PRIVATE EYE

Ihaven’t even been home three weeks from the annual City Weekly Greece excursion, and I’m ready to go back. I’ve felt that way before, longing to be on a perfectly blue sea beach instead of raking half-frozen leaves in my backyard.

This time, it’s a little bit different, though. For the month I was away, I never watched TV. That removed me from the daily local drone of quarrels between the reds and the blues, the lefts and the rights, the self-righteous and the soiled, the conservatives and the liberals, the dumb and the dumber.

I also never read any newspapers. That put me in the category of dumb and dumber right there, and I freely admit so. In that information vacuum, it became more clear why we are where we are today as a divided country and people—it’s a damned easy task to remain actively dumb while it’s a very hard job to become even passively smart.

I’m now convinced, dumb as I’ve become, that all the folks running around being dumb or dumber find it an easier path than actually studying a topic or believing that the USA isn’t the jacked-up mess that our politicians want us to believe it is.

In our dumb and dumber world, we allow ourselves to think the opposite of our true selves. We tend to now look in the mirror and not see gray hairs, missing hairs or hairs where they shouldn’t be—but instead we see the handsome Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. He was so rock dumb, he didn’t know it, which enabled him to believe his own myth. And yeah, he was handsome—to some—but that only hid his other defects, like arrogance and manipulation.

The trouble with us now—so many of us actually choosing to be dumb and dumber—is that we have accepted arrogance and manipulation as positive traits when they are not. We let truth die as we honor liars. We regard compassion as weakness as we dishonor the honorably tough. We make excuses for every bad behavior. We choose our red and blue teams, fully believing the other team is the dumber, not the dumb.

In today’s economy of not really thinking about anything, we’ve blurred the lines of the playing field, which hardly matters when the rulebooks are meaningless as well. That’s left our populace cheering for persons they’d normally despise or becoming full-blown advocates for causes they did not once support. We not only don’t trust our institutions, we don’t trust each other.

It used to be a neighborly rule that if my neighbor needed a wrench, I would provide it. If I needed gas for the lawn mower, he might provide that. In the wayback days or seasons—say, even five or 10 years ago—it was formerly common for a neighbor to deliver some cookies or accept a beer. Now, that only happens during zucchini harvest.

It’s become hard to know who among my neighbors are the ones who would like to “Mike Pence” me. Therefore, I wave and try to make small talk, but I’m leery about stepping on their lawns.

A few years ago, I drove to an old friend’s home and delivered him scads of tomatoes. Instead of it being seen as an opportunity to mix them with cucumbers, green peppers, red onion, feta cheese and Kalamata olives, he took it as a signal of solidarity with him and his beliefs. Before I got home, I started getting messages about all kinds of weird conspiracies and generic finger pointing about who the bad guys are and what was going to happen to them.

But he was dumb and dumber long before me, and thus, he didn’t understand that he was pulling the trigger on his old friend. Or maybe he was and didn’t care.

He’s not gotten my tomatoes since. The thing is, he doesn’t fly a F–k Biden flag or wear a Let’s Go, Brandon hat. It caught me off guard. I’ve never known him to act like a racist or anti-Semite. He’s never been politically active or for-or-against any front-page social causes like Choice or Equality. He doesn’t like the price of gas, and neither do I. We both have no clue what inflation, recession or deficit spending really are. We just think we do.

We used to have so much in common, but now our differences define us along the simplest of lines. One team believes character and ethics matter and that any person found guilty of insurrection against our government should go to jail. The other team believes that voting for Joe Biden is a death-penalty offense and that anything that someone else has, was gotten illegally. It isn’t. We either do all we can to sustain democracy or succumb to the growing chorus believing that not only does democracy result in an inefficient and ineffective government, but that an authoritarian form of government—in some circles even returning to monarchical or theocratic rule—is what we must become.

If I weren’t so dumb and dumber these days, I’d ask my old friend that if authoritarianism is so hot, why did millions of people die resisting it in World War II? Or if monarchy rule is the endgame, then why does England have such crappy food? And why, since his team is so Islamophobic, can’t he credit Islamic theocracies for their ruling endurance?

There will be no answers until the day comes when he looks in the mirror and doesn’t see Gaston, but instead, the Beast. The Beast ultimately reformed and ascended to Beauty, just as the last rose petal fell. How many rose petals do we have left? CW

Send comments to john@cityweekly.net.

