Chapter 7: Character Witness Part 1

| Part 1: My Analogy | Part 2: My Reality |

The Emperor’s New Bronco

“If the glove fits…”

~~~~~~~~~~

Buford “Buffy” Kaelin

If you took a snapshot of the U.S. in 1995, you could probably have divided the entire population into two distinct groups: those who thought OJ was guilty and those who thought he was innocent; given the media saturation, any fence sitters likely ended up with an inclination one way or another that would have shifted the balance if they were forced to choose.

Some of Simpson’s friends, like Robert Kardashian, stood solidly behind him in the beginning but eventually came to doubt his innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence. Others, like Buford “Buffy” Kaelin, continue to support OJ’s innocence to this day. Buffy didn’t know OJ personally before the homicides, but he had once stayed overnight in Simpson’s guest house with his cousin Kato, who shared his last name. Buffy became engrossed in the trial when Kato ended up being called to testifying against OJ. While Kato suspected OJ’s guilt, Buffy was convinced that OJ had been wrongly framed by the police. Buffy was a law student at the time, but during most days of the 11-month trial, he skipped his classes, went straight to the courthouse, and waited in line, hoping to get one of the coveted courtroom seats. Whether he heard the testimony in person or through the media outlets, he kept detailed notes of every day’s proceedings. He always carried his favorite briefcase with him, and by the time the trial ended, the briefcase was packed solid with his scribbled notes. Overriding his legal assessment was the one-way emotional connection he had forged with the man on trial, and he actually cried with joy the day OJ was acquitted.

The subsequent civil trial, however, had a different outcome, and Buffy took the verdict personally. Following the trial, he started meeting regularly with a group of fellow OJ supporters who became increasingly convinced that the police were in a conspiracy and couldn’t be trusted. They decided to form an official club dedicated to OJ’s innocence. The neighbors started calling them the Simpsonites, but Buffy wanted everyone to see OJ as he did: like a kind-hearted, older brother who should be addressed on a first-name basis; he decided they should be called Orenthites, after his heroic idol, Brother Orenthal James Simpson. His adherents unanimously agreed to adopt the name.

Given their mistrust in law enforcement and politicians, the Orenthites found it safer to withdraw to a compound in the Brentwood Hills that they purchased with pooled money. Buffy was excited to have a place to display his OJ memorabilia, which he set up in the front window and throughout the main entrance.

In the back yard, the Orenthites planted an orchard of orange trees to symbolize their devotion to “the Juice”. Buffy spent much of his time grafting branches from this orchard and planting smaller and smaller trees until he finally perfected a potted plant that still bore an orange fruit. The fruit itself tasted like an orange, but the seeds were chewy and sweet like jellybeans. On admission to the club, Buffy would give each new adherent their own “beansai” tree to mark their commitment to OJ’s cause.

In the evenings, they would hold parties where they played reruns of OJ’s NFL playoff games and Naked Gun movies starring OJ in his comedic roles. Once a month, all of the Orenthites would get together to hold a recitation meeting in which each member of their club stood up and recited the line, “I know that OJ is innocent!”

“Guiltless!” the other attendees would reply in unison.

Many of the Orenthites based their conviction on what they knew of OJ’s character and never bothered to look at the evidence for or against his alleged involvement in any crime. If an outsider ever brought up the murder charges, it would immediately be met with a statement about OJ’s character:

“I’ve seen all of OJ’s movies and football games, and the OJ I know wouldn’t and couldn’t have done anything like that!”

As his compound grew, Buffy gained quite a bit of media exposure and became popular with talk show hosts. In an interview with David Letterman, he was asked why he continued to carry the same briefcase with him that he had during the trial.

“During the trial,” he answered, “I went back to the crime scene and found absolute proof of OJ’s innocence.”

“And the evidence is right there in that briefcase?” Letterman asked, “Well let’s see it!”

“Sorry, Dave, I’m the only one with the key,” Buffy replied, “and you’re just going to have to trust me on this.”

With that late-night exposure, the briefcase got so much attention that Buffy handcuffed it to his wrist and took it with him everywhere he went, telling anyone who asked that the contents would be sealed and classified until his own death.

Of course, there has been a lot of speculation in the meantime about what is actually inside the briefcase. Could it contain secret government documents that show an intricate framing process? Could he have found the murder weapon with OJ’s son Jason’s fingerprints, showing that OJ was only taking the fall for his son the whole time? Or maybe Buffy himself was the culprit!

Nowadays most sceptics think it’s completely empty, but the Orenthites continue to believe that the contents of the briefcase will exonerate them all. And they take it a bit further in claiming that anyone who ever doubted OJ’s innocence will be very, very sorry in the end. In fact, Buffy began preaching a few years ago that the evidence in the briefcase will be so overwhelming that those who doubted its contents will themselves be put in prison, implicated with the complicit guilt of having doubted OJ’s innocence in the first place.

At the same time all of the actual evidence that was presented in court, if not completely ignored by the Orenthites, is considered to have been planted by secret agents from international superpowers in a deliberate, grand scheme that was orchestrated to test everyone’s allegiance to OJ and to prove whether or not they actually stood by him during the trial.

“Do not associate with those who think he is guilty,” Buffy has said, “And especially don’t read any newspaper reports that claim to contain confessions from OJ himself – that’s just the agents trying to trick him!”

During the recitation meetings, Buffy would encourage those who had any doubts to stop looking at evidence and focus on OJ’s character.

“It feels so good to say it,” Buffy preached, “and someday everyone will know that feeling. How do you feel when you say he is innocent?”

“I feel good!”

“Do you believe it?”

“Yes!”

“Well then you know it!”

“Yes, we know that he is innocent!” was the unanimous reply to his closing testimony at the end of each meeting.

Buffy continued to gain adherents with these sorts of speeches; due to schedule demands, however, his followers saw less and less of him. Eventually he ended up hiring an agent named Ted Cooper from among his loyal followers to handle his PR. One of the first changes was to start calling Buffy by a more proper name. At every chance, Ted began to introduce Buffy as “President Buford B. Kaelin.”

Ted recommended focusing all of the outreach efforts on a single Orenthite gala where President Kaelin would appear once a year sporting a fancy tuxedo and carrying his famous briefcase down the red carpet.

Every year Kaelin went through the same routine for the annual event, carefully orchestrated by Ted the PR man. Attendance was limited to card-carrying Orenthites, but eventually their numbers grew enough that bollards and barriers had to be erected to keep the cheering crowd and their cameras at a safe distance. Ted’s PR department issued a press release before each gala talking about the fancy suit Kaelin would be wearing for the evening’s festivities; the red-carpet issue covering the gala was a big seller in all of the next day’s tabloids.

