The Idiot Wind of Charles Krauthammer, Pt. 2

Let’s first look at the still-smoldering “Ground Zero mosque” issue. Liberals believe the construction of the Islamic center in lower Manhattan should go forward, not purely on First Amendment grounds, but also as a statement of the country’s commitment to its values of openness and inclusion, tolerance and acceptance. We do make the distinction between Islam and “radical Islam” that Krauthammer seemingly cannot; we would not have the events of 9/11 inspire further trespass against American mores; we would not offer further evidence to the Muslim world that we are hostile to its religion and way of life. Krauthammer’s “Clash of Civilizations” mindset is so simplistic as to be risible, and it leads him to believe that Islam is intrinsically hostile to us (which is why he believes construction of a community center and mosque, with swimming pool and performing arts space, two blocks from Ground Zero to be an insult, an act of aggression even). The Islamic Center, once constructed, can be a monument to American values just as visible and meaningful as the one currently being erected at Ground Zero. What’s more, it seems an even better way to say to Al Qaeda, “You have not changed us. We are unshakably what we were before.”

Krauthammer’s implicit defense of the Arizona law, S.B. 1070 (his explicit defense is nothing more than a recitation of three ideas on immigration with which all Americans can agree) is even more easily refuted. The law, purportedly promulgated to stem an unholy tide of grisly violence perpetrated by undocumented immigrants (Dana Milbank puts the lie to that fairy tale here), is a poorly concealed attempt to harry people of Latino heritage from the state. The most important clause in the law is also its most objectionable and incendiary—it requires law enforcement officials to question individuals about their immigration statuses if there is reason to believe they are in the country illegally. The clause so clearly invites racial profiling and is so obviously unconstitutionally vague (not to mention that the law arrogates rights to the states that have long been the sole province of the federal government), that no one with a elementary grasp of constitutional jurisprudence, save for Krauthammer and other conservative flacks, is surprised that a federal ruling has currently blocked its most dubious statutes. And yet anti-immigration dunderheads will argue that the new law, constitutional or not, is a necessary tool against the Great Latino Tide, despite the fact that border security has improved under Obama and the number of new undocumented individuals entering the country is down two-thirds since 2005.

And finally we come to Proposition 8. Presented with another question of civil rights, Krauthammer reflexively defers to the historic enlightenment of human civilization, which had for millennia, until the late twentieth century, defined marriage as solely between a man and a woman. He also appeals to the will of the people, those 7 million Californians who voted on behalf of Proposition 8. Both arguments are frail ones; on questions of the rights of humankind, the majority does not rule, nor does past practice offer an especially considered view of the ordering of human relations. Had the segregation of schools been subject to a national referendum in 1954, Brown vs. Board of Education would never have been enforced; should the possibility of women’s suffrage be put to the people of Saudi Arabia today, it is a right that still would not be granted to that nation’s wifes, mothers, and sisters. The matrimonial rights of homosexuals in the U.S. are similarly forestalled by flimsy popular resistance, never mind that this denial runs afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause. It remains to be seen whether judicial common sense or popularly-inspired legislation will cede this fundamental right to American gays; however, it is only a matter of time until it is granted—young Americans support gay marriage by wide margins.

The gay marriage issue, perhaps more so than anything else, highlights the fundamental fustiness of Krauthammer’s politics. Liberalism is the big-tent political ideology in a country whose tent is as broad as they come, while Krauthammer’s brand of conservatism clings to a vision of America that rests somewhere between Pat Henry and Pat Boone. It plants its feet firmly in the soil of the golden past and pushes like hell against the turning of the earth. Conservatives so often have rested on the wrong side of recent history—on civil rights, social safety nets, and the Iraq War, to cite a handful of examples—precisely because they insist on treating the future as if it must conform to the dictates of the past. Conservatives see a present wrong and remember a correct past; liberals see a present wrong and imagine a future right. Conservatism, especially that espoused by Charles Krauthammer, is far too often a reactive and regressive political force in America; it doesn’t move this country forward but only binds us to what has gone before. In 25 years, Proposition 8, S.B. 1070, and opposition to the “Ground Zero mosque” will be remembered as the black marks on American values that they are, and Charles Krauthammer’s idiot wind will blow weaker still.

