who were capable of recording time, which would require mathematics, writing, and philosophy – in a word, civilization. It’s not scientifically ludicrous to say that, regardless of biological origins, functional human civilization is somewhere around 7,000 years old, give or take. In any case, I don’t think the idea of earth’s 7,000 year-old temporal existence mentioned in Latter-Day Saint scripture ought to be viewed through an ex nihilo filter, nor do I think it presents a significant intellectual roadblock to credible theories about the origins of both the earth and the life upon it.

So there you have it. My biological manifesto riddled with ignorance, just as I warned you it would be. You are not required to agree or disagree with any of it in order to consider yourself a faithful Latter-Day Saint, nor should anyone of faith fear additional light and knowledge on this subject, whether it comes from a biology class or a Sunday School class, and regardless of how weak or puerile your intellect may be.

Maybe there are dinosaurs living in the center of the earth, like mole people.

It goes without saying that I am no fan of the Boy Scouts of America. Just about every trauma in my youth had some sort of scouting connection. And, on principle, I think the decision to even consider homosexuality as having any sort of bearing on membership in that benighted organization to be backward and silly.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s consider it anyway.

Back in 1993, when President Clinton was considering lifting the ban on homosexuals on active military duty, then–Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell rejected the contention that excluding gays from the military was akin to racial discrimination and instead compared it to a reluctance to live in close quarters with someone of the opposite sex. A military man with tremendous respect for women would recoil at the idea of unisex bathrooms where men and women shower together. That may make him a prude, but it doesn’t make him a misogynist.

In a nutshell, the idea was that life in uniform is strenuous enough without introducing unnecessary elements of sexual tension into the mix. (All that may end up changing now that women are going to be assigned to the front lines, but that’s a discussion for another day.) In any case, Powell’s arguments were ultimately rejected, and now even President Clinton’s feeble “don’t ask, don’t tell” compromise has been repealed.

The sky hasn’t fallen.

Recent academic studies suggest that the repeal has not had a negative impact on the military overall. One might be tempted, then, to conclude that General Powell’s concerns were unfounded, and only bigotry can account for opposition to the idea of the Boy Scouts of America following the military’s lead and lifting their own restriction against gay scouts. Certainly bigotry is an issue. It is not, however, the only issue. Indeed, Powell’s argument carries far more weight when talking about adolescents and not adults.

Those serving in the military are old enough and mature enough to deal with the complexities of sexual attraction amid their ranks. The same cannot be said for 13-year-old boys with hormones a’blazin’.  These are kids who are only beginning to understand the strangeness of their own bodies and what they ought to, or ought not to, be doing with them.

Can anyone persuasively argue that pubescent boys should be going on overnight camping trips together and sharing tents with pubescent girls? What a recipe for disaster that would be. One could expect a lot of scouting pregnancies to result from the annual 50-mile hike.

Could openly homosexual scouts create situations that were equally problematic?

Well, in the pregnancy sense, no, they couldn’t. That’s simple biology. But what about in the emotionally scarring sense? And I’m not just talking about the relatively few instances where a straight kid would face unwanted advances from a gay one. Given the difficulties of understanding and coping with sexuality at that age, the danger of “out and proud” flamboyant Eagles making life uncomfortable for the Tenderfoot heteros really doesn’t strike me as a widespread problem. I’m far more concerned about the gay scouts themselves. Bullying, in my experience, is a Boy Scout tradition. Remember, I used to get beaten up on scout outings because I was a weirdo. I shudder to think what my scouting fate would have been if I were gay besides.

This isn’t just an abstract matter of principle. A significant increase in hazing incidents would present an unacceptable liability risk for the BSA as an organization. Are they prepared for that? Can the BSA survive as an institution if they make this level of a paradigm shift without a clutch?

There are hopeful signs that such a thing is possible. Canada’s scouting organization makes no effort to discriminate against gays, and the sky hasn’t fallen there, either. But it’s important to note that once the ban is lifted, there is no going back. It’s not bigotry to consider all the ramifications of such a decision before jumping in when you can’t jump back out again.

Bottom line: no scout, gay or straight, should ever have to be inducted into the Order of the Arrow. 

In no particular order:

1) Nick Smith sent me a note claiming he was a 17-year-old kid and would I please stop picking on him. I suspect he’s not a real guy – a prank engineered by someone who fully realized how stupid he looked. Alas, my attempt to replace Languatron as my online arch-enemy was not to be.

