Since my last blog I’ve been preoccupied with editing This Mobius Strip of Ifs, which is a mixture of essays and memoirs on education, Existentialism, writing, family, movies, death, living, separation, attachment and psychological abandonment as well as societal conditioning. Whew! After pretty well “scrubbing” the text, Jane and I still found about 50 corrections to make, some requiring re-phrasing, others making the text more felicitous. All tedious and necessary. It is a sturdy book; if better than that, I leave it to reviewers. I have sent out a copy to a contest as well as other work as well. I am a believer in contests, all so Darwinian. Concomitant with all this, I’ve made lists of literary bloggers and have posted queries to about 150 sites and I expect to get a small sampling back. You just have to keep scouring directories, Yahoo, New Pages, etc for sites that suit your genre, in this case memoir/essay. Although not a joiner, I did sign up at bookblogs.ning.com which deals with all kinds of variations, including non-fiction work.
While all this is going on my next book is at the starting gate, “I Truly Lament,” a collection of short stories on various aspects of the Holocaust, a follow up to The i Tetralogy.” It has been edited very well, quite spiffy, and except for a few final touches it will go out to a major contest within a week or so as a word document or PDF, as some reviewers are willing to do that — the writing world is changing as I write. I will coddle this book, hopefully acquiring a publisher rather than self-publishing. It has stainless steel balls, for 10 stories have been published in 2010-2011 from the collection. As usual I go out on the limb in this book.
I lurch daily from editing, seeking out bloggers for possible reviews, making lists of potential things to do to push the book, worrying about deadlines for this and that and squeaking in here and there a book to read, which in this case is American Massacre by Sally Denton, the sordid tale of the Mountain Meadows Massacre committed by the theocratic state of the Mormons. Let me be clear here: it was the most significant atrocity ever committed on American soil until the bombing by Mcvey in Oklahoma. I have read at least three able books about the Mormons, one on the massacre itself and it wasn’t until I read Denton’s work that I got a more complete understanding of what had happened. A previous blog on Fanny Stenhouse will bring you up up to date, for I’d rather give my emotional response to what I read without giving all the details — that is your task if interested.
Observations: Brigham Young was a crypto-fascist, wrong word to use, but in all aspects he was; he did not collude in the massacre of an emigrant wagon train of settlers from Arkansas. He was directly responsible as much as Hitler was responsible for Dachau. One does not have to turn on the gas to be responsible for the act. The Mormon “church,” if that is what it is, has spent over a century in a cover up, in one fashion or another for the killing of at least 140 men and women, the rape of one girl if not two by R. D. Lee, the enrapt and obeisant follower of Young. What I am about to say is the crux of it all. The mental conditioning, the cult-like behavior within the church’s own doctrines and the theocracy which ruled Utah was so despotic and corrosively and psychologically invasive of its people it led to the classic “in” group versus the “out” group, in this case Mormons versus the Federal government. When you read about this group you sense that it is like reading about Jim Jones, except in this instance, the Mormons externalized their rage and fears on an innocent group. I conclude it is a church of followers; consequently I doubt in the forseeable future any great art emanating from this insular group.
I am at the point when I was first learned about the Holocaust — appalled, enraged, furious, angered, hateful, disgusted, seeking some punishment for the perpetrators. Until very recently the Mormons stonewalled any efforts to reveal the total truth, these so-called people of the book. The worst hypocrites are religious people, for they are ruled and dominated by a doctrine and they are in no way free of their conditioning. They revel in their blindness. When unearthing fragments of bones, skulls, and the like, archaeologists were pressured by the Mormon church to cease and desist, an old tradition in that church; the scientists were furious and rightfully so, for their preliminary results pointed directly at white men and not Indians responsible for the killing. In short, historically the church has taken miniscule steps to allow true inquiry into its role in that massacre. And historically, like all good white men of the day, they blamed the local Indians for the deed, although in fact Mormon men dressed and painted up as the Indians controlled and carried out the act, and that act was deliberately carried out through a chain of command going back directly to Brigham Young who used what we would today call, “plausible deniability.” Corrupt, venal, cut-throat, base, coarse, rude and vulgar, he wrapped himself in the relgious cloak of infallibility and let his henchmen take the rap. Years later after two trials only one man, R.D. Lee, was executed. By the way, the U. S. government did collude in not pursuing the case for all kinds of political reasons. A few very honorable human beings did protest, crypto-Schindlers. Ah, the repetition compulsion of the human race.