The Idiot Wind of Charles Krauthammer, Pt. 1

Last Friday, arch-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer published a piece in the Washington Post entitled “The last refuge of a liberal” (invoking Samuel Johnson’s “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” a notion Glenn Beck might take to heart). The column claimed, in Krauthammer’s typically eloquent and astringent style, that liberals, encountering the realities of their failed policies (the stimulus plan, health care bill, etc.) and staring down major electoral defeat in November, have taken to cynically portraying their opponents—most notably the nebulous Tea Party—as a host of ignorant bigots, all in a deliberate effort to gain some semblance of traction in the quagmire of public opinion. He cites four relatively recent instances in which he believes the left wing has resorted to this tactic: painting Tea Partiers as racists; Arizonans in support of the state’s new anti-immigration law as nativists; Americans in support of California’s Proposition 8 as homophobes; and those opposed to the construction of an Islamic Center in lower Manhattan as Islamophobes.

I read conservative columnists on a reasonably regular basis; it’s worthwhile to understand the motivations and arguments of the opposition in order to better counter its rhetoric. Most of the conservatives I follow are on the Post’s Op-Ed page—Krauthammer, George Will, Michael Gerson, occasionally Kathleen Parker—as well as David Brooks and Ross Douthat of the New York Times. I respect Will for his intellectual consistency, his principle, and his facility with language (he is the heir of Buckley, Safire, and Kilpatrick), Brooks for his moderation and his thoughtfulness; Douthat and Gerson, too, are reasonable and fair-minded individuals, although Gerson’s deference to his old boss, George W. Bush, can seem misplaced at best. In short, although I regularly disagree with the ideas of these men, I rarely have cause to object to their tone—and more often than may be suspected, I feel somehow stronger for having entered their confidence. Reading their work can be an exercise in affirming the rightness of difference—a society demands a plurality of views to move itself forward.

Krauthammer, however, is a different beast than the rest; he never attempts to conceal his scorn for the left, never concedes its intellectual viability, much less its good faith. Left wingers are nefarious beings to him, incomprehensible and sinister. He employs “liberal” as a sneer, a diminutive, a pejorative coated in disdain, glazed with malice. His columns are not so much expressions or affirmations of conservative belief, as they are bitter repudiations of the liberal worldview. “The last refuge of a liberal” is echt-Krauthammer, a bread-and-butter gambit from a reactionary grinch, his every word exuding contempt and condescension, the arrogance of a self-satisfied pundit who believes his peculiar prejudices are in the ascendance.

He begins, “Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed,” and goes on to bemoan “the Democrat’s failure of governance,” sprinkles his commentary with acerbic references to the liberal “commentariat,” “intelligentsia,” and “vast media auxiliary,” and speaks of the “corruption of liberal thought” that has led to “the cheapest race-baiting.” He closes with a peremptory salvo that is intended as an epitaph for the Democrats in the coming mid-term elections: “The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.”

It is infuriating from beginning to end, not least because Krauthammer is so terribly off-target. How can he fail to recognize, in the instances he cites, liberals’ rhetorical commitment to advancing and protecting minority rights, to upholding constitutional statutes? Whether in agreement or not, can he be so thick-headed as to deny the moral foundation for the left’s arguments?

The Mixed Curse of Deepwater Horizon

Now, as oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill continues its insuperable gouting from the Gulf floor, and as everyone—engineers, scientists, and politicians—sits by powerlessly while this slow-motion tragedy unfolds day by excruciating day, it seems necessary to revisit the tragically obsolescent foundations of American energy; that is, oil and coal. Oil is the viscous lifeblood, coal the bituminous sustenance of this country. Without them, our economy grinds and catches, staggers, keels, collapses. Absent these fossil fuels, our homes go dark and cold, we shiver, consort by candlelight, grunt softly in the sundown of our suzerainty on earth. No one disputes this; no one denies that should the derrick cough raspy and hollow tomorrow, and the seam echo with emptiness and exhaustion, we are sunk. But two distinct responses attend this knowledge: 1. Dear God, for the sake of our future well-being and prosperity, we’ve got to find alternatives and fast!; and 2. More oil! More coal! To the last drop! To the last lump! Once more unto the breach!

I could spin elegant and acerbic paragraphs in comprehensively refuting this last chorus, the Drill, Baby, Drillers. I could. But Lord what a waste of words, what a waste of breath! Shall we bore holes in every last mile of earth, of seabed, of permafrost tundra? Shall we burn and pollute, burn and pollute, as the atmosphere around us fires like so much tinder, and we’re boiled in our own pudding? While the waters rise, shall we bury our heads in the Alberta tar sands, sucking the ground, sifting the grit in our gullets, hoping dismally for the faint emetic tang of oil in the back of our throats so as to put off the day of reckoning a few seconds longer?