You know the “progressives” are ruining America. That’s the message from Gov. Spencer Cox because he is so concerned about San Francisco. Oh dear, Cotopaxi shut its retail store because of—wait for it—crime! “Utah company sadly learning what happens when progressive candidates and policies are left unchecked,” Cox tweeted. Indeed, there’s been lots of press about crime in San Francisco, especially with the recall election of its District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Voter frustration aside, there is more to the story. “In terms of violent crime, San Francisco does have lower rates than other popular cities in the USA,” the brokebackpacker.com reports. And LAP Progressive notes that the so-called “liberal media” has omitted talk of high crime in places like conservative Texas where gun homicides jumped 48% in two years. Meanwhile, Salt Lake City businesses are stung when Outdoor Retailers react to conservative ideology around public lands in Utah. The retailers want to come back, but Patagonia, the North Face and REI don’t plan to participate.

We will say it again and again—the choices for solving Little Cottonwood traffic are just plain bad, or in reality, a Hobson’s choice. Now Gov. Spencer Cox has come out saying he’s kind of leaning toward a gondola, according to the Deseret News. “Picture looking out a window from a cable car suspended high above Little Cottonwood Canyon, framed by the Wasatch Mountains. It glides along over 8 miles of cable, all the way toward the top of the canyon, with a stop first at Snowbird ski resort, then at Alta.” Well, doesn’t that sound lovely—and exciting? And expensive? And destructive? Yes, so far $50 million of taxpayer dollars has been put aside for the benefit of a couple of private ski resorts. There’s been no thought to reservations or timing traffic flow. Said Brad Rutledge of Wasatch Backcountry Alliance: “We’re not trying to turn our wilderness, our mountains into an amusement park.” Or are we?

It was fun while it lasted. Sen. Mike Lee has been pushing for an endorsement from his junior colleague, Sen. Mitt Romney, who just can’t bring himself to fall behind a guy who tried to justify overturning the 2020 election. “Well, @SenMikeLee finally got the endorsement of a U.S. Senator from Utah,” snarked a Tweet from the Lincoln Project’s co-founder. He was referring to a Salt Lake Tribune Op-Ed that seemed to show Lee stumping for himself. Only after much mirth on social media did the Trib clarify that the glowing portrayal of the senator came from his campaign—not from Lee, himself. “This is comical. The instate paper published an Op-Ed by Mike Lee endorsing himself in the third person? What?” said the founder of Talking Points Memo. It was in third person, but apparently not Lee talking about himself.

For the die-hard Utah Jazz fans out there like myself—who are already decked out head-to-toe in the god-awful, highlighter yellow rebrand color—we don’t need a reminder that the new NBA season is finally upon us.

But for all the non-fans that tend to refer to athletics as “sportsball,” here’s a primer to the upcoming season that should allow you to smoothly glide over basketball small talk with your co-workers without having to watch a second of the sport.

First off, gone are most of Utah’s former players. The French center Rudy Gobert got sent to Minnesota in a very favorable, onesided trade for the Jazz, whereas our shining young star Donovan Mitchell was sent packing to Cleveland.

Pretty much immediately after the blockbuster trades, signage depicting our former players, such as the giant Donovan Mitchell outside the University of Utah Orthopaedic Center (Foothill Drive and Wakara Way, above photo) started to come down.

However, nostalgic fans can still find some vestiges of the past, like the large mural of Mitchell that remains at The Gateway (100 South and Rio Grande Street) and a painted team collage on the north wall of Blue Gene’s (239 South and 500 East).

Why are the Jazz intentionally trading away all our star players to field a bad team this year? Two words: Victor Wembanyama. He’s a 7-foot-3-inch French prospect who can block shots as well as Gobert but can also shoot three pointers like Steph Curry and is slated to enter the NBA next season.

And in this wacky world of the NBA, in order to better your chance of drafting Wembanyama next year, the worse of a team you need to be this year. This race-to-the-bottom strategy by teams is often referred to as “tanking.” And tanking is what I commemorated with my annual Utah Jazz run this year, crisscrossing through the East Cen-

(below photo).

So “Tank Note” Jazz fans, and pray to the NBA draft gods that this year’s pain will be rewarded. CW