2) As at least two commenters have noticed, the Shatner’s Toupee blog is gone. Simply gone. It had been essentially inactive since the summer, but it came back on New Year’s Day with a message that it was about to rise from the ashes. And then it was yanked off the web entirely. I have no idea why. It is not, however, lost forever, as the Internet never forgets. I have no idea who was writing it, although I did send them a message and offer my services to keep the chronicle going in their absence, but I never heard back. My Esteemed Colleague suspects Shatner’s people objected and it was yanked. I’m not willing to go that far in my own theories, but it’s a mystery why he or she would feel it necessary to remove a tremendous amount of well-written content, rather than just continuing to leave the place untended.

In any case, I have wept for the lost Shatner’s Toupee all this while, yea, and I shall weep a while longer.

3) Languatron has completely isolated himself from all human contact, so there’s little point in my carrying on our feud, which began well over a decade ago. That said, he continues to rage against the massive anti-Galactica conspiracy at his own blog, wherein he made an admission that’s worth noting here.

Languatron, AKA Andrew Fullen, has written a number of self-published vanity “books” lamenting the vast anti-Galactica conspiracy, and many of us have taken to reviewing them on Amazon.com. In every case, however, each negative review has been matched, word for word, with a positive one from people who sound strangely like Languatron himself. This is quite a feat, because to be able to review a book multiple times, you have to have bought something from the account used for the review, making it hard for people to dress up in sock puppets and give themselves five stars. That means Languatron was willing to buy a bunch of crap under fake names just to bump up his ratings. Those names included:

Joshua Remington Vegas, Danny Flapjacks, Debbie Miranda McAllister, Roll Fizzle-Beef, Ronald D. Lunkhead, TwoBrainedCylon – a name he stole from one of his critics, RGrant Losing bets extraordinaire, Bold Bigflank, Alberta Larsononi Von Eick, Gripe Bransford Singher-Moore, Butch Crackheap, Ronald Remington Meyer, Blasphemous Butt-Hockey, Black Tower Fuzzy Slippers, bookreader, Dash Canyon, Tad Udowitz, Jameson Claymore, Ron Meyer CEO of the Universal Corporation, Russell Udowitz Sanders, Walter S. Langley, Dank Thistlenads, J.T. Charmichael, RGrant nickname Slab Bulkhead, and, of course, Stallion_Cornell Moist Box, as well as Stallion_Cornell My Moist Box is your Moist Box.

Phew.

Well, Amazon.com finally figured out what was going on and deleted all of them.

Languatron, therefore, has put them all back online at his “Fortress of Doom.” He claims that “Universal Studios and Amazon.com didn’t like all of the favorable and legitimate reviews the books criticizing Universal Studios were getting on Amazon.com.” He goes further, claiming that Universal studios “posts fake, negative book reviews,” including mine, with the following explanation:

“The negative, fake, and stealth marketed written reviews of the books remaining on Amazon.com have an air of desperation about them, don’t they? (1) They don’t sound like real, legitimate reviews (2) the reviews sound like they are all serving a singular agenda (keep the books from getting read at all costs)…(3) And that the personal lives of everyone who wrote those negative reviews would be seriously modified not to their liking if the books were read.”

In the interests of countering Universal Studios’ monopolistic control of the web, I offer you Lang’s “legitimate” reviews for your perusal.

4) My columns at the Deseret News continue to be printed. Please read them.

I actually had something to say here, but my housekeeping has taken up 680 words. So I’ll post it tomorrow. Until then, this is Bold Bigflan Thistlenads, signing off.

You haven’t forgotten our pal Nick Smith, have you? He’s the hater who emailed me out of the blue to inform me how dippy Mormons are, something he knows personally because Mormon women are dumb enough to have sex with him. I would think he’d recognize how badly that reflects on him, not me, but what do I know? I’m the stupid one, remember?

Anyhoo, as I described in my last post on the subject, I emailed him back and heard nothing. Nothing! Up late one night, I sent him one final message…

From: Stallion Cornell <stallion@stallioncornell.com>
To: Nick Smith <nicksmith382@yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2013 2:15 AM
Subject: Re:

So are we done, then? I found a very stupid Jehovah’s Witness you might be interested in.

And tonight, almost two weeks later, I got a response! Here it is…

Why is this weirdo still talking to me? You’re a clown

Naturally, I decided to still talk to him.

Nick! Buddy! I thought you were too busy diddling pious imbeciles to finish up our little chat! How’s tricks? (I mean that literally.)

Hugs and kisses,

Mormon Bozo (Mozo for short.)

As soon as I hear word, I shall inflict it upon my loyal readership post haste.

