On the Utah Obama monkey front – plenty of places to get ideas if you want to take that route -
Obama Monkeying Around In Utah No Accident
News Item: Obama sock puppet monkey was an accident – “Whoops, Sorry.”
Not.
If the world out there believes that, you all miss the point. It’s UTAH. I live here, in the salted version of the twilight zone.
I love to ski and get outdoors, thus my presence for all these years. (came here to college in 1973 from the northeast.)
I became and still am a journalist and I base out of here. I covered the state and west itself for more than 25 years, but have had to focus over the past decade externally because I can’t take what’s going on here socially and politically anymore.
This Obama monkey puppet story is all over out here – but not for the reasons you might think. The vast majority of the state’s population is backing the Lawsons (monkey Obama creators) and people are ticked off that the monkey Obama is not for sale now. I predict you’ll see several militant reactive knockoffs being made and put online in a few days.
I was at the grocery store a little while ago on the day I am writing this – June 18 – where a guy and a lady in the parking lot five feet from my vehicle were talking about how funny it was that an “Obama monkey toy” was going to be sold and, then, the lady blurts out – “well, that’s what he is….” She proceeded to say some racist stuff that would get you killed in certain cities in the U.S.
Which brings me to my point. All you need to do is check out the makeup of the Utah Legislature in this Mormon, right wing theocracy we have out here – all white male Republican Mormons in the 90-plus percent control of the Leg here – to understand people here WANT a monkey Obama toy for their kids. They WANT people to know that they think Obama is related to apes because he is a Black man and he is a threat to the local way of life.
Our legislators here are, again, Mormon and they are rabidly in support of a person’s universal right to carry concealed handguns everywhere. That includes into churches and schools. When the University of Utah moved to ban handguns from campus, the legislature threatened the university with sanctions Look:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0LSH/is_4_5/ai_95447616
The then president of the university is a guy you can ask – he’s the president of the University of Florida now.
Let’s get REAL here. Utah is a blatantly racist place. I interviewed the former Governor J. Bracken Lee once on audio tape several years before he died about his eyewitness viewing of the lynching of a Black man in Carbon County many years ago. Here is a story about that lynching incident that was written by another reporter for the N.Y. Times:
Now, what did Obama say about the bitter small townies who cling to “guns and religion?”
Well, that’s Utah! He picked on the wrong group – because guns and (Mormon) religion are the religion out here, believe it.
Now that you know this – if anyone else were to look at this in this manner, I’d ask, “How could anyone who is clued in, then, (and if you are reading this, you are clued in) actually think the sock monkey was an accident?”
The state senator from West Jordan – where the Lawsons live – is an out in the open racist. His name is Chris Buttars. See:
http://www.democracyforutah.com/node/2022
And, if you want to do any research read this book:
Blazing Crosses in Zion: The Ku Klux Klan in Utah by Larry R. Gerlach
The West Jordan area was, for years, one of the hotbeds of the KKK in Utah.
I’ll throw this in, too. In a part of town called Sugarhouse – where I live – the state prison used to be located in what is now a big park. They executed Joe Hill the labor activist there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hill
Right down the street for many, many years was one of Utah’s most popular restaurants. It was named the “Coon Chicken Inn.” It sported a huge figure of a Black man with an order of chicken. They had Blacks waiting on the white Mormons who loved to bring their kids in for dinner. Those kids are the grown ups around here now. I have had people in my neighborhood tell me how much they miss the Coon Chicken Inn lo these many years after it has been closed.
For more on the Coon Chicken Inn, go here:
http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/links/chicken/
Now, I have been a journalist working in the state and internationally for more than 30 years and I will tell you that the spirit of the Coon Chicken Inn is very much alive and thriving in Utah to the minute.
I get really aggravated by people who act like we have some form of diversity here because we have an NBA franchise with a few Black guys on it. That’s not diversity – it’s tokenism.
There are major pockets of resistance pushing back against this institutional racism, to be certain, but the resisters are in the deep minority.
So – do not let an outsider speculate that this sock monkey was some mistake. Do not let go unchallenged the creators of the idea, who claim it was innocent. These things run deep in Utah’s Zion.