Yet of all the arguments in favor of rapidly accelerating the research and development of alternative energy sources, which is sufficiently compelling to convince the foolhardy of the necessity? Because if global warming is a myth and we’ve got oil and coal for another half-century or more, why worry? What’s the harm and wherefore the urgency? Two months ago our sitting President, a flaming pinko socialist Antichrist in the right wing’s gentle formulation, announced he was opening up previously unspoiled coastal areas to offshore oil drilling as part of a “broader strategy” for energy independence. If the Pied Piper of Progressives whistles the oil anthem, how is the argument for the urgency of alternative energy even heard?

So let us now hymn to the hubris and incompetence of the fossil fuel oligarchs, and most especially to BP America and its fatuous CEO, Tony Hayward. It will take some colossal blundering on the part of Big Oil and Big Coal to convince cynical and complacent politicians, not to mention an inert American public, of the dangers of our abject reliance on oil and coal. Catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon spill render our abjectness manifest in ways that arguments on behalf of global warming—even slick and well-informed ones like An Inconvenient Truth—cannot.

But it’s simply not enough that Obama suspend new offshore drilling in the wake of Deepwater Horizon; when will he commit himself to shepherding the nation toward an economy that generates one-quarter of its energy from renewable sources? If the federal government invested in renewables with the same fervor, the same zealotry, with which it approaches military research and development, this goal—one-quarter renewable energy by, say, 2020—would seem modest. Could the Race for Renewables become the Space Race, the Arms Race, of the early 21st Century? It seems unlikely mostly because the Space Race and the Arms Race were founded on fear—fear not only of Soviet superiority, but of Soviet domination and American extinction. That is, they were founded on a perceived existential threat, and Americans today, taking a cue from the most alarmist figures in their government, view international terrorism, the federal deficit, and gay marriage as far greater existential threats than global warming, environmental catastrophe, or the end of fossil fuels. It seems unlikely that we will wake up on our own to the danger—both overt and insidious—posed by our reliance on coal and oil.

Quite simply, we are an infantile people, one who doesn’t believe in, much less comprehend, what it can’t see, and one who forgets what it has seen as soon as it disappears from sight. As depressing as the prospect sounds, it may very well take more Deepwater Horizons for Americans to countenance a nation built on renewable energy. And given the shift away from conventional fossil fuel sources, which disappear daily, toward so-called unconventional sources—those dirtier and more dangerous to extract—more Deepwater Horizon-like calamities appear to be inevitable. It is a terrible curse for this country to bear, but one that paradoxically may be, in the end, necessary for its future well-being.

A Dirty Little Secret

Imagine one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world, one that rose from the earth around 480 million years ago. They have been exquisitely formed, these mountains, by inexorable natural processes; 480,000 millennia worth of rain, snow, and wind has shaped their peaks, their passes, their eminences and declivities. They’re stunted and wizened, yes, diminutive and unprepossessing, but also soft and round, wooded and green, lovely and mysterious and ancient. They roll, they rise, they fall—always gently—across more than 1,500 miles of their home continent.

The mountains are also an ecological treasure trove, home to more species of flora and fauna than any other temperate forest in the world. Their waters teem with a profusion of fish and amphibians that can be found nowhere else on earth. These mountains, in a purely objective, biological reckoning, are of incalculable value, and from an aesthetic standpoint, they are irreplaceable (what assumes the place of a mountain in one’s sightline?). To their human inhabitants, who number in the millions and have developed a distinctive culture inextricably entwined with these mountains—their physiology and grace and peculiar dispensation of resources—they are a home of centuries, and in some cases, even longer.

Now imagine that these mountains contain a valuable mineral resource. (Utopia becomes dystopia.) The government of the land on which most of these mountains unfold their purple majesty is interested in extracting the resource, and in some cases permits industry to literally flatten the mountains in order to more easily plunder the mineral wealth within. Flatten means flatten: every tree is felled; explosives are inserted into rock; detonation after detonation brings the mountain down. Enormous machinery removes the resource and fills the surrounding valleys with worthless rubble from the destruction. What was once a mountain peak and valleys, bristling with green forests and plant and animal life, is now a perfectly level and arid and lifeless moonscape of rock.

