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Poor Utah by Joseph R. Stromberg
The last time your correspondent was in Ogden, just under two years ago, Olympic fever was in the air. Many there were who expected the Winter Olympics to raise their real estate prices and generally float their boat. Had I wished to pick a fight with these folks, I suppose I could have mentioned how Atlantans felt after the games there, but I saw no reason to break their balloon. No, that deflation will likely take care of itself, and the wisdom of Denver, which rejected the Winter Olympics some years ago, may soon be held up for admiration. The games were wanted, one guesses, for the usual local mercantilist reasons. Spend some of the taxpayers’ money to make the games possible – I leave the whole bribery scandal to one side – and, lo! and behold, "they will come." Everyone will be happier and wealthier, except for those who aren’t. Now with the mountain passes occupied by more federales than were on hand in 1858 and with the high-toned gentry of the press expressing their shock that Utah is in fact Utah, I certainly am regretting the whole thing. I’ll have to ask some of the cousins how they like it – the games, I mean, not Utah. The unpleasantries of 1857-1858 are referred to as "the Utah War" (more popularly "the Mormon War"), which may illustrate the point that if Uncle Sam makes war on you, he will be enough of a gentleman to name the war after you (or is that just his way of handing out blame?). Political geographer Wilbur Zelinsky once wrote that only two regions of the U.S. continental empire have ever been sufficiently disaffected to undertake separatist projects – the South and Utah. Separatist movements do not necessarily have much in common and seldom see one another as being on the same side of history. Thus General Albert Sidney Johnston presided over the Mormon War but within a couple of years he was doing useful work for the cause of Southern independence. The redoubtable Noah Smithwick, Texas pioneer and Unionist, claimed in his memoirs that Mormons he met on their way through Texas were all for the useful precedent which Southern secession appeared to be setting. Be that as it may, up in Utah, Brigham Young had to steer clear of other people’s secessionist projects, however much he cherished his own, because he had to allow for possible Northern victory. No point in making things worse for Deseret. Anyway, despite certain longstanding differences between Utah and other states, which ought to have been well known, the historically ignorant "with-its" of the mass media have been finding the whole thing – Utah – very unsettling indeed. Not for them the old saying, when in Rome do as the Romans do. Well what the Hell did they expect? The whole thing reminds me of an old joke (too long to summarize here), the punch-line of which is "If it makes you sick, why do it?" If the worthy dames and gents of the press didn’t want to be in Utah, they could have delegated their Olympic reporting chores to the locals. I’m sure the latter could handle it. As for the national press corps, sadder but wise, they can lobby to keep the games from ever unfolding in Utah again. I make these proposals in lieu of another one – truly an impossible dream – namely that the press come to Utah and display good manners toward their hosts. Since the big-hearted journalists embody U.S. official ideology and follow all its twists and turns, no one could rightly expect them to tolerate the locals’ intolerance even – or especially – on the locals’ own turf. After all, tolerance and diversity themselves are at stake. For two or three weeks before the start of the games, the press was swamped with goggle-eyed stories of the "Mormons Discovered in Utah!" and the "How Can They Possibly Be Like That?" varieties. I began to dread the games. The opening ceremonies did not disappoint. Leaving to one side official U.S. seizure of the occasion to promote an international agenda, there was much to reflect on. The commentary informed us in English and French that Utah owes much to its diverse history. Canadian trappers and Mexicans were mentioned a few times. Five resident Indian tribes put on a show of some kind. There were vague allusions to rather unspecified "pioneers," which seemed to serve only as an introduction to the Dixie Chicks. Mitt Romney, looking somewhat like a sacrificial lamb, failed to clarify much for the international audience. The closest the unspecified "pioneers" came to being acknowledged was when the ****** Tabernacle Choir was introduced. Unless I missed something, the systematic suppression of the salient facts of Utah history was almost as perfect as the suppression of pictures of the (then) Georgia flag at the Atlanta follies. I am grateful, however, that a handful of Canadian trappers, some Mexicans, and local Indian peoples built the cities, created the irrigation systems, and undertook the farming and industrial projects that made civilized life in Utah possible. The opening ceremonies, in their obsessive flight from actual history, were a worthy complement to the weeks old press campaign. For the press, Utah is too boring, too white, too conservative; or, alternatively, not "diverse" enough, not gay enough, not liberal enough. Case closed. In short, Utah is just another of those evil backwaters which sit, with malice aforethought, athwart the progressive path of the Locomotive of History. It is surprising that Utah has not been included on the shortlist with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The pity of it is that the poor Utahns probably support the present pseudo-Texan administration of Bush II which, like its evil twin The Other Party, entirely embraces the progressive program of crushing out all that is authentic and local. In this, they are as misled any yellow-dog-Democrat-turned-yellow-dog-Republican to be found in the South. It is the great paradox of U.S. history: the localists ought to get together to stop the political center, but in the very act of getting together they (or at least their leaders) cease to be localists. But to return to the heroic free press for a moment. Some fellow at the Denver Post tells us that Salt Lake is forever discredited in winter sporting circles and that Denver, rah, rah, rah, shall inherit all. Well, he is a sports writer and has a license to be childish. But, alas, the fellow is of the new breed – a PC sports writer – and the failures of infrastructure and support (if such there are) are not his main interest. His main theme, throughout the piece in question, is that Utah has those terrible Mormons in it and, being the majority, they give the place its awful tone. (I guess majority rule is only a good idea when the majority agree with PC sports writers.) The horror: people are "forced" and "coerced" into hearing about religion by vicious bigots, who eat Jell-O, have funny alcohol laws, and aren’t non-white enough or gay enough. The Mormon Church, he assures us, was everywhere "on display" – what a persecution! – but how, one might ask, can that be helped? I mean, the LDS church is based there and I doubt that the Twelve could really be expected to hide in the genealogical archives for the duration, just to make outside agitators feel better. I don’t think the entire church membership would fit into the genealogical basement and, anyway, who would then wait on the gracious members of the press? The Denver postman goes on: The Salt Lake Olympics are as bad as the Atlanta games, which were in turn as bad as the 1936 games, hosted by – you guessed it – HITLER. This means, apparently, that Salt Lake = Atlanta = Nazism; or something like that. The tone in other papers has hardly been better. There is the usual uninformed obsession with polygamy, an obsession the outside press shares with Utah’s government and the Salt Lake Tribune, each for its own historically specific reasons. Then comes the notion that people are deprived of all their cherished vices in the Beehive State. It is true of course that hard liquor is under cumbersome restrictions, but the same is true in Ontario, South Carolina, and some other places. The situation with regard to wine is probably no worse than in Ontario, and you can get beer just about anywhere. I grant there may be a class issue here, since one could not without great injustice reduce the lords of the press to drinking something as proletarian as beer. Then there was the great Olympic condom flap. Apparently, some in Utah took it amiss that the Olympic Committee supplies its own brand, and this gave rise to great hilarity in the outside world. Okay, fine. But can’t the athletes and the visitors afford their own damned rubbers? Now we come to the proselytizing. People the world over know that if you see two guys with ties riding bicycles, they will try to engage you in religious dialogue. Is it especially shocking that something similar might happen on these missionaries’ home ground? Short of outlawing religious belief, I can’t see much that could be done about this. Of course this brings us very near the underlying complaints of the media, in their capacity as popularizers of federal ideology. It bothers these folks that somewhere within the very clutches of Uncle’s self-awarded universal sovereignty, there remain cohesive religious communities that do not feel especially guilty or defensive for believing things now considered quite odd. Many of these things were "normal" scarcely thirty or forty years; hence the constant refrain that living in Utah is like living in the fifties. Why life in the fifties should sum up all social evil short of Hitler is left unanswered, but I must leave that to one side. The great evil of Utah is that there you have people who believe in marriage, in having children, in not killing their unborn children at the first inconvenience, in patriotism of an older kind, in local self-government, and the like. Utah has the only Caucasian population in the world that is reproducing itself at above replacement levels – indeed well above them. White people without a demographic death-wish! This might account for some of the hate directed at Utah in recent weeks. Send for the cruise missiles! So we hear, endlessly, that Utah is not diverse enough, and the official classes in Utah itself help carry the tune. Yet Utah has descendants of Anglo-Americans, English immigrants, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, and more, which seems fairly diverse to me. I guess there’s diversity and then there’s real diversity. Who else made that particular desert bloom? As a colleague of mine put it the other day, over beers, the diversity gang hate nothing in the world so much as a genuine case of difference. Still, it’s odd, the press being so shocked and all about Mormons in Utah. Why there are Mormons in Utah, and what that might teach us about geography, empire, immigration, etc., must be put off to another essay. So what can we learn from the present scandal? Perhaps the following: No points are granted for having a working democracy if the majority itself is just plain bad. No points are given for making the desert bloom, if the resulting blooms are in the wrong desert. Points are taken away for the least appearance of theocracy, unless the theocracy is in the correct desert.
I am almost sorry it fell to me to make these observations, but if the eternally adversary Salt Lake Tribune, the Ogden Standard-Examiner, and even the Deseret News can’t be bothered, someone should say it. It isn’t a matter of "Utah, love it or leave it." It’s much, much simpler: No one forces people to go to Utah, especially people who honestly think that they won’t like it there. Nobody in Utah will miss them if they don’t move there. As for self-actualizing Utah-haters who went there only because of the games, they might at least shut up while they are there. This isn’t about the First Amendment. It is about basic manners. Anyway, such tender folk can write all the anti-Utah tracts and books they wish after they have kicked the salty dust from their Eye-talian shoes. Between Dialogue, Sunstone, Mormons, Jack Mormons, and non-Mormons, Utah already has just about as much internal debate as it is likely to need. If Uncle Sam’s program of universal world salvation requires spokesmen in Utah, it already has them in the form of Utah public TV, sundry state bureaucracies, and the leadership of the two barely distinguishable political parties which, unfortunately, are found in all fifty of the empire’s satrapies. Compared to the last bunch, I think it might well be argued that Brigham Young – even if every last charge ever made against him were true – would still look like a constructive statesman of epic proportions – albeit in the wrong desert in the wrong century. February 15, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com |
Joseph
R. Stromberg [