If you get in with a group of locals here who are comfortable with you in certain areas outside of Salt lake City – even if you happen to be a journalist and they KNOW it, they’ll still use the N word freely, as a common term. Down in Kane, Grand and San Juan Counties, areas I used to cover for the ABC News affiliate out here, people used to use it as the common form of speech to describe a Black person – and a good many still do.
Right in Moab, for years, the BLM office would NOT change the name of “Nigger Bill Canyon.”
Finally, it was amended to “Negro Bill Canyon.”
Pretty place – http://northofandorra.blogspot.com/2007/10/short-walk-up-negro-bill-canyon.html
However – locals down there named it “Nigger Bill Canyon” cause they chased a mixed race man into after they accused him of selling whiskey to natives back in the day. It took decades to get the local Bureau of Land Management people to overcome local residents’ opposition to changing the name away from “Nigger Bill Canyon.”
I covered that controversy and had a guy argue to me, “Well, that’s what the place is named. He was a Nigger and they caught him selling whiskey to Indians.”
Fortunately, in the core of Salt Lake City itself, this sort of racism is not the open case. But Salt Lake is a small town. In the surrounding areas (except the ultra liberal Park City resort town) – there are so few Black residents that you would think you are in the heart of downtown Jo’burg, S.A. in the 1960s.
And, trust, me America – the ultra majority of people in this state think Obama is maybe even lower than a black monkey.
Water
It’s finally snowing. It will not last long, however.
Winter wants to creep into Utah, but it’s prospects are diminished, it seems. Over the past 10 years, we have had a few good snow seasons, but, mostly, they have been well below what it will take to continue to keep the populations sprawled across this arid land we call the West well supplied with the precious tanken-for-granted stuff known as water.
We are stuck in high pressure hell.
This climate debate is silly, actually. What’s to debate? Either you are getting the moisture, or not. Or, you are getting too much of it, as they have down along the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
You can’t argue drought and cyclone. They are pretty obvious things.
We had some friends from the Atlanta area over during the Thanksgiving holiday period and they told us that they are now taking “bucket showers” in their home because their main reservoir, Lake Lanier, is essentially empty. The entire metroplex is on a mandatory water alert. Consumption is being cut by 75 percent, but it’s still not good enough. Soon, the entire Atlanta area will simply have its water turned off if there is not some divine/natural intervention in the form of massive rains within the next couple of weeks.
If this happens, if they do shut off the water systems down there, and the move does not soon get reversed, we’ll see the first disruption and possibly displacement of millions of urban dwelling people due to no running water in U.S. history. Where will they go? What will they do? Water will be more precious than gasoline. Will we see water riots breaking out when tanker trucks roll into neighborhoods?
“Hey! Back off! I ordered that drum of water. It’s mine!”
Will we see headlines like this – “Man Shot Dead In Fight Over Water?”
Is this what we out here in the West have to look forward to – that being the distinct possibility that we will become “water refugees” at some point in the not-too-distant future?
Sometimes, we overlook the obvious while fighting over the arcane. We refuse to pay attention to things like the Las Vegas attempt to drain the West Desert aquifer because we think it does not affect us.
Ah, but it does.
Better get your buckets ready.
This January, when the Utah Legislature is ensconsed in figuring out whom to punish for the failure of the school voucher scam, we’ll blissfully ignore the fact that we may be turning into the Anasazi of our time.
If ignorance is bliss, no water is death. Think about it.
For Fun, It’s Hate Week!
Let’s get this straight, I like college football. I pull for Utah, but I do not “hate” BYU’s football team.
I do not like it when east and west coast, or deep south, midwest or southwest media types act as if this part of the country does not exist when it comes to college football. Therefore, I root for Mountain West and WAC teams to do well when they venture out of conference to take on schools from the snotty disctricts of the football nation.
It gives me a lot of pleasure to see a Wyoming, for example, whip up on a Virginia in the first game of the season for both teams and then to watch the Utes crush Wyoming while Virginia has gone on to a bunch of wins and is now poised to play Virginia Tech this weekend for a berth in the ACC championship game.
This tells me that we have good football teams out here in the desert and mountain west, teams that could stomp most ACC, or other “BCS” conference squads. On any given Saturday, I think the Utes, BYU and Air Force can beat most of the other teams in the country, save for all but a select handful of five or less.
