PART 15
As we re-enter I-80 in Omaha the detritus of American culture piles up fast and furious.
“Donate your pop cans to the new Library”
“Unwanted Pregnancy?” (On a black and white billboard, a close-up of a youngish woman looking into the camera with a slightly quizzical look.)
“Get out of Debt Today!” (Credit Advisors fronted by a grinning woman—brunette—in a bright blue blouse. All teeth. A phone number below inviting YOU to “become a C.A. [Credit Advisors] Success Story!”
Giant murals on thirteen abandoned grain elevators near the interstate 480 exchange: wild colored patterns; huge plant-looking images. Some kind of art initiative.
Brookside Church, slouching toward I-80. Huge. Sprawling. A “mega” church where a muscle-bound Jesus really packs a punch.
The billboards, thankfully, begin to die out as we drive towards Lincoln, one of America’s university towns (and, here, coincidentally the state’s capital) where all of the progressive intellectuals fled to during the Reagan years. Bastards. Just when we needed army captains of the enlightenment and they decide to crawl into their ivory towers believing they’d been promoted to Colonel just because of their fucking PhDs.
Here’s a question for all university professors: after you retreated from reality, why couldn’t you be satisfied with just tipping your domino with the malleable minds of 18-year-olds and help change the world that way, or at least keep it from sliding back into the dark ages of a the current tea party? Instead you decided to just talk the inflammatory talk of disgust and outrage, fire up the acolytes and then let them (us) walk the walk. News Flash: Your fawning 20-year-olds weren’t Students for a Democratic Society and what’s more America in the 80s wasn’t what it was when you were bumping around Berkeley and Boulder in tye-dye. No, you’re little pieces of clay-to-be-formed were late boomer-latch kids taking their cues from George H.W. Bush and the latest iteration of the country’s real religion: consumerism. Why weren’t you there running interference by growing up yourself, instead of hanging out at the student union ? By the time half of you–out of guilt?–decided in the mid 90s that everything, including literature, was political and that culture, including politics, religion and the family, for God’s sake, was a socially-constructed web of…blah, blah, blah, by the time you decided this, humanities majors, inflamed with your outrage and holding signs, were flying off to the West Bank to get run over by a front end loader. Meanwhile, you’re sitting back in Lincoln, Nebraska learning how to surf the web and steadfastly refusing to enter the real world. Thanks a lot, Noam.
This is a road I’ve traveled before exclusively in service of my first marriage back in the late 80s. I’m not referring to graduate school in culture studies and rhetoric—although that was a complicating sub-text to the marriage—but literally. I’ve traveled this road. My Nebraskan wife and I used to fly into either Omaha or Denver and then motor out to McCook, four hours away from either end for family occasions which she tried to minimize as best as possible, not being particularly fond of her father. In fact, her Polish Catholic parents never met mine—some lame excuse for not coming out for the wedding in a rural pioneer temple, surrounded by my very Mormon family. Her brother and sister-in-law stood in for the occasion, although sitting out is a better term. Not being LDS they were relegated to a waiting room downstairs from the sacrosanct upper “sealing” rooms where marriages are performed but only in front of the “worthy”—i.e., those who are the new chosen people.
So this is a warning to all Americans: go ahead and vote for a Mormon president if you insist, but don’t let your kid get serious with a Latter-day Saint. She’ll tell your son that she loves him first and her faith and family second, but it’s a lie. One year after the “civil marriage” (even if it’s in another house of worship) and she’ll be reconnoitering with her bishop and a couple of well-scrubbed missionaries to get her bewildered husband (a redundant term, really) into the waters of baptism and into a Mormon temple where the real marriage has to take place for eternal salvation. It’s like some of my Jewish friends when I lived in New York who were very clear that it was fine to fuck around with gentiles till the kosher cows come home, but when it comes to getting married, he better be wearing a keepa and standing under the canopy. We have a Mormon version of that, and many of the flight attendants of my tribe, fresh out of BYU or the UofU were just as willing to hit the hay with a pilot on a layover, move him into a Salt Lake suburb, get knocked up, then call the missionaries. It was like a ghost at the end of the first four principles of the gospel: faith, repentance, baptism, confirmation…converting your gentile husband.
It’s actually a good deal for everyone. Families are made eternal in the temple of the Lord and the corporate church gets 10 percent tithing of the pilot’s considerable flight deck salary. The arrangement is even beneficial for the pilot, in the end, who would eventually divorce his Mormon wife and two kids in Sandy, Utah and thus acquire a second alimony which is a requirement to become a captain…that is, you have to at least two alimonies. Unlike the Catholics divorce ain’t such a big deal for Mormons. Yes, the kids get screwed—as they always do in a divorce—but since the days of my Grandpa John Lowe Butler, divorce was the practical antidote to all the Mormon marrying and giving in marriage.
And so it came to pass that I did divorce my first wife, but before that I was, at least on paper, a happy Latter-day Saint in the grip, as all real Latter-day Saints are, to the cult of family. Thus even on a layover in fucking Omaha on New Year’s Eve—mere months before my final separation from my first wife–I was dutifully driving in a rental across the prairie to be with my wife’s family at a brother’s home in Kearney, Nebraska…without my wife in tow. Yes. I was within duty’s distance of family, and, especially because they were not of the faith, I felt impelled to show them just how important family was to me.
This is how it works for those who have a testimony of the Gospel with a capital Mormon “G.” You find yourself driving three hours out and three hours back to watch your Catholic in-laws toasting the new year in with champagne, while you drink apple juice. Your reward? You get to report for airline duty downstairs at the Red Lion Hotel, two hours after you’ve gone to bed. And you’re wife wasn’t even with you. Sheesh.
