It’s another “god said”
Ok so the Bundy men are Mormons. They think “God” is telling them to grab public land and threaten anyone who comes to evict them.
As roughly 20 militants continue to occupy a federal wildlife refuge in southeastern Oregon, observers are left scratching their heads. Why would an out-of-state rancher lead a self-styled militia in defending federal land far from home?
Because God told him to, Ammon Bundy said in a YouTube video posted Friday.
Oh yes? I wonder why God didn’t remind them to take plenty of food.
Bundy is a son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher known for his stand-off with the federal government over cattle grazing.
That is, Cliven Bundy, a Nevada rancher known for threatening to shoot federal officials and getting away with it. Known for refusing to obey a perfectly legitimate order by duly constituted authority, using guns to back it up – and getting away with it without so much as a parking ticket.
In the video, Bundy, who is Mormon, said he believed God wanted him to defend Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, a father-and-son duo convicted of arson on federal land in Oregon.
“The Lord was not pleased with what was happening to the Hammonds,” Bundy said in the video. “If we allowed the Hammonds to continue to be punished, there would be accountability.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just grow up for a change? He might as well say Santa Claus wasn’t pleased; it would make just as much sense.
Bundy’s rhetoric, though consistent with scripture and early Mormon teaching, is now considered extreme, and [scholar Susanna] Morrill is skeptical about attributing his motives entirely to faith.
“While the Mormon stuff seems important, it also seems like these folks just have their own agenda and may be using Mormonism for that,” she said.
Church leaders issued a statement Monday condemning militants’ actions:
“Church leaders strongly condemn the armed seizure of the facility and are deeply troubled by the reports that those who have seized the facility suggest that they are doing so based on scriptural principles. This armed occupation can in no way be justified on a scriptural basis.”
But the Bundy gang can just say the church leaders have fallen into corruption. There’s no way to check this kind of bullshit.
Not even a couple of loaves and a few fishes?
(Cackles…)
Well, ya gotta understand. Even deities have limits. Couple loaves and a fish or two, we could maybe do something with this, get a small self-declared insurrection fed, well enough. But we can only stretch that can of Schlitz* and half bag of Doritoes you happened to have behind the doublewide’s seat so far, guys…
More on this ‘is there a double-standard in the judicial/police reaction’ thing, in the immortal words of Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth: oh my, yes…
But I’m also, sorta to my amusement, trying to suss out my own reaction to these guys. Must confess, the reaction that most resonates so far has been this one. Tho’ I think I’d more use the term ‘sad tosser’ than ‘jamoke’…
Thing is, tho’, I’m not sure this is all double standard in my case. I think I kinda react to most folk more forthrightly and regularly labelled ‘terrorists’ much the same way, on reflection. Sad tossers who also actually kill people, sure. But there’s just something kinda pathetic about most of them, on any such reflection. Sure, they might have limited ‘success’, but their power mostly seems to be limited to making life a little (or a lot) shittier for everyone. The people they kill are almost certainly going to turn out to be vastly more interesting and more missed by the world, but this isn’t asking much. Sure, sure, if you’re in the self-styled ‘nation’ some of ’em run, it’s a pretty shitty life, and previously nicer places to live keep doing the (I would say) none-too-wise thing, turning themselves that much more into edgy surveillance states in overreaction every time any of said tossers get away in any with their idiot ‘let’s blow shit up and kill people’ plots, but like this is any kind of damned achievement. Yay. You have a gun and you can make life shitty. Like I don’t know how many other hundreds of thousands of idiots. You go, tosser. Can you also burn shit down and get shit all over everything you touch? Wow. Put that in your online dating profile, I guess.
And yes, I expect you might catch a whiff of classism about all of this, linked article and my reaction. Maybe. But whatevs. I grew up rural, knew a couple sad tossers figured the way you fixed anything was to hit people or shoot them, in various religions or lacks thereof. Knew some pretty decent, clever, interesting people, too, happened to live far from the nearest coffee shop. It’s just a particular kind of tosser, this, I find myself thinking, watching ’em, so far as I have time for them (in related: they’re not much in the news I’m reading; France and Charlie Hebdo’s anniversary, a bit more so, which I think is about right, for a change). Hard to take any of ’em real seriously. Maybe I should be grateful these jamokes got into the news enough to put tossers with guns in perspective. Write them their damned citations, send ’em to court, stop glorifying ’em in any way, dammit. Don’t care if it’s Allah Akbar or Joseph Smith’s Americanized god they’re high on. More of them need to be seen and portrayed as small as their ambitions and their ideas have always been.
And re ‘There’s no way to check this kind of bullshit.’ Exactly, too. And this is the critical underlying difficulty. But I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir, there, too, I guess.
(*Alert readers may imagine there is a contradiction, here, with ‘Mormon’ and ‘Schlitz’ in the narrative. Those who have actually known Mormons, maybe not so much. The only actual difficulty with this scenario: is imagining the Mormon desperate enough to pull the Schlitz out with other Mormons present.)
Any religion which proposes that the individual believer has a 1-800 number direct to the Celestial Throne is going to have constant trouble with self-declared prophets. Sunni Islam is absolutely savage in its opposition to ANY kind of leader or teacher arising out of the blue. Hence the relentless persecution of Alawis, Ahmaddiya, Bahais etc. etc. The Catholic church has used both the stake, and sainthood as means of controlling wild prophecies.
In the aftermath of the Elisabeth Smart kidnapping, a Mormon spokesman mentioned that, at any given time, the Salt Lake headquarters is attempting to keep track of as many as 200 ‘Ones Mighty And Strong.’
So glad to see someone else catch on the the possible significance of the Mormon connection. Any background information on this for the other gunmen?