Now imagine that things get worse. Imagine that the mountain rubble used to fill those valleys is full of other minerals, less profitable ones, metals like selenium and zinc, in addition to chemical compounds such as arsenic and sulfates that are either toxic or known carcinogens. The metals and compounds leach from the rubble into mountain streams that have been covered up in the hasty resettling of the rock. These streams feed private wells and water supplies throughout the region. Well water, in many cases, turns to brown sludge. These are the lucky households, ones with clear signals not to drink; others, without obvious prohibitive cues, consume the contaminated water every day. Cancer rates in some areas skyrocket. The incidence of diseases of the lungs, kidneys, and heart among local populations increases significantly. The government, confronted with evidence of the ecological and human damage wrought by the practice, refuses to ban it outright.

Where in the world are we? China, perhaps? Russia? In some benighted developing world nation where a cash-strapped government is desperate for export income? Somewhere in Africa maybe? In fact, the nightmare I’ve described is unfolding in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia today. Energy companies have leveled, and continue to level, millions of acres of the Appalachians in order to extract coal, meanwhile destroying vistas 480 million years in the making, essential plant and wildlife habitat, and filling and contaminating more than 1,500 miles of streams. Mountaintop mining, as the practice is known, is America’s dirtiest environmental secret.

Kites vs. Tea Parties

Two weekends ago, Tea Party activists gathered at the Capitol (photo at left by Rebecca Jones) to protest the consideration of new health care legislation. They threatened (symbolically or otherwise) violence, decried the tyranny of elected officials, called Representative Barney Frank a faggot , John Lewis (who still bears scars from the beating he received on the Edwin Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday) a nigger, and spat on at least one other member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri. It was an ugly coda to what has been an exceedingly long and ill-tempered legislative battle, but, at the very least, this battle had a happy ending—the House passed the Senate version of the bill along party lines, effectively enacting the most essential social welfare legislation in most Americans’ lifetimes.

The bill, to my mind, is deeply flawed—it doesn’t do nearly enough to attack the roots of irrepressible costs in the sector, lets the private insurance industry off too easily, and falls short of universal coverage—but it represents perhaps the best bill possible given the current political climate in this country. It certainly represents a formidable legislative achievement—Obama and the Democrats finally displayed the mettle to go hand-to-hand in the trenches with the Republicans and their weapon of choice, demagoguery, a fight for which they have seldom displayed the fortitude in the past. For their efforts, 32 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured will gain coverage by 2019, and all Americans will be able to purchase affordable insurance regardless of their pre-existing conditions. This bill, despite its flaws, resumes a broken line of expanding social protection afforded by the U.S. government to its citizens, one that began with the New Deal and ran through the Great Society. It is a modest renewal of the liberal dream of a society in which all citizens have an equal opportunity to grow and achieve regardless of economic circumstance. For all of these reasons and more, it should be celebrated.

And yet the sordid specter of last weekend has lingered. Perhaps it’s the concatenation of intimidation and petty violence attached to the bill’s passage—death threats, faxed images of nooses, bricks through office windows, cut gas lines—that make it difficult to fully enjoy this historic moment. That many Americans are angry about the bill’s passage is evident, but whether that anger, as it is currently being expressed, is justified is entirely debatable. The truth, as E.J. Dionne has explained, is that the health legislation that finally passed Congress was essentially a free market, Republican bill—no public option, fortification of the private insurance industry with millions of new customers—and yet the cries of “Socialism!” and “Government takeover!”, far from abating following the unceremonious yanking of the public option from discussions late in the fall, if anything reached a crescendo of vehemence last weekend. And why? Quite simply, Americans have been deliberately misled. Spin is a game all politicians and pundits know well; mendacity is a darker sport. Republicans and their ideological champions in the media have twisted the truth in inciting their shock troops to oppose passage; for good or ill, those chickens are coming home to roost.

What a difference a weekend makes. On Saturday, I made my way to the Mall unable to forget what had happened a week prior—video taken by my girlfriend of Tea Partiers and counter-protesters screaming jaw-to-jaw, jabbing fingers in one another’s faces (photo again by Jones), nearly coming to blows, replayed in my head. Civility, respect for the other, respect for the workings of the government, had all been thrown aside for the opportunity to impugn without discrimination, to condemn without reflection, to vociferate without pity. It had been a blot on the tradition of reasonable democratic discourse in this country. But last Saturday, the mood on the Mall was something else entirely—the Smithsonian Kite Festival kicked off, and insouciance reigned.

