Salt City Sinner

posted on 12/6/2018 by the Salt City Sinner A consistent theme present in many events from about 2008 until now can be summed up as “things as they have always been, but stripped of pretense and nicety.” Whether you’re talking about the racial politics of the GOP or Jerome Corsi admitting (on camera!) that a lie isn’t really a lie when an evangelical tells it to a heretic*, these are things that we’ve all known were true all along yet more-or-less mutually agreed to bury beneath a blanket of bullshit, nonsense, and euphemism. Ever so has it been, yea verily, in Zion. Anyone who hails from the land of Life Elevated knows that the LDS Church wields more cultural, political, and economic power than any other entity ever has (or probably will). Given our state’s history, the Church’s grip on Utah is understandable (if unconstitutional and colonialist) and has been the subject of much ink and many pixels from irritated, impotent nonbelievers such as myself. Having lived in...

posted 3/21/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Photo: AP Paul Mero has a freedom problem. And not a freedom problem in the sense that an alcoholic has a drinking problem. Modern conservatives have made out like bandits by exploiting metaphors and ideas that are deeply embedded in American culture -- concepts like freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, and individualism. During the Bush years, these linguistic tics took on a grim, ironic quality. Increasingly, they were deployed alongside other, older conservative idioms regarding patriotism, faith, and family as a smokescreen to cover concepts somewhat at odds with freedom: indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, and torture (proud new American traditions that continue under President Obama to this day). I've   written before  about how an ideology -- any ideology -- is like a room in which conceptual furniture must be arranged. That's not my metaphor (although I wish I had thought of it first); I cribbed it...