Posted by:
Raptor Jesus
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Date: August 30, 2019 12:37PM
Some of you might remember the poster En Sabbah Nur. He was often described as an “oafish buffoon.” And while that is true, he was and always will be MY oafish buffoon. Part of his oafishness has been an unwavering love of biblical scholarship in spite of leaving the church, whilst his buffoonery has afforded him a recent birthday. With our ages being similar, we have both turned “bitching.”
For you children, the “bitching” age is where you can still do things, but not without some serious bitching. “Sure. Let’s hike that mountain,” you’ll say, but will also add, “even though my thighs will rub together like sandpaper.” Or, “Sure, we can go to the gym. But I’m going to need a heating pad afterwards for my peanut brittle hips.” Yea even, “Sure, we can fly there, but I might need an international panel of astronomists to determine if my prostate is the size of a planet or merely a ‘captured object.’”
Anyways, En Sabbah Nur (or ESN for brevity’s sake) turned bitching, and we discussed what kinds of aging, oafish buffoonery we could get up to. Given my current convenient coordinates, we decided that the best way to celebrate would be to visit the Ark Encounter, Creation Museum, and Nauvoo. I’m going to leave the Ark Encounter and Creation Museum for another post. This post will be for Nauvoo.
I’ve written about Nauvoo before because I’ve been there, and that’s the oafish buffoonery that I prefer. ESN had not. Therefore, as we ventured forth to the Smith family’s sepulchre, I was raptorsplaining to ESN what to expect, and what we should consider for our itinerary. We rolled in early afternoon, on a Sunday. It was the best for our travel plans, but it’s not best for Nauvoo. The town, being a conglomerate of Christian faiths fighting against the helmetless Juggernaut that is Mormonism, was shut the fuck down. Except the town buffet.
Which. We. Uh. Left early Sunday morning to catch. And made reservations. Because if you’re going to go to Nauvoo, please go to the buffet. Yes, it’s pricey given the area, but it’s just too hilarious to not miss. You can’t not go to Nauvoo and shouldn’t don’t not un miss it, is what I’m saying.
The food is all the things you’d eat at a Mormon funeral in Utah. And this is Nauvoo. So...the buffet is really for Joseph Smith Junior. Everyday. And that’s a death worth celebrating. Anytime.
Before I move on, I won’t be using Joseph Smith Junior anymore. After coming to a very familiar understanding with both his corpse and his spirit, I will be referring to him as Joju. It’s a name we’ve mutually agreed upon. And as someone in a unique position to speak for him after his passing and unexpected resurrection, he prefers that name.
With that being said, Nauvoo shuts the fuck down on Sunday…. I may have mentioned that. We buffeted. And then we double checked that Carthage Jail did tours on Sunday. Which might have been the original plan. To go to Carthage first. But then don’t miss the buffet on Sundays. In Nauvoo. Anyways, ESN and I cheesed it to Carthage jail to do some touring, then we’d catch Nauvoo in the morning, when everyone stopped paying attention to god to start paying attention to paying tourists.
Carthage is a cute drive away from Nauvoo. If you haven’t done anything along the Mississippi, I would recommend it. There’s nothing like a horrifying body of water to give you perspective. When we arrived to Carthage Jail, it was busy. We were clearly not the only ones who found out that Nauvoo was shut the fuck up on Sundays, but we were clearly the only “non-Mormons.”
And I’d like to explain that. Mormon divided by Non hyphen Mormon can sometimes come down to physical appearance. For myself, I look like Porter Rockwell with two exceptions. One: my clothes. This isn’t Red Dead Redemption; this is real life. Although I have unlocked that Porter Rockwell outfit in game, my real life attire for summer is a black t-shirt and camo shorts. And Two: my eyes. Where Porter Rockwell was constantly searching to destroy his next victim. My eyes have seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all.
ESN’s outfit had a “touch of the fairies.” This is a “fairly” common post christian malady, where a “fairly” Christian male dresses and looks like any white, heterosexual male in middle class Americana hell trying to drown something into heteronormative banality. But his heart and thoughts would belie those notions. However, that is fairly outside the parameters of the story.
Full disclosure: we did have a backstory for our characters being there at Carthage Jail just in case we were asked questions about what in the fuck we were doing there, or perhaps why the fuck we were there. You never know on a Mormon tour. There’s a chance that an aging missionary will actually be prompted by the spirit upon seeing us and demand, “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?” It’s a small, statistically improbable chance. But I like to be prepared. Which, spoiler alert, paid off.
We agreed that we were but two wayfaring men of grief. Writing partners who sometimes deal with American religions. Which is true. It just omits large sections of who we are. And that’s half metaphor, half foreshadowing to the shitshow that we willfully waded into.
In order to see Carthage Jail and keep the giggles to yourself, you must first check in to the visitor’s center - which looks like unto any common church - with some missionaries. They give you a ticket with a time for the tour you’re going on, and then you have to watch a movie before you can see any kind of shit.