UPDATE: His latest missive arrived at 5:21 AM on the morning of January 23, 2013:

I think you’ve just confirmed how ridiculous you people truly are. Good grief

A Charlie Brown fan! Naturally, I fired off another round…

You and I have very different ideas about what constitutes the ridiculous. In my mind, “ridiculous” usually involves a public lack of pants. “Ridiculous” is Bob Dylan’s Christmas album. But most of all, “ridiculous” is contacting a total stranger and making witless, vitriolic generalizations about 14,000,000 people and labeling them all clods because you think they find you hot.

Well, no matter how hunky you may be to the brain-dead community, I, for one, am NOT willing to have sex with you! I mean, sweet fancy Moses, you’ve never even bought me dinner.

Awaiting another scintillating reply…

You don’t really want to read my depressing thoughts about Barack Obama’s second inauguration, do you?

If it makes you feel better, I had no such thoughts when he was sworn in four years ago. At least, that’s what I thought until I searched my blog and saw what I wrote on that occasion.

We have a new president. I don’t have a lot to say about it. His speech was workmanlike; the poem was strange and unnecessary; the closing prayer was racially divisive tripe. “When the Red Man can get ahead, man?” What the hell is that?
…
As I write this, a television is following Barack’s slow drive through DC after the inaugural. I cannot remember anything in either Bush term approaching this level of excitement. Obama is going to be a disappointment to just about everyone, only because God Himself couldn’t live up to this kind of hype.

So, it turns out I was somewhat depressed four years ago. But I can’t imagine I felt as bleak as I do today.

Obama didn’t live up to the hype.

The man who called George W. Bush unpatriotic for racking up $4 trillion in debt in eight years piled up $5 trillion in four. As we stand by helplessly as entitlement programs metastasize and consume the entire federal budget, he pushes through a new entitlement that is already estimated to cost trillions more than originally projected. The so-called “Affordable Care Act” has accelerated the already unsustainable growth of health care costs by double digits, and it has raised average insurance rates by about $2,000 per family. (Heaven help us if health care gets any more “affordable.”) In the meantime, the economy continues to suck out loud, as unacceptably high unemployment lingers longer than it has in living memory. Yes, we got Bin Laden, but, as we received word this past week, Algeria just got us, executing a number of American hostages with impunity only months after a resurgent al Qaeda murdered an American diplomat in our own embassy as the administration blamed YouTube.

Demonstrably and objectively, this president is a failure. And we just signed him up for another four-year hitch.

I’d like to say we know he is a failure, but the people who voted for him don’t seem to realize it. A friend of mine on Facebook posted the following self-congratulatory bile he encountered on another website:

Today is about Americans’ rejection of fear.
The fear of embracing “the other” as Barack Hussein Obama’s opponents tried to paint him.
The fear of “socialism,” as his opponents have falsely tried to paint his policies.
The fear of racial and ethnic minorities and our country’s changing demographics.
The fear of people of other faiths.
The fear of gays, lesbians and the transgendered.
The fear of the poor.
The fear of health care reform.
The fear of change.
Our fear of each other.

Congratulations, America, and thank you, for again rejecting the unreasoning, unjustified terror that our president’s opponents tried so hard to spread.

Wow. “Unreasoning, unjustified terror.”

What would that look like, exactly?

Terror that your opponent might confiscate your uterus? Personally fire you from your job? Give you cancer? It’s amazing that Obama could even have gotten a single vote, given the repeated assurances that Republicans were actively working to prevent minorities from voting. The Vice President of the United States told a group of African-Americans that Romney and the GOP were going to bring back slavery. Where was “hope and change” in 2012? It took a back seat to the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to tell you that Mitt Romney was a genocidal monster. Barack Obama ran the smallest, meanest, most vitriolic reelection campaign in living memory.

Mitt Romney was “weird.” (Fear of the “other…”)

Mitt was a “vulture capitalist.” (As opponents have falsely tried to paint his policies…)

Mitt, with voter ID laws bringing back Jim Crow, was supposedly working to “put y’all back in chains.” (The fear of racial and ethnic minorities and our country’s changing demographics…)

Scads of commentators and Obama’s most prominent SuperPAC donor went out of their way to deride Mitt Romney’s religion in scathing terms. (The fear of people of other faiths…)

Romney was accused of trying to prevent homosexuals from visiting each other in hospitals and take away their children. (The fear of gays, lesbians and the transgendered…)

Mitt Romney volunteered countless hours to help the poor and the needy as an unpaid minister and was still derided as someone who hated poor people. (The fear of the poor…)

Romney created sweeping health care reform in Massachusetts which was alternately and opportunistically praised and ridiculed, depending on whims of the audience. (The fear of health care reform…)

Romney proposed modifications to entitlement programs to make them sustainable in the long term, whereas now, unchanged, they’re on track to double our debt in less than two decades and make our nation insolvent. (The fear of change…)

Mitt Romney is a robot. He isn’t human. He has no idea what real people are like. (Our fear of each other…)

You want to know what I fear? I fear that Obama did everything he now retroactively accuses Romney and the Republicans of having done – and it worked. The way to the White House is fear, hatred, division – and, if you’re a Democrat, all of that is forgotten once you win, and people can speak of your inauguration in glowing terms while, at the same time, backhandedly slandering Republicans as being guilty of the tactics they themselves perfected.