Orenthite photo op with Kaelin’s replica Bronco parked outside the red-carpet gala

Despite its apparent success, however, Ted began to notice that every year a small number of dissenters walked away from the parade saying, “He wasn’t wearing any clothes!”

Eventually Ted noticed that proceeds from ticket sales were beginning to decline, so he initiated opinion surveys to track the trends. He surveyed those who left early and found that many had vowed never to return. In trying to establish trends he found that most of the dissenters had crossed the tape before coming to their naked conclusion.

Ted hired extra security and had his construction committee beef up the crowd control fence. He enlisted his best marketing experts to develop a campaign encouraging faithful followers to stay behind the barriers. The underlying message to group members was, “Don’t get too close or things will get ugly.”

This statement made some of the loyal subjects a bit curious. During the next gala event, some climbed over the new fence and were promptly met by security guards who handed out citations summoning them to appear in an Orenthite “discipline court.”

The debate around the distancing rules had also found its way to Ted’s son, Travis. Travis still wanted to follow the rules, but he decided to invest in a fancy camera with a powerful zoom lens for the red-carpet ceremony. What he found shocked him to the core.

“Hang on a second,” he told Ted in a frantic cell phone call right in the middle of Buffy’s catwalk, “it turns out those troublemakers were right after all!”

“No, no, no. You’ve got to doubt your own eyes,” Ted replied, trying to calm him down, “You must have bought a bogus zoom lens.”

“But Buffy isn’t wearing any clothes!”

“Listen, I’ve got to go,” Ted said, “Can we discuss this in person tomorrow.”

After the event, one of the crowd control officers approached Travis and handed him an official piece of paper summoning him to the court. On his way home, he passed a group of fence-jumpers who had been detained and noticed that they all had similar-looking documents.

The next day he took his seat around a large board room table in the Orenthite conference building. Most of the other chairs were still empty by the time Ted entered. The other detainees Travis had passed hadn’t bothered to show up for the hearing.

“Listen,” Ted told the small group, “If you think you’ve realized that President Kaelin isn’t wearing any clothes, that’s perfectly fine; in fact, you may be right.”

“What?” gasped the dissidents.

“It’s totally ok,” Ted continued, “and there’s a perfectly good explanation. In fact, we’ll be issuing some official statements about it soon. Just don’t tell the rest of the crowd in the meantime. You wouldn’t want to ruin their party now would you?”

Travis and his fellow doubters all agreed that it would be a shame to shut down the annual gala, but they weren’t sure what to do with their new-found realization.

Before wrapping up the meeting, Ted handed each of them a copy of his book, “Kaelin’s Kool Klothes,” which had just been released in a new printing.

Travis flipped through the book and rolled his eyes. He had never found the contents very interesting, but his old edition had at least included pictures. This one was just hundreds of pages of text, outlining the source of each of the textiles comprising Kaelin’s wardrobe along with endless descriptions of the fabrication process.

“Read it over and over until you can see the beauty in it,” Ted advised, “And remember, don’t mention any of this to the others.

Travis went home feeling completely confused, but in the end he decided to follow the gag order faithfully and attend the required recitation meetings – though he caught himself throwing up in his mouth just a bit upon hearing absolute convictions about the Kaelin’s wonderful wardrobe.

Travis and the other silent dissidents only spoke to each other in secret and avoided open discussions of their doubts, even among their own families. In their private discussions with each other, they realized that they had each come to the same conclusion, including the perfectly understandable fact that those around them who continued to believe in Kaelin’s clothes just hadn’t looked closely enough.

They ended up piecing together the whole story. As it turned out, Kaelin didn’t own any clothes at all; in fact, he hated wearing them altogether. He even claimed to be allergic to fabric, so his streaking tendencies weren’t even his fault. But Ted’s team included some superb artists, including highly skilled body painters. Each night before the gala, the painters would spend hours and hours applying intricate body art for his annual appearance to his Orenthite patrons.

A few whistle blowers began to promote the truth about the body paint among the mainstream Orenthites. Though these charges were generally dismissed as a grand delusion, ticket sales to the next gala started dropping more steeply than ever before. Travis still enjoyed the annual gala, but part of his enjoyment was centered around looking through his zoom lens at all of the things he hadn’t seen before.

He ended up snapping some pictures of President Kaelin that made it glaringly obvious that the clothes were just painted on. He initially kept the photos for himself until he attended one particularly disturbing recitation meeting where the other Orenthites threatened to evict anyone who dared to speak of President Kaelin’s nakedness. He decided that real evidence might help combat this lack of tolerance, so he distributed the photos to his friends…and promptly found himself holding a cease and desist order.

Seeing how this alarming trend was affecting his own family, Ted started holding meetings with the board of directors to plot a way forward; they decided issue a press release from the PR department to redefine the word clothes and give President Kaelin the new title of Emperor.

At the next recitation meeting, Ted read the official statement from the pulpit:

“You may have heard allegations that Emperor Kaelin has no clothes. Well, if you look up the true definition of the word, clothes can be defined as a covering. The Emperor has covered his body with paint; therefore he is wearing clothes, and we’ve been right all along.”

The audience members oohed and aahed in amazement at this explanation.

“A latex rainsuit is clothing, wouldn’t you agree?” Ted asked.

Everyone nodded.

“Well the body paint that the artists apply to the Emperor for the gala is actually latex-based, you see?

More nods came from the audience.

“So body paint is clothing, yes?”

“Yes!” said the faithful followers.

Ted pulled out a list of names from his discipline meetings. Pointing his finger at some of the silent sceptics in the audience, he began speaking ominously.

“So who is lying here? Certainly not me!”

His adherents looked around, hoping Ted’s finger wouldn’t land on them.

“Those who say Emperor Kaelin is not wearing clothes are the real liars,” Ted said, “We don’t want to associate with liars, so please delete them from your contact lists.”

Faithful adherents obliged, and from that day forward, in addition to their recitation meetings, the Orenthites began to hold weekly workshops entitled “Body paint is beautiful!”

The workshops fulfilled their intended purpose in quieting the dissenters and slowing the exodus. Now welcome to look closely at Emperor Kaelin’s beautiful “clothes” in the upcoming parade without police tape or barricades, ticket sales actually began to increase.

Travis himself decided to fall in line and put his earlier doubts aside. Ted’s explanation that they had been fed the truth all along seemed like a stretch, but in the end, he acknowledged that it was a viable loophole.