When I arrived, hundreds of kites already dotted the sky surrounding the Washington Monument, fluttering and swooping unpredictably in a desultory wind like butterflies, their tails coursing behind in jaunty mimicry (I heard a young man exclaim on his phone: “There are kites everywhere!”). The heavens, overrun, evinced a dreamworld quality. The grounds of the Monument swarmed with families, young and old. It was a polyglot, diverse crowd—white, black, East Asian, South Asian, Latino, Eastern European. Everywhere children ran and laughed and were generally transfixed by the infinite kinetic possibilities of a piece of nylon or tissue paper stretched over a wooden frame, caught up in the breeze. Parents laughed too, to see their children so captivated, so eager to help, in their own clumsy way. Lines tangled and kites plummeted in awkward places, but no one groused—collisions were all part of the fun. It was a cutesy scene.

The very act of flying a kite seemed the antithesis of raging, of condemnation. It was as peaceful, easygoing, unconcerned an act as screaming maledictions bulgy-eyed was grave and blood-boiling and bile-raising. It seemed the softest possible rebuke to the rabid Tea Partiers—life goes on, the sun shines, the wind blows, and something funny and wonderful and innocent takes flight. No one at the Kite Festival seemed in the least concerned by the state of the Union following a bruising, often ugly year-long policy debate; I needed that blitheness too. So I soaked it in. And after all, the health care bill had passed. Why not enjoy it?

Playing Chicken

There’s an old joke, variously attributed: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Some sources suggest it originated with Mark Twain, or with Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner; it was also notably employed by the great American humorist Will Rogers. It’s a funny joke, or it was, first because it’s true—everyone does talk about the weather—and also because it represented an impossibility masquerading as a challenge to the noisily dissatisfied: You don’t like something? Well change it!

Everyone in Rogers’ time knew that the idea of changing the weather was an absurd one; the weather was something to be lived with, not anything alterable, subject to the intervention of humanity. Now that we know the truth—that the earth’s human inhabitants have been slowly but insistently warming the planet for centuries, since well before Rogers’ time and Twain’s too—the joke has assumed a terribly ironic cast. And at a moment when acknowledgement of the human role in global warming is so widespread that no less a dunderheaded skeptic than George W. Bush broke ideological ranks to affirm as much, the joke has turned tragic. “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” might as well serve as the epitaph for the recent Copenhagen COP negotiations.

Does the world need another climate change Chicken Little? After all, we have such eloquent and erudite bell ringers as James Hansen, Elizabeth Kolbert, Al Gore, and Bill McKibben already. Who in the U.S. doesn’t know that climate change is a problem? Who doesn’t recognize the potentially disastrous consequences of inaction? Who, besides born contrarians, obscurantists, fossil fuel barons, and reactionary ideologues requires convincing? (Even Osama bin Laden, as anti-rational as they come, has signed on to the cause—although his motives for doing so seem solidly anti-American rather than moral.)

Sadly, the answers to each of these questions reflect the stubborn skepticism of the American people—when it comes to matters demanding personal and national sacrifice, we are all Missourians. Volumes of peer-reviewed scientific evidence neither convince nor satisfy us—you’ve got to show us. A recent survey from Yale University and George Mason University confirms that doubt regarding climate change has grown in the U.S. of late: Today, only 57% of Americans believe that global warming is happening, down from 71% two years ago. Similarly, only 47% believe that global warming is caused by human activity (in contrast to 57% two years ago), while 36% believe it is caused by natural changes in the environment. As a result, and despite an ever-growing chorus of alarm, American support for action on climate change is eroding: a recent Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll found that Americans rated global warming last among 21 potential priorities for the President and the Congress in 2010—only 28% identified it as a “top priority,” down from 38% in 2007. Much of this reversion may be attributed to plain old shortsightedness: It’s not enough that we must belie a common human difficulty in acting concretely in the present to obviate problems in the future (delaying gratification), but we’re also staring down the effects of the Great Recession, which ensnares us even further in the temporizing trap. (Our shortsightedness also smacks of infantilism—we have a hard time believing in what we can’t see.)

