All politicians, by definition, are compromised, but these days Congress is filled with “shills,” slang for someone who, according to dictionary.com, poses as a customer in order to decoy others into participating, as at a gambling house, auction, confidence game; or, a person who publicizes or praises something or someone for reasons of self-interest, personal profit, or friendship or loyalty.
This is the case, in my view, of my own Congressman, Chris Stewart (UT-2)–for both definitions of the word “shill.” But each shill has his or her own game, his/her own motivation, and, in Stewart’s case–and most troubling in my view–his/her own interior world view in which the detail of his vision is also the horizon of that vision.
More on that horizon metaphor later.
This is troubling not only because this shill is my congressman, shoehorned into office in 2008 through savage gerrymandering and the lunacies of the so-called Tea Party. It’s troubling because the philosophical, doctrinaire milieu from which he has emerged and from which, apparently, he continues to operate is largely based on an ethnic identity we both share: Mormonism.
Secondary to that, but almost as painful, is that he’s also an author, as I am. If I had to give Stewart any kind of pass it would for that, for it takes effort, time and a certain doggedness to kick out fiction and nonfiction to the level that he has (admittedly, much more than I have). To write a book is a solitary journey requiring an ego, yes, but an ego only to be sent over a kind of “bridge of sighs,” where it is then dashed against the rocks of editing and publishing in the process of making something you feel as though you’ve birthed into a mere product, to be owned by the writer, in a sense, no more.
This post is about who I think Congressman Chris Stewart is now and how he was and continues to be shaped by his ultra-orthodox response to a world view that will be all too familiar to Mormons (Latter-day Saints) and post-Mormons like myself, but perhaps not so much to those in his District who are not Mormon.
How is it, besides the gerrymandering, that this soft-spoken former Air Force pilot and writer managed to become our Congressman with no public service under his belt? And how is it that we can dislodge this man, who has to date voted 93.5% of the time with the wishes of the GOP’s own private murder weapon Donald Trump?
Orange-Haired Korihor and His Minions
Christopher Stewart rode into political office in 2012, surfing the wave of Tea Partiers that had taken the nation by Tsunami two years after the election of Barack Obama, the country’s first black president (more on that later as well). In the Beehive State, simply put, politics is spawned by its own weird brand of theocracy, followed quickly by “constitutionalism” on steroids. No surprise here in Utah that the GOP would carry the day, but it was especially bizarre in that, as Salt Lake Tribune columnist Paul Rolly reminded us earlier this year, “Stewart won the nomination at the 2012 Utah Republican Convention, when he spoke in LDS [Mormon] code words to the delegates, warning of conspiracies by the ‘Gadianton robbers’ (scriptural bad guys in the faith’s Book of Mormon).”
This is how Utah Republicans operate in my experience: they speak in code that only fellow Mormons, especially priesthood holders (Mormon men) resonate deeply with but which non-Mormons can only respond with, “Huh?”
It’s not unlike the whisper campaign orchestrated by GOP operative Karl Rove (another Utahn) during the Bush-McCain presidential primary when Rove’s poll launched in the swing state of South Carolina with the carefully crafted question, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” As The Nation reminded us, “This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.”
Today, in the second year of Trump in the White House, this outcome doesn’t surprise us: the whisper campaign worked, playing to racism and swinging the state to soundly defeat a man clearly smeared by Rove, Inc. But in line with all the tropes of Mormon niceness, when it comes to the efficacy of whisper campaigns and code talkers, it’s less about a candidate attacking the “Gadianton Robbers” who want to bring down the Constitution, and more about making sure that voters know who the true-red Mormon candidate is which, legend says, one of whom (or possibly a collective) is prophesied to come barreling in during the latter days to save the US Constitution which will at the time be “hanging by a thread.”
Little did orthodox Mormons realize that the one who would be shredding the Constitution would be a Republican, and that the Mormon Utah congressional delegation would, uniformly, prop the shredder of said document up like the straight-edged backbone of an LDS missionary just arrived at the Missionary Training Center in Provo. But this is exactly what has happened with the rise of Trump who if he isn’t a fascist, is certainly a criminal with a deeply authoritarian bent, someone who embodies the single greatest political emergency of our lifetimes. The Republic is indeed at stake and in the alternate universe of Mormon orthodoxy, the Korihor of our times (another Book of Mormon villain) when it comes to honoring the Constitution of the United State is none-other than Donald J. Trump.
Ironic, that Stewart, whom Rolly called the equivalent of the sitting president’s “Little Boy Fauntleroy,” is arguably the greatest enabler in Utah’s delegation of, to speak in code, Korihor himself.
