Pligs

Pligs are in the news again! “Pligs” is kind of like the word “blog.” It’s Utah slang, and is short for polygamists. We practice Big Love in Utah. And the Plig Prophet, Warren Jepps running from the FBI took a band of Pligs to Texas where odd ball religious practices and patriarchy find rich and welcome soil. That’s where the news was yesterday and today. Little Plig girls were rescued and placed in protective custody and the rat bastard daddy/husband/brother/grandfather patriarch of this little band of fertile girls was arrested for having sexual relations with kids—who knows, maybe his own. It’s such a common story here that it surprises me it’s received front page coverage in the Salt Lake Tribune for two days. Top of the fold!

I grew up an outsider in Utah, and so will always have the outsiders curiosity and morbid fascination of the things I shouldn’t know about the strange practices of Mormons and religious wierdos of every stripe.

One of my friends when I came back to Salt Lake after my first foray abroad at the ripe old age of twenty one, told me about the young woman who married the worst schmuck from my high school. He was the son of a high-up, muckety-muck Mormon historian and professor at the University of Utah. And this insufferable dick’s mother was some paragon of Mormon womanhood with a title like Relief Society President, but really President in this context means Princess. The son of these two elevated and cultured Mo’s, as we called them (that we would be me and my atheist parents), was a truly creepy pedant, Philosopher king in his own mind, and nasty teasing prick. Because I was a loner, and pretty, in an odd sort of way, and because I smoked and hung out with his best friend, Lyndon (who was a great guy, artistic and mechanical, who taught me to drive his Austin Healey Sprite the right way, accelerating into and drifting corners on the narrow, steep winding roads of the many canyons on the outskirts of downtown Salt Lake) I ended up having to suffer the company of Lyndon’s friend, that rat bastard Bob.

So I come back from Italy to find that Bob has taken a wife. Not just any wife, but a sweet young thing, April, barely of age, youngest child of a Plig family. Lyndon and I had started hanging out again. This most likely is where I got the low-down on Bob’s young wife. Philosopher Kings do not do well with equals, they need student’s who worship them. A Philosopher King will never marry an equal, he also needs a servant. And isn’t this the very definition of a wife?

So, the story goes in April’s family, that the first time we met, I just showed up and knocked on their door. She answered, of course, (Philosopher Kings do not answer doors— that’s what servants do) and the first thing out of my mouth was, “I just wanted to meet the woman who was stupid enough to marry Bob Jacobson.”

I have no recollection of this supposed first meeting. It may not have happened at all, but the story has gone round so many times in exactly the same way for forty two years it has come to stand for fact. Sounds implausible to me for so many reasons, not least among them, the fact that I would not have wanted to risk having to spend even a second in that prick Bob’s presence, so unless I was positive he wasn’t there, it’s unlikely I’d just drop by. And that I could say such a nasty thing to a sweet young woman I’d never met before, is too horrible to contemplate. But it has come to stand for the kind of take-no-prisoners bitch I am, or was, or might have been, and when you’ve got a bad reputation, if you just can’t shake it, I say, run with it. In the final analysis, it explains a lot about how certain people react to me. So as you might guess, a lot of people claim to know me well, but I don’t really have a lot of close friends.