Four more years of this.

And then, due to shifting demographics, government dependency, and unsustainable benefits that no one will risk reforming, we’ll get more of the same for decades to come – until the nation either comes to its senses or finally buckles under the strain.

Hail to the Chief.

In the heart of Utah County, which is in the heart of Mormondom, you will find Springville High School and their football team, the Springville Red Devils.

The reason for the mascot is simple enough. The school was constructed by the Red Devil Cement Company, so the mascot was named in their honor. Every few years, this upsets groups who consider a Red Devil to be an inappropriately satanic icon associated with impressionable teenagers, who will no doubt start conjuring demons and praying to Beelzebub upon exposure to such. Rhetorical pitchforks fly, and much sound and fury is expended on an issue that matters, really, not at all. Occult activity in ultra-Mormon Springville doesn’t seem to be on the uptick.

On occasion, a similar debate has taken place at the University of Utah, where some question whether or not it’s disrespectful to Native Americans to refer to to U of U sports teams as “The Runnin’ Utes.” This microcosm of the long-running “Washington Redskins” controversy wastes a lot of passion and ends up going nowhere.

While there are strong opinions on both sides, it has not seemed necessary to me to take a side on these issues either way.  Locals with a stake in the heated debate seem to have been able to work these things out on their own, or less. Really, who cares?

Which brings us to Dixie College.

As the Southern Utah school prepares for its new university status, many have suggested that a name change is in order, as the title “Dixie” conjures up a relationship with the Confederacy and the ugliest chapter in American history.

Yet the word has its own unique place in the story of Utah.

When Brigham Young sent the first Mormon settlers down to the south end of the Utah territory, he did so with the hope that they would be able to grow and farm cotton in the warm climate. Those efforts resulted in the area being labeled “Utah’s Dixie,” despite the absence of slavery and Utah’s allegiance to the North during the Civil War. The name is in broad use throughout the area even today, with a large “D” for Dixie emblazoned in a lighted letter carved into a prominent hill in St. George. That hill has also been unforgivably marred to make way for some ugly condos, which almost persuade me to be an environmentalist.

See how hideous that is? But I digress.

Should the school choose to expunge the name from the fledgling university, it is not likely they will succeed in eliminating the Dixie label from the region in which it finds itself. Personally, I’ve got no real problem with Dixie. Perhaps a greater cause for concern is the mascot of Dixie College – the “Dixie Rebels.”

Rebels? Really? How about the “Dixie Confederates?” The “Dixie Secessionists?” The “Dixie Wish-We-Could-Be-Slaveowners?”

I mean, come on.

It’s no use to pretend this is an innocent, unintentional linkage. Utah’s Dixie has no history of rebellion, but America’s Dixie does. Using this mascot deliberately creates the unfortunate association that troubles critics of the Dixie name, and, to put it gently, it might be time to reconsider that mascot in order to avoid confusion.

That said, I don’t care much. I don’t watch football. I graduated from a university whose mascot shares its name with a condom brand. I’ve got no dog in this fight, except to say that St. George isn’t as nice in the winter as people think it is.

So there you go.

UPDATE: A St. George friend has pointed out that, a few years ago, Dixie College changed its mascot from the “Rebels” to “the Red Storm.” Some may think this means I’m slow on the uptake. I prefer to think this blog gets retroactive results!

If I had to pinpoint the time in my life where I learned how to write well, or at least where I learned to enjoy writing, it would have to be my 10th grade Calabasas High School English class under the tutelage of Mrs. Darby. (I have no idea what her first name is/was, but I’m pretty sure she bears no relation to the folks from Pride and Prejudice.)

Part of the reason was that she assigned all of us to keep a journal – not necessarily a chronicle of our life’s events, but rather a repository where we could write stories, philosophical musings, or whatever it was that popped into our heads of the time. As I recall, she asked us to write in it at least once a week. I wrote in it at least once a day. Remember, back then, if someone mentioned the Internet, they were probably talking about that mesh thingee that boys have in their swimsuits to hold themselves in place. This journal essentially ended up being an analog blog. I couldn’t get enough of it.