~~~~~~~~~~
Bean Boozled

But each night Travis would stare across the room at his own beansai tree and wonder what else might not be as it seems. Each beansai tree came with a chain of custody certificate stating that it was a bona fide tree tracing its roots back to the original tree that Kaelin grafted from OJ’s Brentwood estate yard. Travis always felt good that he could trace the tree that he had received from his father, Ted, back through to Kaelin and all the way to OJ himself.

Each beansai tree also came with an instruction manual on how to care for it. The cover page of the manual included the following statement:

“A beansai tree is like a bonsai tree, only it grows fruit. And not just any fruit. When you open up the beansai fruit, its seeds are the most delicious orange jellybeans.”

That part always sounded nice to Travis, and he had always enjoyed the jellybeans that he found inside the fruit that appeared on his tree each morning; but the manual also included a dire warning:

“Do not under any circumstances touch the stem,” the warning read, “or you may be asked to leave the compound.”

Travis looked at the fruit on his own tree. Realizing that his closer look through the zoom lens had led to the concessions about Kaelin’s clothes, he decided to ignore the warnings and have a closer look at the stem of his tree.

What he found shocked him to the core: The branches had simply been stapled to the stem, and the fruit was just glued to the branch! Travis decided to pull out one of the staples, and the branch fell right off. The fruit fell right along with it and just squashed on the floor. He had never even noticed the glue on the fruit that he peeled each morning.