This means that I want to see BYU win games against teams like Arizona (they did) and UCLA (they did not) so that there is some respect paid to this region and the brand of football it produces. Do not ask me what happened in that Tulsa game, though. That was pathetic.
Furthermore, as a Utah fan, I do not want BYU to come into the annual game a beaten down shell of a team. I want the Utes and the Cougars to be good. I want them to play a great game, a classic. Then, I just want the Utes to win.
Yet, it will not kill me if they don’t.
I thought the ending to last year’s game was simply amazing, although I did think the Utes blew it by not sending a blitzing army after John Beck. Had they done so, they would have sacked him and ended it, as opposed to allowing him to freely scamper around for an hour or so before tossing the winning lob.
I thought at the time, “Damn! What a play!” Then, I was upset at the Utes for the stupid defensive call. But, I then found myself happy for Beck, who’d long been the target of his own fans’ wrath. It was appropriate payback for the kid.
However, when I discussed my feelings over the subsequent week with a few Ute fans whom I happen to know, they looked at me as if I’d contracted some sort of terminal mental disease.
“What? You what?” I got asked when I said I thought the Utes had the loss coming to them because they didn’t pressure Beck.
“What does that have to do with anything?” one friend barked at me. “It’s fuc-ing BYU!”
I had another acquaintance, a BYU fan who lives around the corner, walk up to me and say, “Ha! Guess we kicked your ass!”
I was totally appalled. I said, “Eldon, I have never heard you talk like that before. What’s up with that?”
He said, “You know, in the game. The Cougars kicked your ass!”
“I didn’t play,” I said.
Thus, we arrive at the real weight behind this annual get together we call the Utah – BYU game: Hatred.
That’s right. This is the week where people get a “free pass” (they think) to say out loud what they have been thinking about each other all year long.
My neighbors get to think I am getting my non-Mormon ass kicked if BYU wins the game. They’ll hide inside until Monday if Utah wins, probably fearing that someone might walk up to them and say, “Hey, you just got your ass kicked!”
Utah – BYU. BYU – Utah. Hate Week is here!
The Mormons get to speak about all the sinning, sexed-up, disgusting, liberal, drunken louts they consider their non-Mormon “enemies” to be all the time – not just during game week. Then, the non-Mormons get to point at the Mormons and accuse them of ignorance, intolerance, illegal political manipulation, blind fealty to “idiots” like George W. Bush, environmental destruction, obesity and belonging to a “cult.”
All fun stuff.
Usually, when these concepts come up at times that fall outside of game – I mean “hate” – week, they are discussed in carefully coded rhetoric and terms.
For example, someone might say during non-hate week that Bobbie Coray, the liquor commissioner who proffered the idea to hide or obscure booze from the view of non-drinking restaurant patrons so as to not offend them is “short-sighted.”
However, during hate week, people just come out and say, “oh, that stupid Mormon broad. What else do we have to listen to from that moron?”
Remember, it’s the football talking.
Or, we might hear Paul Mero, the “right-wing lunatic institute director” (football talking) actually say what he thinks about the people who voted against the Mormon Publicly Funded Private School Bill, also known as the Voucher Proposition, Prop One or, simply, as “that Oreo thing.”
“Buttholes!”
Again, the BYU – Utah game makes this sort of discourse acceptable through midnight, November 25.
Other free shot examples:
Non-Mormons can refer to Mormon, male Whitebread legislators as: “homophobic, racist, animal-abusing bastards,” and draw laughs and shouts of “Yes!” from friendly audiences.
Mormons can call people who voted for Ralph Becker for Salt Lake City mayor, “Fags!” and “liberal evil-doers!”
Or, BYU fans can refer to Utah fans as “tehrist symptizers!”
While Utah fans can call BYU fans, “retards!” and their women “fatasses!”
Heat packing Mormon Second Amendment misinterpreters can smile, pat their pistols and say, “better watch out, you Godless little puke!”
While non-Mormon “pukes” can respond, at least to the men, by asking, “What, got a penis shortage?”
On it goes.
Personally, if I ran into Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, I’d ask him who is more insane – BYU or Utah fans? That based on his view that a mix of people (Mormon and non-Mormon, I suppose) voted down that Oreo thing, which he funded out of his own pocket, you know, from the money he makes off the highly profitable company he runs.
