Feeding the Beast

 

Thomas Jacob Sandford, man who shot Mormons in church

There’s a temptation when you know you have readers to reinvent the wheel. Update things you’ve said before in the context of today’s headlines. It’s called Feeding the Beast. Some readers might think I need to post something scoop-like. Not true actually. I have an advantage and a disadvantage over many other writers when it comes to this temptation. It’s really quite easy for me to find what I’ve said before about some topic that’s popped incongruously into the news again. That’s the case right now regarding the  Mormon thing. No one wants to talk about it, because it’s a perpetually thorny subject for the liberal, preponderantly atheist media. Mormons and Mormonism are just one of those subjects everyone wants to steer around, talk around, not be around.

But they’re sneaking into the news at the moment. The alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk came from a Mormon family, which is at least as important as the fact that they were also a MAGA family, with the conspicuous exception of their rebellious son. Something made him crazy enough to throw away the rest of his life. What? We don’t want to talk about the transgender thing even more than we don’t want to talk about the Mormon things, so let’s talk about MAGA thing instead. How we get the Kimmel martyrdom and spurious tantrums about free speech from people who have just spent four years hating free speech. Then comes this shooter of Mormons, who was also crazy enough to throw away the rest of his life.

Looks like an opportunity to sneak MAGA back into the headlines, but maybe not so fast, honey. He was a marine, a combat veteran with PTSD and assorted other mental health issues. Just as one killer projected his life woes onto Kirk, this killer projected his onto Mormons. 

As it happens I’ve looked at Mormons more objectively than most do. My interest stems from the fact that I have cousins who converted to Mormonism and seem happy with the result, AND the fact that I had a friend from college who was raised Mormon and was actually a bishop in that church in his early twenties. He was very funny in his lampooning of a faith that had been wished on him and he was trying hard to wish away. 

I finally wrote about the Mormon thing, not just in passing as I did with Romney, but as part of the complicated social dynamics that govern large organizations like corporations, political parties, and, yes, religions and cults.

I could summarize some of that now, but this is definitely a case where I would be reinventing the wheel. Because I can, I’m sending you to one particular month here at Instapunk Returns. One link that will take you to all nine posts, most of them not lengthy, in which the Mormon thing is put into a larger context that is also relevant to the rage spasm we see unfolding in the Democrat Party. Organizations can be paralyzed by their own strictness and intramural authority. That’s when explosions occur in a lot of different arenas.

I am ALSO giving you three very specifically focused links that will be self explanatory: The Church of Latter Day Saints, The Cult of Scientology, and How the Scientology-Progressive Comparison Can Clarify the Current American Plight. (Wait for them to load; the graphic blanks fill in quickly.) the odd position of Mormonism in this mix is food for thought; answers would be your job.

Here’s your link at IPR to posts from December 2020, the interregnum between Trump and Biden, before Jan 6. I knew that hell was coming and I was right.

If you get lost, just come back to this post and retrace your steps. Not hard. You might have some fun along the way.

Comments

Post a Comment

Readers also liked…

My World and Welcome to It

Image
     This post was last updated at 10:45 AM., Sunday, September 21. Latest entries are “A Comparison Not made,“ “An American Turning Point,” “A Mission from Gahd,” and “For Those in Hell,”  The Instapunk Times is hot off the presses. .. Undernet Black was updated September 21. This will be a pinned post in perpetuity, but it will be updated continuously, just like all of our lives. The title — “My World and Welcome to It” — is stolen happily from James Thurber, who is known as a humorist, unabashedly untrained cartoonist, and dog lover. He was also subject to melancholy, a drinker of note, and something of an outsider (in his own damaged eyes at least) as an Ohioan, born and educated, who became a fixture in the glamorous Algonquin Roundtable of Manhattan writers and playwrights. I can relate to all of that but the fame and the lifelong journey to blindness. I believe he was likely the best writer of the gang that gathered in the Algonquin Hotel in the 1930s, and I m...
Read more

For those in Hell

Image
  Yes, I’m writing this because of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He was a good and brave man and I admired him. He was 31. Now he’s eternal. Since I am Christian and do believe in an afterlife, I am confident Charlie’s life has entered a new realm with new opportunities awaiting him. It is this to which I subscribe, as I believe many faithful do, not as susceptible as children to a constant heaven made of clouds and angels and long trumpets and hosannas to the One who cannot really be seen. If this makes me a blasphemer to some, I don’t care. Heaven as a gated community with a good view seems a limited and boring retirement from the excitements of life. To me anyway. Most of the problems people have with the concept of divinity are similarly small-minded and short-sighted. It’s human to keep trying to cut God and his domain down to size in ways that make him open to dealmaking or derision if that’s your preference.  Imagine that Heaven might be a roll your own kind of tr...
Read more

An American Turning Point, Part 1

Image
  This is not a subject we’ll be talking about every day. That’s why this post today. It’s a marker. You can come back here later to remember where things stood before Charlie Kirk was laid to rest. Everything will be different from now on, and this moment will be part of the subtext of what happens in other arenas where it’s not mentioned or regarded as relevant. As needed there will be Parts 2, 3, etc, but we’ll go on doing what we’ve always done here, talk about whatever we feel like talking about, by turns seriously and satirically, and when this particular subtext is relevant it will be noted by hyperlink, not renewed sermonizing. Yesterday, I posted the following at Facebook: The one big question that matters now... where exactly is the faultline in American conscience? How many to the left of the crack in our national soul and how many to the right? It was never going to be the case that the assassination of a major conservative political figure would meet with universal c...
Read more