Travis simply couldn’t believe what he had found. Each of his siblings had proudly displayed their trees in their own rooms while they were growing up. Were theirs fakes as well? Travis decided to call each of them to let them know he had found out his tree was a fake.

“Have you checked yours?” he asked.

“No need,” they replied.

“But you should have a look at the stem!”

“Sorry, the manual says not to look at the stem, just look at the fruit!”

“But…”

“In fact, the fine print in the manual says that if you touch the stem at all, the whole tree will die.”

“I checked mine,” Travis said, “It was already dead!”

“Well then you must have killed it by digging around too much.”

“I guess I can’t speak for yours – maybe you got a good one,” Travis conceded, “But mine’s a fake!”

“Don’t be so sure of yourself.”

“Well, when I turned over one of the leaves, I found a sticker that says it’s made in Hong Kong,” Travis said, “So how can we go around saying it was made right here in Brentwood?”

“I’ll bet a hater just put that sticker there to try to fool you.”

“What? Seriously?”

“Yes, don’t you remember you’re supposed to doubt your doubts?”

Travis saw that these discussions weren’t going to go anywhere so he decided to write straight to Kaelin himself with his concerns.

He received a lengthy, written response outlining how Hong Kong originally included a small island named Beanola, a colony where the first beansai trees were grown and grafted. So all of the beansai trees, including OJ’s tree, came from the same source.

“So the sticker is true,” read the response, “And the manual is true. And the staples are true. And the oranges are true. And the jellybeans are true. And the glue is true…and OJ is innocent!”

“You can see that connection, can’t you?” asked Kaelin in his final remarks.

Travis couldn’t see the slightest relevance to OJ or make any sense of the other explanations, so he started searching the internet for any mention of the details Kaelin had offered. Not a trace of the Beanola story or any other supposed evidence showed up on Google.

Travis decided he couldn’t keep up the charade any longer and scheduled a meeting to sit down with Kaelin in person. He brought along his beansai tree to back up his story.

“I couldn’t find anything about the tree’s origin online,” Travis said as they sat down together.

“Of course not,” said Kaelin, “All the records about Beanola have been lost. But what are you doing on Google in the first place? Didn’t we tell you to stay off the internet?”

“Guess I forgot,” Travis said, “So how do you know so much about Beanola yourself?”

“Well, I’ve got the full history right here in my briefcase along with the evidence for OJ’s innocence.”

“Can I have a look?”

“No, it includes blood samples and some toxic chemicals that would kill you if I opened it. I’ve developed an immunity, but nobody else can see it unless we step inside the sterilized lab and suit up.”

“OK, whatever,” said Travis, “but can I see your tree?”

“Well, I don’t think…”

Travis stood up and started walking toward the mantle where Kaelin’s own tree was displayed. “Look!” he exclaimed with surprise after taking a close look, “it’s stapled just like mine!”

“Oh, yes, sorry,” Kaelin said, “I forgot to mention that in my letter.”

“So you knew that the trees you were giving out were fake?”

“Well, technically, yes, but they’re modelled after the real thing that I saw with my own eyes.”

“WHAT?”

“They’re exact replicas of the real thing, so technically they’re real, and so is the fruit,” Kaelin said, “Don’t you like jellybeans?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“Well, from where I stand, I see lots of people who find out the truth about their trees, and they keep right on eating the jellybeans. What makes you so special that you suddenly need all of this proof?”

“Uh…”

“They taste really good! Wouldn’t you agree?”

“OK, sure,” Travis conceded, “but the jellybeans weren’t even grown on these trees like the manual says. They must have been borrowed or stolen from a different source altogether. We’re not the only ones with jellybeans; in fact, I recently found out you can order some online and they’ll deliver for free – right to the front door!”

“You’re on thin ice,” Kaelin warned, “remember, the store-bought jellybeans aren’t real.”

“Neither are these!”

“Well, they’re counterfeit! Poisonous too!”

“Make up your mind!” Travis asked, losing his patience, “How would you know anyway? You’ve never even tried the ones from the store?”

“Of course not,” Kaelin replied, “Haven’t you read your manual? It says to make sure never to eat any other jellybeans once you’ve had a taste of the ones from your tree. The combination would ruin your taste buds if it doesn’t kill you first.”

“Well, I’ve got a confession to make,” Travis said proudly, “I ordered some the other day and ate a whole jarful. I’m just fine; in fact, I liked the store-bought jellybeans even better!”

“Well, if you’re not going to take my advice and stay off the internet, I can’t protect you. I have no choice now but to conclude that your taste buds are shot,” Kaelin said, “so I’m going to have to tell everyone not to trust your opinions anymore.”

Realizing his voice would be rendered meaningless to everyone who meant anything to him, Travis decided to concede, ask for Kaelin’s forgiveness, and keep quiet. He dropped the fruitless discussion and went back home to think through his options. Over the next few weeks he tried doing what the manual suggested step by step, but found that he just couldn’t keep it up.

