Salt City Sinner

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...

posted 10/31/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Perhaps the best political or literary take-down of my generation was penned by Matt Taibbi in response to Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat." In the review, Taibbi notes the peculiar quality that distinguishes Friedman from the usual beltway idiots ( link ): The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of one word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays...Thomas Friedman does not get [metaphors] right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always  screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest detail without genius. in a like manner, Paul T. Mero, alpha brain at Salt Lake City's conservative Suth...

Paul T. Mero, hero of the tortured inside-out semantic argument , is back with a new hit single to celebrate today's blow to Prop 8 . When a friend of mine on Facebook pointed out that it's a bit hypocritical of Mormons to persecute others for violating "traditional definitions of marriage," given the history of the LDS church, Mr. Mero had this to say: [Polygamist marriages], though plural, were between one man and one woman. As Will Ferrel's version of Alex Trebeck would say: "Simply stunning."

I wandered into an exchange on Facebook yesterday and today that culminated in an extremely odd online encounter with what I'm assuming is the real Paul T. Mero , public face of the Sutherland Institute and a prime example of the highly concentrated conservative culture that festers in the dankest corners of Utah life (on a par with Chris Buttars or Gayle Ruzicka ). A friend of mine who is something of a moderate Republican is apparently friends with Mero, so when my phone pinged me that one "Paul Mero" had commented on the same post that I had, my reaction was halfway between "Well how about THAT, a local celebrity" and "...wait, Paul T. Mero, the same Paul T. Mero who argued publicly following the Prop 8 fiasco that gays come from a 'very emotionally immature frame of reference' while pretending to gladhand the gay Colmes to his Mormon Hannity in a weak sauce series of public forums?" If that last seems hard to follow, it's because Mero...