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Houston, You Have an Opportunity

Houston, You Have an Opportunity

Last updated on: January 6, 2025 at 11:36 pm by Dan Peterson

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Houston, You Have an Opportunity 2025-01-06T23:36:03-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Brigham Young (John Donovan Wilson) and Mary Ann Angell (Twyla Wilson) walk home after their wedding in a scene from “Six Days in August.” (Photo provided by James G. Jordan)

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will shortly be assaulted yet again by the entertainment media, this time in a soon-to-be-released Netflix series entitled American Primeval. Here’s a piece on it that includes a heartwarming trailer: “How did Kim Coates prepare for his role as Brigham Young in American Primeval? Details explored.”

The recent Interpreter Foundation film, Six Days in August — which is now available on DVD and Blu-ray through Deseret Book — took a rather different view of Brigham Young than the new Netflix series seems to take. And if we don’t want the Netflix view of Brigham to predominate, we need to continue to tell our own story. In that connection, the core filmmaking group for Interpreter met this morning to discuss our approach to the docudrama series that we have always envisioned as following Six Days in August. It should begin to go public, if our plans hold, well before the middle of this year.

Incidentally, for anybody who may be in the Houston area this week: There will be a special showing of Six Days in August at Star Cinema Grill in the Baybrook Mall, 702 Baybrook Mall, Friendswood, TX 77546, on Wednesday night. (It may already be sold out, but there is always a chance that some folks who have reserved seats for the showing won’t actually show up.) John Donovan Wilson (who played Brigham Young in the movie) and his wife, Twyla Wilson (who portrayed Brigham’s second wife, Mary Ann Angell Young, in the movie), will be speaking on Thursday, 9 January, at a fireside in the Latter-day Saint chapel at 505 Deseret Dr, Friendswood, TX 77546. I’m afraid that I don’t have a time for it, but 7 PM probably wouldn’t be too far wrong.

The entrance to the Harold B. Lee Library, the main library at Brigham Young University, a portion of which is visible behind the brightly lit entrance pavilion and a significant portion of which is underground. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

I liked this: “Opinion: Football, faculty and faith — why I’m excited about BYU’s future: Religious institutions like BYU stake out clear moral propositions and build communities in all disciplines that support the whole person.” I confess that I’m excited, too. I’ve also been hearing good things. I’m impressed by what Elder Clark Gilbert and President Shane Reese and their team are trying to do, and I wish them all success. I even almost wish, right now, that I hadn’t retired. It’s odd for me to be no longer affiliated with BYU. From my first arrival on campus as a student at the age of seventeen, it has been central to my life. Now, I look on almost entirely from the outside. I’ve had some concerns in recent years (about signs of seeming drift from the University’s mission in some quarters), but I’m feeling pretty optimistic these days.

An image of Pinocchio, from the 1940 Disney film of that title (Wikimediia Commons public domain image)

I found this article, written for Meridian Magazine by Jeff Lindsay, well worth reading: “How the Word of Wisdom Protects Against the “Evils and Designs of Conspiring Men”” In this connection, I’ve recently been described over at the Peterson Obsession Board as being boastful about my superior righteousness on the grounds that I’ve never consumed alcoholic beverages. I don’t remember ever having bragged about not drinking — it strikes me as no very great moral achievement to have refrained from doing something that has never even slightly tempted me; I’ve also (praise be to me!) resisted being a serial killer, a Columbian drug lord, and an arsonist — but surely I must have done so. I’m sure that nobody over there at the Obsession Board would ever dream of misrepresenting me.

To demonstrate my supposed boastfulness, one of the more dedicated cast members over at the Obsession Board now cites this comment of mine from late November 2019. (The dedication to monitoring every word of my blogging oeuvre that some there have shown is undeniably impressive, even if their actual comprehension of what I write has often failed to keep match their zeal.) To put the remark in context, I had just mentioned that several members of my extended paternal family (not Latter-day Saints, for the record, but rather somewhat lax Lutherans) had struggled with The Bottle. Then I went on to say:

There is evidence that heredity can incline a person to chronic alcohol abuse. So, not knowing whether I myself might have been born with a genetic proclivity in that direction, I’ve always been quietly grateful that, when the time came for me to choose to drink or not to drink, I had already committed myself on religious grounds, with considerable support from my faith community, not to do so. I’ve never regretted the choice even slightly. I’ve never been tempted, at all, to go back on it. I don’t miss it.

Now, “quiet gratitude” has never seemed to me precisely synonymous with self-righteous boastfulness. But your mileage may vary. His certainly seems to!

While I’m at it, though, I think that I’ll correct two other casual falsehoods that I recently encountered during an expedition over there:

A friend and former student of mine, later a colleague, earned a Ph.D. in Egyptology from Yale University, where he had a falling-out with his graduate advisor and was able, with his department’s approval, to change advisors. I’ve recently been accused (by someone whose pseudonymous moniker resembles Everybody’s WC) of having slanderously alleged that the rift occurred because his advisor had made unwanted sexual advances. But I don’t recall having ever leveled such an allegation, nor having ever heard such a claim, nor having ever thought such a thought. So I contacted my friend and asked whether such advances had ever occurred. “No,” was his reply.
Apparently, I’ve also recently (and ridiculously) written here (or, anyway, somewhere) about an alleged “war on Christmas,” which (I guess) links me with Bill O’Reilly and “Christian nationalism” and suchlike. But I don’t remember having ever written here or anywhere else about that supposed “war.” Can anybody help by supplying a reference or a link? In my advanced stage of geezerhood, whenever I can’t remember something, whenever I can’t come up with a name or have forgotten a plot detail or a book title, I wonder whether this could be the beginning of my imminent and inevitable descent into senility.

I probably do have a warped mind, though: I found myself thinking, as I fell asleep last night, about the curious change in the pronunciation of the element -body in such words as nobody, somebody, everybody, busybody, and embody. It’s astonishing to me that so many non-native speakers of English somehow learn reasonably well how to pronounce it, read it, and spell it.

But back, though, to the subject of “secret combinations”: Seriously. Here is a really appalling example of a truly terrible conspiracy. You may not be able to access the article at the first link. But that might be perfectly fine, since (caveat lector!) it’s not exactly suited to the faint of heart. (You may not want images from it in your mind or memory.) The second link, though, should be accessible:

National Review: “Sexual Terrorism in Britain: What are the ‘grooming gangs,’ what has been done about them, and why the renewed public interest?”

The Free Press: “The Biggest Peacetime Crime—and Cover-up—in British History: The serial rape of thousands of English girls went on for many years. Few in power cared. Then Elon Musk started tweeting.”

The eponymous Christopher Hitchens, speaking in Colorado in 2005. The cigarette and the drink in his right hand are not unrelated to his own eventual untimely passing.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I found this item in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. Plainly, many religious people don’t hesitate to enlist even children for their manifold crimes against goodness and decency: “9-Year-Old and Friends Package Almost 70 Lunches for the Homeless: Jackson Willis and his mother gathered helpers in Mesa, Arizona, to make, package and deliver lunches in an effort to strive to be more like Jesus Christ”

Statistically speaking, it’s a virtual certainty that at least some of the readers of this blog are religious believers who take actual pleasure in the horrors (such as that mentioned immediately above) that are routinely inflicted upon humanity by theism and by theists. Others, though, will want to be on their guard against such evils. So here’s a warning about the wickedness, scheduled for next week in Salt Lake City, to which certain religious zealots are inciting their followers: “Come and Help in Packing One Million Meals for the Utah Food Bank”

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