Who ya gonna call?

***

A whole circle of freak-show demagogues once swirled around the professional anti-Mormon mountebank Ed Decker, who achieved somewhat more than merely his fifteen minutes of fame with the 1982 film The God Makers.  (Decker is still reputed to be alive in some sense, up in Washington State.). One of Decker’s associates, Bill Schnoebelen, used to claim that the very architectural form of the Salt Lake Temple, particularly the “trapezoidal” form of its spires, was consciously designed to attract demons, like flypaper.   (See Massimo Introvigne, “The Devil Makers: Contemporary Evangelical Fundamentalist Anti-Mormonism,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27/1 [Spring 1994]: 153-169; for the flypaper claim, specifically, see page 164.)

My serious hunch is that Schnoebelen derived the idea of demon-attracting architecture from the use of the Manhattan apartment building at 55 Central Park West in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters.  In that immortal film — which should probably not be interpreted as an anthropological field documentary  or an essay in Religionsphänomenologie — that apartment building is called the “Shandor Building” and “Spook Central,” and the movie tells us that “The whole building is a huge, superconductive antenna that was designed and built expressly for the purpose of pulling in and concentrating spiritual turbulence.”)

Anyway, in the wake of the Decker/Schnoebelen circus, there were complaints from more orthodox, mainstream anti-Mormons — I can’t recall offhand whether I heard them from James White or from Jerald and Sandra Tanner — that it was becoming harder and harder to recruit volunteers to picket Temple Square during the twice-annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Why?  Because gullible evangelicals, terrified at the thought of being so close to the main Latter-day Saint satanic power-generating station, were unwilling to stand anywhere near the Salt Lake Temple.

Some of you may be aware that I’m the proud owner of a small but zany group of anonymous personal critics who tend to congregate at a place that I sometimes call the “Peterson Obsession Board.”  As a whole, they’ve been at it for about fifteen or twenty years now.  (They’ve been at it for however long the POB, for which I appear to be a principal raison d’être, has been operating.)  There’s my Malevolent Stalker, for example, and my Mini-Stalker, and several others.  And there’s the fellow at the POB who’s been sending me obscene and studiously semi-literate personal insults since at least 4 August 2012; they now go directly into a special file, where — I checked just now — well over eight hundred specimens are available for study by interested mental health professionals.  (I have no idea how many of his creations have been trashed over the past decade, or otherwise sadly lost to science.)

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the glorious days of Decker and Schoebelen when I recently read a comment from a poor unfortunate over at the Peterson Obsession Board who had long obsessively followed my blog, seeking (and finding) daily specimens of my stupidity and depravity to share among his fellows, presumably hoping for (and receiving) their approval.  Of late, though, as they were discussing what they claim to perceive as my warm, friendly feelings toward the Nazi Third Reich and the Holocaust, he vowed to stay away from my blog.  It isn’t healthy, he observed, to expose oneself every single day to such evil as I represent.  Expressing sympathy for him, another commenter observed that I embody, in microcosm, everything that is evil in the Church and, indeed, in the world more broadly.

When tributes such as these pour in, it really does seem to me that I’ve accomplished something with my life.

***

On a separate but related front, since certain critics are once again laboring mightily to establish the falsehood that I have been, or will be, lining my pockets with the cash that Witnesses has been bringing in and that that movie’s docudrama sequel, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, will also enrich me, I probably need to issue this little statement once again:

As I’ve pointed out many times before, the claim that I have profited or will profit from the Interpreter Foundation’s film projects is flatly untrue.  There is no expectation on my part or on anybody else’s part that I will earn a penny of profit from Witnesses or Undaunted.  There is no mechanism by which I might be able to do so.  There is nothing in any of the contract documents related to the project that promises or permits me any financial interest in the success of the films.  No money will accrue to me from the movies — neither directly nor indirectly.  (Nor — I know how certain critics’ minds work! — to my wife, my children, my grandchildren, my cousins, my present or future pets, my estate, my heirs and assigns, my legatees, my neighbors, or any shell company or secret bank account in the Cayman Islands.  Neither in cash nor in kind nor in gold bullion nor in doubloons nor in Swiss francs nor in bitcoin nor in corvée labor.)  Whether, in the end, the film project fails miserably or breaks even or earns $800 million, my share of the earnings will remain unchanged, at precisely $0.00 — or the exact equivalent in any currency used within the United Federation of Planets or known to exist beyond the Federation.  And I make this statement freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.

I realize that that’s almost certainly not clear enough or airtight enough for certain folks, and especially for those who really, really, really want to expose me as a mercenary fraud.  But it’s the best that I can do at the moment.

***

There will be deep disappointment in some circles over this news:

“U.S. Department of Education dismisses Title IX complaint against BYU”

***

Finally, and on a very, very different note, I share with you an almost unspeakably horrific story about something that has happened to a former neighbor of ours, a former member of our Latter-day Saint ward:

“Help Leticia Post-Amputation Surgery”

I know that she’s a stranger to almost all of you but, if even a few out there can spare even just a few dollars, I’m sure that it would be deeply appreciated.  Nothing can make up for what has happened to her, but we can show her and her family that they’re not alone.