White and Delightsome

Each time I descend into the the city turning in the air above the Great Salt Lake it gets worse. It's a kind of dread. A revulsion. A fear. It's culture shock, actually. I know what I'm in for and each time I fly into the city it gets harder to want to be there. I am lowered by plane into the very belly of the great white, clean, beast that is Mormonism.

It begins as the plane leaves from wherever it comes from before it reaches Salt Lake. On the flight there are a handful of clean, white business men talking about politics, work and their families. Their moral code is apparent in their speech and their cleanliness leaves a sickly sweetness in the air. They are: clean-shaven, carefully coiffed, dressed in upscale clothes and dazzlingly white.

Arriving is worse. The airport is like the two men on the plane only multiplied. All white, all clean, all living by the code of their secret society. Of course, there are also immigrants working at the airport and there are tourists leaving the city so it's not a complete white out.

But by the time I reach my hotel, two blocks from temple square, the transformation is complete. The only thing I see from my window over the street are small herds of white, blonde, church-dressed families. Mostly groups of seven or eight or twelve walking toward the tabernacle with smiles on their faces. All the males wearing black pants and white shirts. All the females in seemingly the same frumpy dress in pastel shades. And as they march along the upper way in the clean streets of Salt Lake, in the immaculate morning air, I shudder.

This is my own personal hell.

Everyone the same: Women like little dowdy stepford wives. The men like Agent Smiths. Each a perfect facsimile of the other. All perfectly, horrifyingly alike.

It was on this trip that the phrase white and delightsome first came to my ears. Not that the Mormons are racist or anything, but apparently if a person with skin darker than whey becomes Mormon they can someday hope to become "white and delightsome" like the rest of the pasty-faced crew when god decides to reverse the curse that is their blemished skin. Lovely.

Of course since 1981 the LDS church decided that "white" really just meant "pure" and all the scriptures were changed accordingly. Now it's ok to be a Mormon and also to be black. And you don't need god to change your skin color or anything for you to be truly blessed. Of course no white Mormon is gonna marry you either. But you understand.

I won't touch Polygamy and the Mormons in this rant, even though the practice is alive and well. (Ok, I will say this: It's officially "not condoned" anymore, but of course polygamy was the very cause of Joseph Smith's "martyrdom" and therefore a foundational tenant of the religion.) There is more than I want to discuss in this one post already.

Flying away from the city, I kept my eyes on that lake; big and dead and lovely. Three sides of the valley are surrounded by mountains all changing colors for the Fall. Such a beautiful place.

I was so glad to leave it.