The Roots of TDS in the Dem Rank and File

Image
  Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex. But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she ha...
Read more

Hands Across the Water, Hands Across the Sea

Image
  People say the left has no heart. This is very far from the truth. They are full of love and empathy for everybody but the evil ones among us, and they are very Old Testament in their conceptions of Justice. They believe absolutely in the Death Penalty and Hell forever after, except for the ones who get oppressed by the evil ones for their color, ethnicity, gender choices, sexual promiscuity and perversity, body odors, excretory preferences, criminal propensities and other mental illnesses, and every form of weakness except being too small to live anywhere but inside a woman’s body, to which they have no right at all. With the exceptions noted, they love absolutely everybody equally, especially people who work for the government and famous rich people who agree with them about all of the above. Everybody acts like this is so hard to understand. It isn’t. It’s simple. You just have to have an eye for it. Know how to look for their heart and when they’re wearing it prominently on t...
Read more

Into the 9th Month of Trump 2.0…

Image
  The normal term of gestation is almost done. Apologies to Kubrick. What have we got to go on so far? What kind of President is 2.0 going to be? The 1.0 version was naïve about the extent of corruption and poison in Washington, DC. He got stabbed in the back a lot. Like most of us, he was not nearly suspicious enough of the massive healthcare/pharmaceutical complex and learned the hard way that their “science” is just as fraudulent and mercenary as the Climate Change Mafia. He got a lot done in the first term, but they were successful in removing him from power. What can we expect now. How different is 2.0? Here’s an assessment of who Trump has been since January 20. He is boldly but carefully revolutionary. I say carefully because he is playing the long game and when he drops a big rock in the water he lets the system absorb the shock and respond. People stung by his second term tweets overlook the fact that tweets these days are a frequent substitute for ignoring the law and for...
Read more

The DNC Response to the Kirk Memorial

Image
This is only a thought starter, because there are still a lot of balls in the air on this thing, but time’s a’wasting. The funeral is today, but the Memorial Event yesterday at Arizona U. Stadium is simply not something the out-of-power party can ignore or pretend never happened. This is what it looked like: This wasn’t a Trump campaign rally at some basketball arena. This was a double decker football stadium, every seat filled, plus an arena across the street watching the proceedings on a Jumbotron, with still others  lined up outside. Many speakers and one brand new star in the firmament, Charlie Kirk’s widow, who is no retiring house mouse. Except that she brought down the house in Phoenix and promised to keep going from here on forever. No two ways about it. She stole the show, and the thunder, from everyone, including  Donald Trump. Which makes people believe, maybe for the first time, that MAGA  won’t end  with him. That should scare Dems from here to Ireland ...
Read more

A Mission from Gahd

Image
  If you were to wake me at 3 am and ask, Who’s the star of the Blues Brothers  movie?, I’d say “It’s the Bluesmobile.” It’s 3 am in the morning now. Years ago I made up a list of the best American movies about America and ran it as a series on the original Instapunk website. I subsequently published it in 2018 as a Kindle book under an assumed name, because I didn’t want people to pass it up on the basis of their prejudices against me and my abrasive approach to things. It’s still available at Amazon. Illustrated and with a provocative concluding essay about Stephen Spielberg. It’s a good book and I recommend it. At about a hundred pages covering 35+ great movies for five bucks, it’s a cost-effective antidote for the dreck that’s being made and shown on the streaming services these days. One problem that’s been bothering me the past few days, though, is that it’s missing one very important milestone in American cinema. One that’s grown steadily in relevance as we have stumbl...
Read more

The Sprained Mind of Rachel Maddow

Image
This is the follow-on to Monday’s post about the dire straits the Democrat Party now finds itself in. We were at pains to point out that the only hands capable of seizing the horns of the bull charging at the Progressive movement belong to Rachel Maddow. That bull is wearing the mantle of what used to be called “that old-time religion,” now revitalized with a heroic cape of youthful energy. Some facts that should be very concerning about the impact of the Kirk Memorial Service. Why somebody needed to take the reins and assert some visionary leadership over a Democrat Party that has been scoring nothing but fouls and foul-mouthed tantrums at the referees. Unlike most of her lefty colleagues, she was a star athlete in high school (and could have been in college if she hadn’t been outed as a Lesbian by the Stanford newspaper when she was a freshman). She knows about playing with pain. One of many reasons why Rachel Maddow was the best choice for assuming a strong, defining position o...
Read more

The World According to Instapunk

Image
  It’s time for me to do something I really dislike having to do. I need to write a book that will be printed on paper and will also consist as entirely of words as I can manage. It has been many years since I have regarded that as my preferred medium of expression. I find it confining, technologically and artistically retrograde, and I would avoid doing it if I could. Not that I can’t do it. I have done a huge chunk of work that way. But that aspect of my writing was supposed to be over nearly 30 years ago. The author of every creative project is a unique persona. He is the state of his consciousness during the period of producing it. What medium or genre he is working in. What his original intention was. What in personal life and in the world around him was drawing his attention at the time. And what was changing in him as he moved from intention to completed work. Instapunk is a persona, an artificially created one who started as a performative voice and became an alternative mo...
Read more