It just so happens that while digging through the detritus in my attic, I uncovered the two spiral notebooks in which I, Languatron–like, blogged for an audience of one. The pages are frayed and yellowed, and the handwriting is barely legible, but it’s a joy to read. (At least for me, anyway. No idea how this nonsense will play with a wider audience.)

I was a much sharper writer than I remember, and my style and my point of view really haven’t changed as much as I thought they had. That’s both encouraging and discouraging; it means I was quite talented once, but in the intervening three decades, I haven’t made as much progress as one might expect.

Alas.

All this is preface, of course, to my plan to inflict some of these ancient gems upon the modern digital world. Instead of toiling in literary obscurity, Young Stallion will finally get the dozens of readers he deserves. It also means I can occasionally produce content for this blog without having to actually write anything. This scenario appeals to my two greatest passions: nostalgia and laziness.

It doesn’t get any better than that.

So, without further ado, I provide you a transcription of Journal Entry #4: A Letter to Euripides.

———–

Dear Euripides,

It is I, Enola Farmface, your great and lovely daughter, and mother of Grendel Farmface, who is lying in a bloody heap at my feet. While I know he will never bite the cat anymore, it is my duty as his lovely and gorgeous mother to beat the $&@% out of the @&$# who kicked the *€£#@ out of my @$@<#! son.

But that would not be subtle, or even intelligent.

No, we will worry him to death. We will aggravate and harass him until he goes prematurely bald. Being ridiculed and shamed, old Wulfy will never be taken seriously again, and kill himself in disgrace. Or maybe we put cyanide in his mead.

I can see it now. As Beowulf discreetly walks to the little boys’ room at Herot, he keels over in a catatonic stupor and lies in an alcoholic coma on the floor of the mead hall.

After the Tylenol has been checked, they will come to the conclusion that I, Enola Farmface, was the perpetrator of this insidious crime and I, Grendel’s mother, have avenged my son’s death. Or maybe I’ll just put out a contract on them and bump them off.

Yours truly,

Enola

————-

That was written circa 1982/83: long ago, yes, but still centuries after the long form English poem upon which it is based. I think you’ll agree that Beowulf-based gallows humor never goes out of style. Or at least that I was, and remain, a geek.

UPDATE: Over on Facebook, my sister pointed out that the Pride and Prejudice hero is Mr. Darcy, not Mr. Darby. So there’s that.

UPDATE II: The actual journal entry, which takes up a full handwritten page, is only 200 words. 200 words?! They seemed so long at the time. This monstrosity is over 700 words. So while I haven’t made great strides in the quality of my writing, the quantity has metastasized.

My newest friend Nick Smith has responded to me once again! He ignored my “can’t we all get along” message and fired back with the following:

Is he really saying what I think he’s saying?

“Those Mormons! They’re so stupid! How stupid, you ask? Why, they’ll even have sex with ME!”

Such low-hanging fruit! So do I continue the snark, or do I try to actually live my religion and be nice to the guy? This time, I choose the latter.

My response to his response:

From: Stallion Cornell <XXX@XXXXXXXX.com>
To: Nick Smith <nicksmithXXX@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2013 11:22 PM Subject: Re:

That’s nothing. I once tricked a Mormon girl into marrying me. So I win. But thanks.

Which produced this reply:

From: Nick Smith <nicksmithXXX@yahoo.com>
To: Stallion Cornell <XXX@XXXXXXXXX.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2013 10:04 PM
Subject: Re:

Killing with kindness? Yeah, that oughta work. Coming from a guy who’s cult leader was tarred and feathered like a maniac, I guess one must show courage

Okay, gloves are off now.

From: Stallion Cornell <XXX@XXXXXXXXX.com>
To: Nick Smith <nicksmithXXX@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2013 10:17 PM
Subject: Re:

Indeed! Surely kindness is the appropriate response to someone who correlates a religion’s stupidity with its adherents’ willingness to have sex with him. (I, for one, am unwilling to have sex with you.)

XXOO,

Stallion

And then, thinking about it some more, I wrote this…

From: Stallion Cornell <XXX@XXXXXXXXX.com>
To: Nick Smith <nicksmithXXX@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2013 10:26 PM
Subject: Re:

Thinking about it a little more, I recommend that you look into Catholicism. Unlike the Mormon girl you defiled, I’m sure no Catholic would be stupid enough to have sex with you.

Cheers!

Stallion

No response as of yet. I’ll keep you posted.