Like the Nazis, who collected the luggage, shoes, hair and gold teeth from their victims at the extermination camps, after the massacre wagons were loaded up with the dresses of the slain women, their earrings, personal items, their shoes, undergarments, and the clothing of the men as well as the stock they had driven from Arkansas, their wagons — the bodies were left stripped and nude and observers saw wolves feasting on their carcasses for weeks after. In short, all the paraphernalia was collected and driven back to Salt Lake City in wagons where women were employed to wash out the blood from the garments, press and iron them. I associated to how the Germans cleansed human hair and wove them into blankets for their troops on the eastern front. The few very young children who were eight or younger were allowed to live because of some decrepit Mormon doctrine and often assigned to the homes of the very slayers of their parents!The personal trauma was astounding, haunting them for the rest of their lives and their descendants as well. In one grotesque and horrific incident, R. D. Lee heard his young “adopted” girl see his wife and say that it was the dress her mother had and so were the earrings; with that Lee got up and cut her throat. So she was psychologically killed once and now he killed her forever. I give you one of the high officers of the church.
Denton writes in a measured voice, for she is an investigative journalist; it all sneaked up on me, the culminatively arraying of facts so that conclusions are more powerful because they are not driven home. I’m at that point that I am ready to debate any Mormon I find in Nevada about the hideousness of his past, for I do believe that we all have to metabolize our personal and collective pasts if we are to move ahead in some way toward a better life or existence. The Mormons, I believe, are a frozen collective, and in many aspects are a cult much like Scientology. It is brain control of a significant kind. Jane is not a “Jack Mormon,” which according to a definition is a Mormon who does not follow the church but has a measure of devotion to it. Jane is an apostate, thank “god,”a tried and blue atheist and she sees through her Mormon upbringing with a laser eye. I will only say, perennial shrink that I am, here and there, like a stone on the road I catch Jane’s conditioning , which I point out to her. It often takes the shape of obeisance. And sometimes with love and sometimes with anger, I go after that, for I detest enslavement of any kind, especially mind conrol from a church.
Only recently Jane received a call from a Mormon elder asking if she was interested in…You can fill it in. Jane thought about it and said no. She informedme that they never let go, or stop trying. In any case I think to test her mettle she thought it might be very interesting if she invited the elder back to discuss her reentry into the church. I questioned her about her motives, but she wanted this and saw through to herself. In any case two men arrived, one older than the other, dressed in black, and I was informed by Jane they come in twos. After two hours with them, I returned home because she had requested I leave, knowing that I would have gone at them fast and furious about other things. What had happened? The same old crap, but this time she argued evolution and gave them her considerable knowledge about this and that and as she told me this her eyes rolled up because it was all so useless. I could have saved her the time. When you are a zombie, aspirin doesn’t help and sweet reason does not stay the hand at the oven’s door. A few days letter a note on yellow foolscap, folded in four, was at my doorstep, addressed to Sister Holt, her maiden name, asking her if she would like to attend the next church meeting, etc. Note that Jane tells the story while in a temple in Utah she asked one of the tour guides what was her first name as they were addressing one another as sister. Jane was told this was natural and normal; however, when asked what was the first name of her companion guide, she could not(!) give it because she did not know it. I give you a slave.
Probably the most hated, the most loathed symbol to a Mormon is the question mark.
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