Let’s You and Them Fight
It would seem that Stewart knew of the danger that slouched toward Washington. During the presidential primary leading up to Trump’s nomination, the Congressman referred to Agent Orange Trump, quaintly, as “our Mussolini,” as if it were somehow kind of cute. Stewart’s expressed sentiment even made a kind of sense as the Congressman, a retired Air Force pilot, had written Shattered Bone in 1998, a techno-thriller in the vein of Tom Clancy or Clive Cussler. The book features a Ukrainian national working for the post-Soviet Russians and who gets reprogrammed by the US to take out a Vladimir Putin-like ex-KGB Russian president, hell-bent to start a nuclear war.
Not being one who reads techno-thrillers myself, I refer to an article in [Salt Lake] City Weekly by Ryan Cunningham in March 2018 who characterizes the Congressman, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, as someone “who publicly impugns the motives and integrity of top U.S. intelligence officials [who claim that Russia interfered with the 2016 election and infers collusion with Trump], “all while casting unspecific doubt on an American investigation into a foreign adversary, one whom Stewart himself admits is acting with indiscriminate malice toward our democracy.” The reporter refers to Stewart as “full of complexity and contradiction—maybe too good even for writer Chris Stewart to concoct.”
But of Stewart’s 11 books, his Air Force inspired techno-thrillers are not what concern me most as his constituent. Lord knows that there are plenty of hawks out there in the GOP who get their rocks off on narratives, fictional and not, about American cowboy pilots saving the world while barking about freedom and protecting “our” way of life–or at least the way of life of some of us, mostly white, male and of a certain percentage economically that has a single digit between zero and two.
No. The greater concern is of Stewart’s other books, in particular his six-book, 1,387-page epic of “the beginning of time to the final hours of the last days.” The religious fantasy series called the The Great and Terrible series is published by the LDS Church’s publishing arm, Deseret Book, along with his two books of political history published by Shadow Mountain, an imprint of Deseret which poses as something other than a church press in order to reach more of a secular audience.
When asked if these apocalyptic tales featuring Satan, literally, as the villain and the righteous spirit children of God sent to earth in the last days as Saturday’s warriors to save the cause of freedom (read: the United States) from the ruin of secular humanism and abortionists presented a dire future, Stewart balked: “My true worldview is just the opposite of this apocalyptic,” he told the local Fox News affiliate. “Look, I know we’re going to have challenges, and who knows, maybe there will be a zombie apocalypse or something like that, but I think, really, we have great reason to be hopeful, and that’s the more important message and really the message of our campaign.”
Fast forward to the 2018 mid-term elections. Stewart is running for a fourth term in the House of Representatives, Utah District 2, my district. And he opens his pitch to Utah voters in the official Voter Information Pamphlet with this:
As a member of the House
Intelligence Committee and
former B-1 pilot, one of the
questions I’m often asked is,
“How dangerous is this time?”
The answer in short – very
dangerous. Our many
adversaries want to destroy the
freedom that is the foundation of
our country.
More code words. The “adversaries” he is referring to are not headed by Agent Orange, a sitting president who is the most fatuous, lying man who has ever (ostensibly) won the office; a man who is a sexual predator; a narcissist, or … to quote Stewart himself, “our Mussolini.” The adversary apparently isn’t even Russia which US intelligence agencies have determined interfered with the 2016 election and whose operatives appear to include some of Trump’s closest associates, if not the president himself.
These are not Stewart’s adversaries, or America’s, according to the congressman. Our nation’s adversaries are left-leaning, freedom-hating “socialists” like Hillary Clinton and Democrats in general. You know the ones: baby killers who want to drive us into financial ruin by raising the national debt to the highest level it’s ever been …
oh … wait a minute…
You Say Idiot, I say Ideologue
This is the ideological engine of Representative Chris Stewart, a man who the federal government spent millions training to fly multi-million dollar B1 jets so that he could then turn around and trash the same federal government as one of many GOP shills with the Republican mantra made famous by Grover Nordquist: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
Again, we have plenty of hawkish, white men taking care of white men (the GOP’s idea of governance) in Washington. So why am I picking on Stewart? The answer is simple: he is a religious ideologue recognizable to me because he’s of my tribe. And this is what we know about religious ideologues. Theirs is a zero-sum game. They will do anything to win, just like Mitch McConnell, but unlike the Senate Majority Leader, religious ideologues will do it for a god and will mask it in dogma, in righteous indignation, in allegiance to either “the only true and living church on the face of the whole earth” or some other version of that. They will sell their soul to a nationalist, racist, authoritarian if not fascist American dictator for power, for control and for vengeance, the end justifying the means. That and because the alternative (baby killers, socialists, et al) constitute those pesky “murky truths of the known world,” as fiction writer Steve Almond who knows the difference between fact and fantasy has said. Instead religious-ideologues-turned-political prefer a fiction, a lie, alternative facts–“the ecstatic possibilities of the imagined.”