The breaking point came when he stayed up late one night and discovered that Kaelin had hired a work force whose job was to buy jellybeans, stuff them into oranges, and go around gluing them to the Orenthites’ trees while they slept.

The betrayal was too much for Travis, and he started questioning everything the Kaelin, Ted, and every other Orenthite had told him from the beginning. As the dominos toppled in his head, Travis found himself facing the now absolutely relevant revelation that materialized in an instant: OJ actually was responsible for the double homicide!

From the 911 calls to the Bronco chase to the distracting circus of the trial verdict, the whole sequence of events suddenly became clear. The staggering realization that a murderer had escaped justice was quickly followed by the overwhelming implications and the complicit guilt of his own false professions of OJ’s innocence to everyone he had known. He had spent years of his life in OJ’s defense, only to find himself pointing in the wrong direction; had it all been a wasted effort?

Travis had rarely left the compound since the day Ted had heard about the Orenthites and moved his young family in almost two decades before. It seemed like a scary proposition, but he knew it was time to leave. He wanted to tell everyone he knew about his epiphany, but he also knew that his conclusion was going to be meaningless to his friends and family; those who professed OJ’s innocence based on feelings around the fictional character that had been concocted weren’t going to allow themselves to take the briefest look at the evidence that had led him down this road.

As he packed up his possessions, he tried to fit everything he would need to start his new life into one box, beginning with a blank notebook that he intended to fill with his newfound insights. He threw all of his copies of Kaelin’s Kool Klothes and the rest of his Orenthite mementos into in another box bound for the dumpster.

As he exited the compound with both boxes in hand, he passed some young new recruits entering the enclave. He wondered if he had any obligation to let them know about his own journey. Almost 30 years had elapsed since the trial of the century, and in the meantime, the members of this whole new generation of Orenthites weren’t even old enough to remember the trial at all. It seemed ironic that they would soon be proclaiming their knowledge of OJ’s innocence at the monthly meetings without any awareness of the crimes he had actually been charged with.

Travis felt a degree of sympathy for them, but at the same time also a measure of envy given that they would never learn enough about the case to ever question OJ’s innocence. It seemed so much simpler when he was in that situation himself, but there was no going back now. Travis just shook his head and kept walking.

His first stop was the dumpster along the street. Try as he might, he just couldn’t bring himself to throw out his box. Maybe Ted or his other family members would want them, he thought. He went back through the entrance to find a familiar face, but his club membership card was no longer valid. He was surprised to be promptly turned away by security who had already been notified about the unlikely dissenter. The security guard radioed to Kaelin, who quickly made his way to the entrance to bid farewell.

“No hard feelings, right?” Kaelin asked, “I mean you understand we can’t risk having you come back here spreading rumors and falsehoods among the new recruits, don’t you?”

Having come to recognize the textbook signs of cultism through his late-night Google binges, Travis let the word slip in front of Kaelin, who scoffed at the designation.

“It’s not a cult if it makes you feel good,” Kaelin said, pointing to a jar at the reception desk, “Have a jellybean!”

Travis dropped his paraphernalia box at Kaelin’s feet, grabbed a handful of orange jellybeans, and headed out the door for the last time. This was no longer his home. These were not his people.

Travis had finished all of the jellybeans by the time he walked the three blocks to Sunset Boulevard. Although he knew that the orange jellybeans weren’t as magical as Kaelin had claimed, he still found them pretty tasty all things considered. In the back of his mind, though, he had always wondered if there might be other flavors out there, perhaps some that he might like even better than the orange ones.

He didn’t know which way to turn down Sunset Boulevard, but he found the prospect of choosing for himself strangely liberating after the regimented life he had been accustomed to. As he made his choice, he was excited to find out what life might have in store for him down the road.

~~~~~~~~~~

A few years have now passed since Travis split ways with the Orenthites. He got into the landscaping business and seems to be coping just fine in his strange, new world. He never saw Kaelin again, but he still keeps in contact with Ted and his other family members. Ted likewise came to the conclusion that OJ is guilty and beansai trees are bogus, but he enjoys the jellybeans, the recitation meetings, and the gala too much to leave himself. Travis makes an annual pilgrimage from Socal to Norcal to visit the Jelly Belly factory. His favorite flavor is Tutti Frutti, which is a blend of every imaginable fruit flavor. Just the other day, Travis bought the Beanboozled game online just so he could cut out the box cover and hang it up on his wall to commemorate his exit and to make sure he is careful not to be “Bean Boozled” again in the future.

~~~~~~~~~~

So that’s the end of the parable. This whole story is obviously made up – and is so ridiculous that I can’t even say with a straight face that it’s based on a true story…which is actually how I feel about my own past these days. So where does this cockamamie tale come from? Here’s the reality:

My own son used to come home frustrated from fast and testimony meeting each month.