Misinformation is likewise partially to blame—those seeking to discredit climate change science have been effective in sewing the seeds of doubt (the leaked Climategate e-mails, for example) within a populace all too ready to seize upon whatever scraps of contradiction are shoveled their way. Just last week, a friend of conservative political stripes asked my opinion on the climate change issue, and in response to my avowal of its importance, he replied, “But the world has been cooling for the last decade!” That despite NASA’s recent affirmation that the 2000s were the warmest decade since modern climate records were first kept in 1880. This finding isn’t much subject to debate or revision; it is a fact, as much as anything can be a fact these days. And yet: “The world’s been cooling the last six or seven years, at least.” Some of this is due to popular ignorance regarding what global warming is and isn’t (global warming, of course, doesn’t mean no more cold winters, no more snow), but much of it derives from deliberate obfuscation on the part of those pernicious skeptics with a public platform. People believe what they want to believe, especially when there is pseudoscience and anecdote to buttress it.

All of this is certainly disappointing, frustrating, disturbing even: it would not, however, be cause for despair if not for the cowardice and cynicism of much of the American political class, who evidently understand their duty as public servants to lie exclusively in reflecting, with perfect fidelity, the will of their constituents. This may not, on the face of things, appear to be a problem, but if one considers that a constituency or a polity does not, de facto, know, in all cases, what policy is best pursued on its behalf, and furthermore, that questions of the broader welfare of the nation and the world must be given due consideration in any policy debate, it seems clear that true political leadership sometimes demands that politicians contradict the stated desires of their constituents. Unequivocally, true leadership in Congress is virtually nonexistent these days—acts of conscience and courage on Capitol Hill are rare in an age of an unprecedentedly impatient electorate and an unprecedentedly timorous legislative branch (I am reminded of E.M. Forster’s characterization of the British parliament as “that caucus of cranks and cravens”—do they get any more crackpot at the extremities or more craven through the heart than the 111th Congress?).

Thus, three years following the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, which states with the stolid authority of overwhelming scientific evidence, “Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change,” Congress continues to, variously, deny, ignore, doubt, and cavil. It takes no action to diminish that future rate, that future magnitude. Above all, it delays, and the earth alters, ice melts, seas rise, deserts grow, storms punish with an ever more frightening force. The world looks to us to lead, and we, effectively, bury our heads. Do we need another Chicken Little? All of the foregoing, I hope, has served to answer that question. We need a barnyard of Chicken Littles. We need a factory farm of Chicken Littles. We need a great, squawking, flapping, pecking, furious flock of Chicken Littles. Climate change is the defining problem of our age; we will be judged by future generations on our ability to act now to combat its most serious effects. The sky is falling.

The Two Towers: Temple

The road that led out of the desert ran north through gray and ocher rock, mining country, stark and forbidding beneath a lowering sky that promised rain. In Judeo-Christian mythology, deserts are places of confusion and danger—the Jews wandered for forty years in the desert searching for Canaan; Satan tried Jesus for forty days in the rocky waste between Jerusalem and Jericho—but in the Southwest we had gladly fled from the tawdry tumult of Las Vegas into the craggy embrace of the Great Basin desert. The Great Basin had given way to the Escalante, and now the Escalante gave way to a span of desolate beauty on Highway 6.

The desert lay behind us; ahead Salt Lake City waited. Colorless hills, fronted by low, scrubby tumbleweed, stretched into the distance on either side of the road. After the russet splendor of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, where every gradation of red and orange revealed itself in time to the vigilant eye, the earth seemed suddenly bereft of vibrancy. Perhaps this was due to the unfamiliar cloud cover—the sky hadn’t surrendered a single wisp until the morning of our fifth day in the desert. We passed mining installations, railroad tracks, and sulfurous piles of stones and minerals, but few settlements of any size. Gradually the landscape greened, and the hills took height; snow appeared high up in the crowns of the Wasatch Mountains. Provo presaged Salt Lake City: the town ran up into the foothills, and a large lake in the west reflected the light of a fugitive sun. We stopped for gas. The station’s clientele was improbably diverse—I saw black, white, Latino, and Native American customers. Salt Lake City, the omphalos of the Mormon universe, was 45 miles away.

When Brigham Young first caught site of the Salt Lake Valley, he was reported to have said, “This is the place,” recognizing an accord between personal spiritual vision and reality. The valley is paradisiacal—it is green and vast and beautiful. Snow-capped mountains encircle the city and kick out crumpled spurs into peripheral streets like legs stretched before a fire. From a distance, the valley is a convincing vision of heaven come to earth. Once it was arid and barren; the Mormons, by dint of will, transformed it into something vibrant and growing. My brother-in-law, a professor of history, calls Mormonism the only true indigenous American religion, born on American soil, incorporating the history of the continent into its mythology. Throughout my time in Salt Lake City, I fought the impulse to think of the Mormons as a separate race of beings, some alien people; such is always the danger where spin-off is concerned. So like us, but not us, the thinking goes.