I know of what I speak. I was a believer once, and in the same jar of jelly beans as Chris Stewart is. At a certain point in my life as a Mormon missionary it’s possible that I would’ve strapped a bomb to my body if my mission president had told me to. If you don’t believe that orthodox Mormons are Mormon first and Americans second, that Chris Stewart isn’t driven by a religious narrative that under any conditions other than the mind of another orthodox Mormon would be considered lunacy, I invite you to read his books. Leave his techno-thrillers behind, along with his co-authored book about the trials of Elizabeth Smart. Instead, read the ones that Deseret Book pimped during the post George W. Bush era when another freedom-hating “socialist,” America’s first black president, a so-called baby killer and a homosexual enabler took office.
Truthfully, Chris Stewart scares the hell out of me. It’s one thing to have religious fanatics marrying more than one wife out in the west desert; it’s quite another thing when those fanatics can “pass” by writing books, setting world flight records, and being elected to Congress. I know what it’s like to be that kind of true believer, part-and-parcel of which is feeling chronically misunderstood, even persecuted–which in turn feeds the fires of seeing the world as a zero-sum game. I know what it’s like to blink incomprehensibly past the invisible but rigid borders of my life and see only what we need to see: the Kingdom of God before me, a Zion constructed in my mind so deftly that it becomes both the center of life as well as its distant horizon. This is why Chris Stewart has to go; we have a man in office who may be able to “pass,” but he can’t be in service of a pluralistic and democratically-inspired nation first and foremost–a true, public servant–because of his fusion to a cause.
Full Disclosure
I’m not finished with Chris Stewart, my congressman.
In part two of this post I will share with you my reading of Stewart’s The Great and Terrible series, a kind of Left Behind farrago cast in Mormonese that is likely to make you gasp with disbelief at the hokey audacity of it. Also, a tour of his two books of revisionist history (world and American) co-authored by his brother and federal judge Ted Stewart, one of which Seven Miracles that Saved America, was elevated to the New York Times best seller list by none other than fellow Mormon and Pillsbury Dough Boy of right-wing conspiracy theorists Glenn Beck. (New York Times bestseller, indeed.)
My motive in all this? I would very much like to see Congressman Stewart voted out of office. We are ten days out from the mid-terms, and Stewart is up for re-election. Don’t be fooled by his soft-spoken presentation, by the humble guise of a fighter-pilot-returned-from-war, a la a modern-day “Captian Moroni” (don’t ask, just click) or the patient, authoritative father of six children.
He is an ideologue.
His murder weapon, along with the GOP leadership’s, is Donald Trump.
He is a Republican shill.
Rolly is right: “Stewart has been perhaps the most outspoken Republican — save President Donald Trump, himself — in opposition to the idea that Russia tampered with the 2016 election in an attempt to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign and, accordingly, help Trump.” The columnist goes on to quote former CIA Director John O. Brennan who was recently in Utah. “’It is a one-sided and partisan effort to short-circuit appropriate investigative measures,’ Brennan said. “There will be a reckoning for those who protect the president. And that will be at the ballot box.’”
Will Chris Stewart answer to the voters on Nov. 6? The code talker knows who his audience is, so it is a daunting task to facilitate this guy’s banishment to his next story line about angels and demons hawked by what is essentially the publishing arm of the Mormon Church. I hope we are successful in jettisoning Congressman Stewart from office, and I need to do my part to try to make that happen.
In Part II, you can read a rhetorical analysis of Stewart’s religo-fantasy novels, an update on how his ideology extends to his work as a sitting congressman, and a disquisition on the end-times narrative of both Mormons, like Stewart, and evangelicals, like Vice President Mike Pence. Are these ideologues curating the biblical “signs of the times” with Trump as a kind of secular catalyst? Are religious fanatics who have turned to politics orchestrating a self-fulfilling prophecy of the much ballyhooed second coming of Jesus Christ? Even if there isn’t a conspiracy of this kind, there is evidence that the impulse do to so is baked in to the brain and the literary imagination of Congressman Chris Stewart.
#