“They’re all saying they know these things are true,” he would say about the youth who had stood up to share their testimony, “but when you hear them talking between classes, I don’t think they really mean it.”

“Well, you can only answer for yourself,” I told him, “so if it bothers you, just make sure you only say what you really believe.”

“I think it’s like the crowds in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes,” he told me after one meeting that really annoyed him, “They say it because everyone else is saying it, but they don’t believe it themselves.”

“All you can go by is what you see and recognize for yourself,” I told him, “How can you ever know whether someone else sees what they say they see? You can’t call that into question, because they could say the same about you.”

I’m not sure if the message sank in for him, but I do want to live by that mantra myself. I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t call someone else a hypocrite without being a hypocrite yourself, so I really don’t feel comfortable telling someone who see clothes that they’re wrong.

Even if you don’t see the clothes yourself, it doesn’t mean other people are lying. They see the clothes, because they want to see the clothes. His comments really got me thinking about my own convictions, and I tried to find an example in which different people in the crowd might legitimately see different things. That conversation is what sparked this chapter.

~~~~~~~~~~

This example certainly isn’t limited to Mormonism; we will all face situations in which we have to figure out how to navigate life when a believer sees the beautiful clothes, and a non-believer sees right through them. So let’s look back again at Buffy’s photo at the beginning of the chapter. Actually, the guy’s name is Keegan. He is a real guy who went to a real party where someone snapped a real photo of him with his real Smartphone for his real Instagram.

Is he wearing clothes? Looking at the photo as a small thumbnail, it may look like he was decked out in a fancy tuxedo. What if you had seen him yourself at this party, and the next day your friend told you, “Keegan wasn’t wearing any clothes at the party!”

You might disagree and say, “You’re wrong. I saw him from across the room, and I know full well that he was wearing clothes.”

Only you’d be the one who was wrong, because in this case, Keegan is wearing body paint. The tuxedo is just painted on. You might reject this truth and find yourself at an impasse with your friend; but if your vantage point makes clothes and body paint indiscernible from each other, you may wish to reconsider your conviction. Your friend only knows the secret because he had a closer look; if you wanted to know for yourself next time around, maybe you’d better get a bit closer. If you’d rather not know, that’s fine – and perfectly understandable if Keegan isn’t your type – but then you ought to stop claiming that you know what he was wearing!

Once you zoom in, though, the body paint becomes completely, glaringly obvious. The Emperor is naked, and I can’t unsee that. Now that you know the truth for yourself, you’re in the same boat. Don’t believe me? Try to look at his picture below and unsee his nipples. Then look him in the eye and repeat three times the words, “I love your tux, I know it’s true!” without catching the tell-tale signs of its absence with your peripheral vision. Try it! I dare you! I’ll bet you can’t, yet that’s what my former, fellow parishioners are asking me to do: to unsee the glaringly obvious, awkwardly revealing truth!

~~~~~~~~~~

Now this whole bean-boozled episode might sound bizarrely amusing, but the Mormon version of this tale includes an ongoing tragedy. I know I’ve already beaten the imperial imagery to death here, but let’s substitute Joseph Smith for Keegan, and the prophetic mantle for the tux; some see the fabric while others see right through it.

How can that difference in perception be tragic? Well, suppose someone who sees the prophetic mantle is married to someone who sees the signs of its absence; can they ever find common ground? What if the believer has been taught that non-believers will be locked out of heaven? And not just the non-believer, but any believer who is partnered up with a non-believer as well, dooming both of their souls? Now that might sound simplistically extreme, but it’s the well-documented doctrine of the LDS Church, and it’s a very real, toxic situation that thousands of couples find themselves confronted with. Add to that a belief that looking too closely is wrong, and the non-believer will be stuck carrying the blame for having doomed the couple’s eternal future by decimating their heavenly mansions.

They could decide to live their separate lives and maintain their individual philosophies, splitting up the kids based on each child’s individual inclinations; that seems to be a very common approach for part-member or partially believing LDS couples. But is there a way out whereby they could reach some sort of agreement on how to spend their Sundays and raise their kids? Of course, there ought to be a pragmatic middle ground, but official church statements claim there is no such thing. So if they wish to navigate life together with any sort of unity, the believer could join the non-believer or vice versa, but which one should concede?

Say you put a couple in a room with two doors on opposite sides of the room and handcuff Harry and Sally together. Fireman Joe appears on the TV screen, dressed in his fireproof suit, and shouts that the building is on fire. Whether or not they agree, the pair is going to have to choose one door or the other to escape through. Fireman Joe says the door on the left is going to explode into a deadly backdraft if opened, while the door on the right leads to a posh resort.

“Now hurry up and get to the resort,” he says, “and stay away from the TV screen!”

“Come on, let’s go,” Harry says, tugging at Sally.

Sally thinks the whole thing smells fishy. She starts pulling back at Harry as he heads for the door, trying to get a closer look at Fireman Joe.