Last time I was in Nauvoo, the movie was about Joju. It was one of those church productions that made him super folksy, super prophet. Like unto, he’d be all in his dress shirt, and someone would be like unto, “Oh, god. Sawing this log is so fucking hard. I just can’t do this shit on my own.” And Joju, would laugh, and then grab an extra ax just fucking lying around, and just start whacking away at that wood before meeting another group of Mormon men who would challenge Joju to a leg wrestling competition. And of course Joju would win, and the men would be like unto, “What powerful thighs you have, Brother Joju.” And he’d respond, “All the better to steal your wife from you, my dear.” And they’d be like unto, “What?” But then they’d be interrupted by a stuffy, old preacher from a non-Mormon denomination who would be all like unto, “Surely, a prophet wouldn’t carry on in such a disgraceful manner.” But then Joju’d be like unto, “Remember in the bible when god wrestled that guy so long and hard, his hip popped out?” And the preacher would shrug and say, “You’ve got me there. That is exactly what happened in the bible.” And that’s how you knew that Joju was a true prophet. He wasn’t some stuffy old fuck in all black who didn’t remember about scriptural pelvic injuries.
Well, this wasn’t that movie. Instead we got Holland minus Oaks giving his full jowled testimony of Joju. Which, if I had been a true outsider, would have made zero sense. The nice thing about having distance from the church, is that I could go into this tour seeing if it would make any sense to an outsider. Was this tour a historical story that could be followed? And the answer from the beginning was, fuck no.
Meanwhile, there was a couple in front of us, who could tell that we weren’t Mormons, and they did ask us nicely what in the fuck we were doing there. We gave them our little spiel as well as mentioning that Nauvoo was shut down. They told us that they’d be happy to answer any questions from the tour even though they weren’t missionaries, and also that there was a special pageant going on that night in Nauvoo that we should go to.
The tour continued, and once we got into the jail everything was about Joju’s innocence, and that everyone believed that he didn’t deserve to be in jail, and then he got special treatment from the jailor because he was a prophet, but people came to kill him, and there was a shootout, and prisoners had guns for some reason, but Joju was innocent, but he died from an angry mob that just formed out of nowhere, and then everything was sad, and what a beautiful martyr his bullet riddled corpse made, and none of it made any goddamned sense.
The couple who had been in front of us kept tabs on us throughout the tour, and I was honest with them when they asked, “Is this making sense?” I just said, “No. I’m more confused the further we go on.”
We got to the end, and there was the, “Does anyone have any questions?” and I couldn’t fucking help myself. My hand shot up, and I was like unto, “Uh, yeah, I just have some questions for clarification.”
And then shit went down. ESN and I weren’t trying to be rude, but we “had done some reading about Mormonism and Joju before coming, and we were trying to square some shit.”
I kept questions going with the professed innocence because, honestly, it’s a pet peeve of mine. While Mormons can pretend that Joju was innocent of all the crimes he was charged with, that needed to be proved in court. Joju struck a deal to surrender himself peacefully because the crimes he was charged with were fucking serious. Inciting a mob for the destruction of the printing press was the LEAST of the charges. The other was fucking TREASON. He agreed to go to that god damn prison peacefully, because the other alternatives included another Mormon war, or a fucking rope and a tree. So, I’m not accepting this bullshit about “standing blameless like Jesus.” Because I hate to burst another bubble, but Regular Jesus DID NOT STAND BLAMELESS before Pilate. If Regular Jesus had actually “cleansed the temple” like unto it says in the gospels, that would have also been a fucking act of sedition against Rome, and would have been punishable by crucifuckingfixion.
Now of course, I didn’t say it like unto what I just wrote, but my questions were pointed in a way of Joju’s death being a historical story that can be retold through some key events that are well documented. And it was so frustrating when both of us asked simple questions that shouldn’t have been threatening, and were stonewalled.
I asked about the printing press, and its contents multiple times, and all I got was, “the press was printing lies. Slander. Terrible things. Horrible untruths.” And finally I said, “But does it matter? He can’t just burn down a printing press critical of him without consequences. That in of itself is breaking the law. Something he’d have to answer for in court.” At that point the tour guide was done with us. She didn’t know anything, and refused to answer even if she did know. So, other people on the tour stepped up to answer questions that we had. Some of which they knew, some of which they didn’t. And oddly, my point had nothing to do with belief, so much as it was this growing frustration that no one could tell a coherent story about Joju’s death, and if they didn’t know something, they couldn’t just say, “I’m not sure.” Some of my questions, I knew the answers to, but some of my questions, I didn’t. I was genuinely curious, as an outsider would be. So, I didn’t know somethings, and I was admitting that through my questions. The answers on the other hand….
Finally, it was just time to go. The people who stayed to chat with us about our burning questions, thanked us for our “thoughtful questions dealing with difficult history,” or some such bullshit, and in the nicest way that I could, I was like unto, “This wasn’t a historical tour. It didn’t make any sense, and nobody seemed to know shit.”
We left to go back to the hotel before the pageant, where we did more research. We found the droids we were looking for on the internet. Which hilariously we were warned about. “You have to be careful what you read about Mormons on the internet.” Ha. Ha. But nobody else seems to know shit, so where else would you go?
Lastly, we went to the pageant. And to borrow a line from a great philosopher, “While I didn’t regret going. I did both rue and lament it.”
There was a plague of fireflies. Or “lightning bugs” if you were born in the wrong place. The stage lights fucked with their OnStar systems, and we were swarmed with delicious bioluminescence. That part was cool. For us. The bugs were miserable. The music was all stolen songs picked for their emotional pungency. That was miserable for me. ESN loved every second of the music. He loved it so much, he yelled about it to me the whole car ride home until I put on Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” Relearning the days of the week always help calm the oafish buffoonery inside.