Sometimes, losing is the best strategy for winning. And ethics be damned. Radiolab, a podcast I recommend, has happily remediated me on the matter of the Chinese-Korean badminton match in the 2012 OIympic Games in London, which both teams tried very hard, shamefully hard, to lose. Here’s one look at the ‘competition’ in which the boos and jeers of the crowd are evident. Here’s a briefer version in which the broadcast commentators let the so-called athletes have it. The Radiolab... Read more
Many of us will file this past year under “death”, for the passing of a platoon of heroes and beloveds, and for the sudden passing of our joy in progress. Taken altogether, the host of remarkables who left us during this most deplorable of years marks the end of a life that we recognized. The world that remains without them is strange, anxious, even hostile. The uncertain world that launches with this new year, however, need not be unhappy. Given... Read more
The LDS church will send its famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir to perform in the inauguration of a new president, next month. Many Mormons are aghast. Bad enough, they say, that so many LDS-Mormons threw their integrity in the fireplace and voted for this career criminal. Now the LDS church itself wants to contribute, actively, to valorizing him? Those for whom apologia is a way of life will scream, I expect, that participation in the inauguration of a POTUS is a privilege... Read more
The Intermedia tells us that the young generation, the millennial generation, is comprised of a horde of whining brats whose delicate dispositions and emotional immaturity have been laid bare by the USA’s (re)new(ed) white, male supremacy. The solid, strong voices of Generation Knows Best decry the tendency it sees in millennials to panic, to shriek, to run screaming from opposition to “safe spaces” where they can find comfort and coddling and the affirmation of their identities. This new generation of young’uns,... Read more
This past weekend I published an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune. The piece garnered much more attention than my opinions generally do. I even received a few pieces of personally-addressed and remarkably profane email in response. I won’t say that I don’t experience any sense of gratification at being able to make some people so very, very angry. But the unhappy responses to this short essay seem either to have missed or to have ignored the point. The presumption... Read more
I was wrong. I wrote just last week that the 2016 election would show, finally, that the USA is not a “Christian Nation”, as Little Prince Pumpkin’s preposterous campaign finally goes down in flames, drawing his callow Evangelical Christian supporters into the fires of hell after him. I grossly underestimated the will of so many U.S. citizens to drop their drawers and dump on decency. Yes, email servers and Benghazi and Obamacare and foreign trade and blah, blah, blah. It... Read more
There’s nothing happy about this year’s Presidential Dolt-Fest. But one possibility that this electoral disgrace offers is that the Christian Right has tied itself so tightly to its Great Orange Millstone that the November landslide will bury them both so deeply that neither will emerge again except as coal. In that event, we’ll see the end of the rising panic over the war on religious liberty in the United States, and religion will reemerge in this country as a joyful,... Read more
I’m coming a bit late to the party. I was on an international jaunt during the LDS church’s General Conference at the beginning of October, and didn’t get this iteration of the semi-annual gathering live and first-hand. So, I got this year’s (un)popular conference sound bites second-hand and after-the-fact. The item on which the Internet has most dwelled, it seems, is Russell Ballard’s “To Whom Shall We Go?” address. Russell Ballard asked of folks who might be considering alternatives to... Read more
It was a dark and stormy night, y’all. The phone rang, and Celia called to me from the front of the house because I don’t carry a phone and we don’t have a landline, so it was her phone, ringing. The voice on the other end was anxious and curt. The next thing I know, I’m waiting in a dark and stormy corner of the Crosstown Concourse’s abandoned parking ramp, waiting for a sign that I didn’t get the time... Read more
I would vote for any one of the people on the following list, were any one of them the only alternative to the Rancid Yam the Republicans nominated last month: George W. Bush Steve Forbes Victoria Osteen Cher A Five Pound Block of Cheese Honestly, now, in all seriousness: if Richard Nixon dragged himself from his grave, came slouching down Pennsylvania Avenue mumbling, “Checkers”, and was the only alternative to Little Prince Pumpkin, I would tick the Nixon box and... Read more
Aestheism
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