“Why would he tell us to stay away from the screen?” she asks.

“Come on, we don’t have time for that!” Harry responds, “Let’s go!”

“Hang on, I can see his badge,” Sally says, squinting her eyes “It says Marshall – from Paw Patrol. He just printed it off the internet and taped it to his suit!”

“Who cares, he’s a fireman,” Harry shouts, still facing the door and pulling Sally toward him“Besides, the kids love Paw Patrol.”

“What does that have to do with anything, and how do you even know he’s a real fireman?” Sally challenges, “It looks like he’s wearing a costume from Target. I think he’s just trying to sell us time shares to the resort.”

“It looked real to me,” Harry says, “Maybe he was in a rush getting ready and knew people would die if they scrutinized things too much; that must be why he told us not to look too closely.”

“That doesn’t make any…”

“Come on, we have to hurry!’

“But…”

“Listen, I know he’s telling the truth,” Harry says, sobbing and pulling Sally’s handcuffed hand to his heart, “I feel it right here!”

So…which door should they choose if they truly respect each other’s opinions? Now let’s tie the kids up to the same chain gang and pose the question again. Harry wholeheartedly believes that the door on the left, which Sally actually prefers, will be fatal for the entire family.

Sally, on the other hand, believes that both doors are relatively safe, but that the door on the left is actually preferable, and the posh resort to the right comes with the obligation of sitting through a two-hour time-share seminar every week.

Harry claims to have an absolute knowledge that he is right. Sally doesn’t think there’s any way to really know anything from inside the room, but the fake badge and uniform seem like sure signs that there’s a con going on and that there isn’t even a fire in the building at all.

To spin it back into a Mormon story, by choosing the left door, Harry believes they would be giving up kingdoms, thrones, principalities, dominions, and even planets for not just themselves but their own posterity…and not just for their mortal kids but for spirit children numbering more than “the sands of the sea” who will instantly cease to exist if they take that exit. If he gives in and takes the door on the left, he believes his whole family will die a horrible, gruesome, painful death, “how sore you know not, how exquisite you know not, how hard to bear you know not.”

For Sally to capitulate and choose the door on the right, she might have to sacrifice a couple of hours a week and recite a few phrases about how awesome the resort is in an attempt to convince their friends to buy time shares as well, but there’s no burn unit or skin grafts involved.

Yes, this sounds ridiculous, but a no-middle-ground, exclusive religion essentially leaves its adherents with only these two doors, telling everyone they must choose the door on the right to escape their doom.

With this unbalanced weigh-in, it is understandable why so many non-believers pretend to see the same thing as the believers and spend the rest of their days reciting phrases they don’t actually believe, proclaiming the beauty of the Emperor’s clothes and the resiliency of his fire-proof suit.

So taking it back to Kaelin’s Krazy Klub, should those who devote two full-time years trying to convert people to the “Mormenthite” movement be shown all of the evidence for and against their case before embarking on that effort? Should they be able to accept the selected evidence indicating the innocence of their role models and ignore any incriminating clues? Should they be told about the charges of sexual assault, racial discrimination, and hate crimes laid against their prophet heroes? What if a prospective emissary bases their belief on the principle that “I feel good when I think about his innocence; therefore, it proves his innocence.” What if evidence is seen as something dangerous that shouldn’t even be touched? And that they have been taught that the only evidence that hasn’t been doctored is stored in the magic briefcase that will ultimately and conclusively prove innocence. If the conviction of a Mormenthite is based on those underlying principles, is it even worth stirring the pot by bringing it up? So far in my life, the answer has been no. I bite my tongue after having seen the fruitlessness of discussions that have started down that road.

While Kaelin’s excuses and explanations in the story seem ridiculous, they actually feel more sensible to me than what I read from Mormon apologists about scriptural historicity and other topics. There are few things more aggravating than watching someone who has been caught red-handed and naked trying to keep the story going with nonsensical excuses!

Like Travis, I just had to walk away quietly with nothing but a few jellybeans. Now I don’t doubt the integrity and sincerity of those who prefer to keep a safe distance and continue to attest just how beautiful the Emperor’s wardrobe is. But knowing that the term “clothing” had to be redefined to keep the parade going, it feels a bit funny to hear the believing observers talk about the bowtie and the cufflinks and the jacket’s fit and other things that don’t really make any sense in the now-admitted context of body paint.