I do think I know who the guy who shoots endangered species so he can save them from extinction is rooting for Saturday. He’s clearly a “Zoo” guy.
I saw Governor Jon Huntsman is headed to Iraq this week with John McCain. He’s a smart guy. There will be a lot less hate on the streets of Baghdad this week then we’ll have around here.
Oh, my heck, that’s just the football talking again.
Utahzz: The “Z Factor”
“You’re from where?”
I get this a lot. All the time, in fact, when I tell people where I live, which is Utah. After the polygamy jokes and all the rest, I sometimes hear compliments about the skiing, which, when we have snow, is quite wonderful.
But, typically, I get remarks about all sorts of weirdness that has made this state a running joke for Hollywood writers and others who think the place is, uh, weird.
Well, it is. It’s something undefinable beyond just the Mormon vs. not Mormon thing that makes this state so odd, I suspect. Some would call the place bizarre, even. I do. And, within that word I believe I have found the answer, or at least a name, for this thing that makes us so, well, weird and bizarre.
I call it the “Z Factor.”
It’s that undefined, yet palpable, force that, for whatever reason, brings us to the situations the rest of the world find so weird and strange.
We have “Z” – whatever that is.
Being a Utahzzan, I must write write of it, to torture some English, which iz a Utahzz passtime, along with sticking the letter Z on the end of sports team names and even children’s names, like Shayleez, and Rondezz, etc.
Therefore, I declare a concession is in order.
I will write here in “Harrington’s Utahzz” if the people who keep pestering me about how I must “start writing about Utah (or the West) again” will please stop it. Okay – you win, but only so far as I can take matters here.
However, do not expect me to get hard core like the old days and start blowing the lid off of scams and the like. I have arrived at the point where, if people out here get caught up in yet another of a million and counting pyramid schemes, they deserve to get fleeced. Period. I am not going to investigate and save them. Been there, done that.
What I will do is find the appropriate situations and people to skewer (or even applaud) – because, frankly, there is just no good skewering going on around here and it’s time someone got out the point.
I may spend some time digging around to back up the skewering with some heavily investigated and, therefore good enough to hold up in court, facts. Should these facts that are on my skewer help deflate a few folks’ plans for world domination, or at least domination of some small political office, joy!
I will have printed for me a number of small cards and then, when in a setting where I am bound to be asked, “what are you doing now?” and then, after answering, being instructed, “you know, you really ought to be writing about Utah and the West again,” I’ll reach into my pocket and produce this little card that will have written upon it – www.utahzz.wordpress.com – and I will then say, “I am.”
I will say, “my blog is entitled Utahzz, because we all have some Z in us, see?”
Hopefully, they will be exzzited, as all of Utahzz is with the Z Factor – even if they don’t know it.
The Z Factor makes us who we are. It defines our place, if not out collective state of mind.
We of the Z are a simple people, fond of tradition and adverse to dynamic change.
For example, we keep alive the warm memories of the more simple “Cold War” – as opposed to the complicated “War on Terror (also pronounced ‘tehrer’) – by continuing to propagate and expand on our own religious cold war, which has prospered here, well, since day one of the Whiteones arrival.
We are a bizzy state, like beez are bizzy. This is why the beehive is the state symbol. Bizzy, buzzy, beez.
That’s us. We are so bizzy, we seem to spend a ton of time, especially the people in the legislature, buzzing around in other peoples’ bizzness.
We do also “do bizzness” here. It’s just that some of our bizznesses are a little offbeat. For example, we are a state that sends people who take toxic waste dump companies (in this case “Energy Solutions”) public back east to ring the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. We don’t send regular business folks, like bankers, to the NYSE. Nope – we send toxic waste dump CEOs.
We are into “conserzvation,” which is a newer form of (inverse) “conservation,” only with the Z Factor applied.
For example, we have a guy out here who is a big apartment landlord who went to Africa and shot a big endangered white rhino so he could stuff it and “donate” it (probably for the entire cost of his “conserzvation” trip) to our big religious university we call BYZoo in order to “save the species from extinction.”
So, conserzvation, the exact opposite of conservation. – a Utahzz thing.
Well, then, Utahzz it is. We have a start
