I'm taking a break from the all-BitterGate format to recommend a couple of books I serendipitously happened to read recently. Both have helped me process the freaky events coming out of the Texas polygamy compound -- and understand why the public (or just the media) seems to be tilting toward sympathy for the many-wived men and their Little-House-in-the-Prairie-like ladies.
First one is Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven. It's actually the story of a 1984 murder, but, in the beginning at least, it provides a lot of insight into the polygamous way of life -- a life the Mormon (or LDS) church has denounced and distanced itself from, but a life that lives on nonetheless. A brisk, involving read, the book explains how polygamous families across the West thrive on working the welfare system for single mothers (they call it "bleeding the beast"), among other things. Anderson Cooper referred briefly to this custom tonight on CNN, but didn't get into how it's done. Kraukauer does. The rest of the book is chilling.
Second, less instantly alluring but just as satisfying, is Amy Irvine's autobiographical Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land. I keep thinking about those clothes: There's a scene in a laundromat in which Irvine tries to wear them, and ends up stripping them away from her neck.
Irvine is a Jack Mormon by family lineage, and honest about the conflict that creates in her. She alternately tries to wear the Mormon "dress" and rejects the society that demands it, and throughd her struggle over trying to fit in and break away, you come to understand a lot about how those fine ladies got that way -- why they didn't run away and still don't. And you understand their thinking from the inside, without condescension; Irvine is in it and of it, not outside looking in. She's also an lovely, elegant writer who has lived enough to deserve to write a memoir.
I find somehow that when the government moves in on these families the media has to struggle not to make it seem like the families have been terribly wronged. That's happening now. It's puzzling. A very strange thing. And so I thought some context might be useful. And I found this interesting from the AP story tonight:
Officials said the investigation began with a call from a young girl who has yet to be located by CPS. The women in the sect said they suspect she may be a bitter ex-member of the church.
Evidently bitterness drives you to every kind of nutty thing.