That official concession is freely available to anyone who bothers to look, but why won’t the officials who know the truth announce to the gala crowd that he’s wearing nothing but latex? It still involves some impressive artistry. Maybe it’s a fear that the spectators would stop coming. Or maybe it’s because the books they have published have played up the value of real, authentic textile, and the spectators were told that the gala is the only place where they can see it for themselves. So they’re told to leave their zoom lenses at home and stay behind the fence while the charade continues with whatever rationalization is required to keep it going.

~~~~~~~~~~
Priceless

I was fed a line that’s similar Kaelin’s admonitions: “Keep your distance and you’ll see the beauty of his adornment,” they said, “but if you choose to ignore the voice of warning, cross the tape, and get too close, it’s bound to get ugly; in fact, we’ll throw you out of the courtyard altogether!”

If you ignore the warnings coming down the Mormenthite chain and keep moving closer with your own disobedient, scrutinizing eyes, you’ll see what they didn’t want you to see…and find yourself facing a choice: you can pretend you didn’t see it, you can choose to leave silently, or you can raise a stink about it and get yourself kicked out.

If you decide you’d rather stay, it’s a tough gig to stay true to yourself. Realizing that some of those who claim to have interacted with resurrected beings in early LDS history claimed later they had been looking through their “spiritual eyes,” I suppose I could take that same approach here and see a tuxedo that isn’t really there. If I try squinting my eyes a bit, for example, and back away from the screen, I can easily pretend he’s wearing real clothes because I see that tux with my own “spiritual eyes,” too! But if you pulled the smoke alarm at the party and set off the sprinkler system, you’d see him standing there naked and realize that anyone who still clings to the belief in his fine clothes at that point is deceiving themselves…or choosing not to look.

As for the keepsakes on my bookshelf? It’s as if my parents gave me and each of my siblings a hand-crafted, priceless treasure like the beansai tree. I’m not saying the gifts are worthless – they still hold some value and serve a given purpose. They just aren’t what I was told they were, and I was told their value was due to their origin. Well, I checked mine and had it appraised. And I found out that my tree is a fake. I have no right to tell anyone else theirs is counterfeit; maybe my siblings were lucky enough to get the real thing. But should I feel obliged to tell them mine came from a fraudulent source? And should I recommend that they check their own stickers?

Maybe a fake Made in Hong Kong sticker was placed on my genuine tree by a devious, deceitful snake of a pawn broker who just wants me to sell it short. And maybe if I recheck it with a more qualified broker, or just take Mom and Dad’s word for it, I’ll be happy with my heirloom. Sometimes I wish I could plug myself back into the Matrix where at least I still believed it was real and could cuddle up to my tree as a security blanket. But I’ve checked it and rechecked it myself; I’ve taken it to appraiser after appraiser to get second and third opinions. And the bottom line is that mine is clearly a fake; even without the appraisals, it just feels fake now. In a way this realization is a blessing, but it’s also a curse, because nobody else seems to want to see the staples in their tree. And I guess in the end I can’t blame them, because it’s not a pretty sight at first. But as for myself, a trip to the Jelly Belly factory makes it worth it in the end, recognising that even though there’s a Stinky Socks flavor mixed in here or there, at least there are more flavors to choose from than orange – including my favorite Tutti Fruttis that I never would have tasted if I had stayed on the compound!

~~~~~~~~~~

OJ is innocent!

If I compare my Mormon saga with the backdraft analogy above, I have gradually transitioned from Harry’s role to Sally’s, including a number of years in which I found myself looking at my watch in the timeshare salesroom, knowing I could only leave if I agreed about the awesomeness of the whole pyramid. So I found myself reciting things I didn’t actually believe, always looking for wording that fell short of an outright lie. It’s an awkwardly easy thing to do with enough mental gymnastics. Let’s take a yes or no question, for example, like “Do you believe OJ is innocent?”

If your initial answer is no, let’s see if we can change that to a yes in three paragraphs or less.

I, for one, believe that OJ committed the crimes he was accused of. But if I needed to profess his innocence, could I say those words and maintain my integrity? Yes, absolutely! If I had to pass a lie detector test with an affirmative response to that question in order keep my Mormenthite membership card and attend my sister’s wedding, I believe I could do it.

Let’s see how this might play out: If I define innocence as not having been proven guilty, then yes, I believe OJ is innocent. He was “not proven guilty” of the crime, at least not in the criminal trial. Under the law, aren’t we Americans innocent until proven guilty? Our personal view of the actual guilt he should be feeling for the crime that most people now believe he actually committed doesn’t matter for the legal statement; we can only rely on the consensus of the jury.

So in this instance, throwing aside the civil case, no, he was not proven guilty under the protocols of that system. Which means he is technically innocent, whether I believe it or not. So by limiting my context to an under-the-law interpretation, I could stand up in a recitation meeting and say with full conviction, “I believe OJ was innocent.” Could I let my integrity off the hook with that technicality? Well, with that resolute phrase, I could at least pass the Mormenthite recommend interview with flying colors, keep the card in my wallet current, and continue my life with them…or alternatively, the growing indigestion associated with that process could prove to be too much for my gag reflex, in which case I might just blow my cover, take it to civil court, and post this essay online.

I am Kreylin the Mormenthite, OJ did it, and the Emperor has no clothes!

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“If the glove fits…would you call the Emperor’s buff?”

[Next: Chapter 7: Part 2 – Emperor Mormenthal]