The evening of our arrival in the city, we paid a visit to Temple Square. At its center is the Salt Lake Temple, the sanctum sanctorum of Mormonism, the center of the center of the center. The Temple, the construction of which began in 1853 and finished in 1893 (forty years—coincidence?), is of an architectural style that I thought of as Futuristic-Gothic. It resembles a fortress, spired to the hilt, finials on every spire, jagged but perfectly symmetrical. The spires are lit from below with white fluorescence that evokes a gleaming purity, and because of the rigidness of the building’s lines, it resembles a baroque candelabrum. It is a vision of cold magnificence, as conceived by the uneducated, neophyte prophet of an embattled religion, determined to impress upon a hostile nation the capability and the potential of his faith (it is a fight that the Mormons continue to wage, with increasing success, to this day).

The spires, glowing as if from within, imbue the temple with a fantastic quality; striding around Temple Square in its shadow, one has the unmistakable sensation of being an extra in a science fiction film. Seen from a distance, the spires are magnetic. They project sanctimony like the biblical city on a hill—if that city were the Emerald City. However, this tower of the American Dream, unlike the glittering totems of Las Vegas, attempts to conceal its kitschiness—in this case behind a façade of impregnable authority. The Temple possesses the gravity and solemnity of proscription; it, like Mormon temples generally, is closed to all but members of the Mormon Church in good standing. One cannot observe the rituals of the church, experience its liturgy, hymn with its congregation. For a religion so desirous of converts, the secrecy is puzzling. One must wonder what, precisely, goes on within the Temple’s walls, what harm the Church imagines would follow upon the opening of its doors to outsiders. It invites scrutiny and the sort of flickering curiosity that attaches itself to secret societies.

The Mormon Church’s means of sidestepping this issue—Americans demand transparency in all categories of experience, sacred to profane—is the Visitor Center. Temple Square has two. Mormon Visitor Centers are some cross between museum and exposition hall. The Salt Lake Temple’s Visitor Centers were open at 8:30 on a Saturday night, and when we entered, clad in black hoodies, jeans, and sneakers, we found the place swarming with churchgoing families dressed in the formal, dowdy manner of the stolid American pious—the men in modest suits and ties, the women in monochrome dresses rising no higher than mid-calf. There were children everywhere, boys running with tucked-in shirts, girls congregating around a display, giggling. Some families perched on couches, their attention taken by a program running on a large television before them. On the screen, a series of young children answered questions about God and religion. “I believe a prophet is anyone who does God’s work,” a young boy, no older than five, intoned. I shuddered a bit.

I felt unmoored, panicky even. I couldn’t say why, exactly; somehow the unreality of the Temple had coupled with the unreality of this wholesome, beprimmed mob to rattle me. I could at least peer into the collective psyche of the Las Vegas Strip, even if I couldn’t fully apprehend it; but here, despite being a regular churchgoer throughout my childhood and adolescence, I met something opaque and impenetrable. We wandered dazed among the exhibits, scenes from the Book of Mormon reconstructed and explicated, precepts of the faith illustrated in painting or video. All the while, despite our conspicuous difference, we moved among the people as if unseen. I felt invisible, like Ebenezer Scrooge visiting the stations of his life with the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future.

Finally, we were buttonholed by a pair of docents—young Mormon women whose mission brought them to Temple Square for two years to answer the questions of the faithful and unfaithful alike with patient good humor. One was American, the other, according to her lapel pin, Korean. They were both smartly made up, unfailingly bubbly, well-informed. We chatted uneasily for several minutes. There was no proselytizing. I waited for the ask, the pitch, the personal expression of faith, the gentle condescension masquerading as affirmation, all of the things that I had come to associate with Christian evangelism. They never came. They were nice girls; they offered us a dinner recommendation. We made our way to the Lion House, which originally quartered several of Brigham Young’s wives. The food was served cafeteria style, and it was impossibly bland and nourishing: Mashed potatoes, corn-on-the-cub, mixed vegetables without salt, dinner rolls—an all-American cuisine.