In “Coffee Cups in Hell” MoDo says Mormons make their flamboyant debut on Broadway — could the White House be next? The Moustache of Wisdom is “Hoping for Arab Mandelas,” and says the prospects for democracy in the Arab world generate both hopes and fears. Mr. Kristof, in “Freedom’s Painful Price,” says Mubarak is gone, but an Egyptian woman’s story of torture depicts a revolution far from over. Here’s MoDo:
It’s the Mormon moment.
The Republican Mormons Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman may run for president, braving more questions about whether they wear the sacred undergarment and more resistance from evangelicals who consider Mormonism an affront to Christianity.
TLC just renewed its hit “Sister Wives,” and HBO’s popular “Big Love” just had its big finale.
On Thursday, “The Book of Mormon,” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the scatological scamps who created “South Park,” and Robert Lopez, who co-created “Avenue Q,” opened on Broadway in a confetti burst of profanity, blasphemy, hilarity and rapturous reviews. Stone called the musical “an atheist love letter to religion.”
Aside from impersonating Jennifer Lopez and Gwyneth Paltrow at the 2000 Oscars, Stone and Parker are known for mercilessly mocking religion, celebrity, phonies and Snooki in their cartoon world with the four potty-mouthed fourth-grade boys from Colorado.
They pushed the limits at Comedy Central when they put the Prophet Muhammad in a bear suit. But as Terry Teachout wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Making fun of Mormons in front of a Broadway crowd is like shooting trout in a demitasse cup. … If the title of this show were ‘The Quran,’ it wouldn’t have opened.”
Stone and Parker said they were drawn to the Rodgers and Hammerstein and Disney qualities at Mormon sites in Salt Lake City. “Mormonism has this great cheesy aesthetic,” Stone told The Journal. “When you watch their videos, it’s almost as if they’re about to flash a smile at the camera and burst into song. … Mormon cheesiness is so close to musical cheesiness.”
The Mormons in the musical are depicted just as Mormons on “South Park” were — naïve but nice.
There is one song called “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” featuring Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, Johnnie Cochran and a couple of Starbucks coffee cups in hell. (Mormons can’t have caffeine.)
The raunchiness is offset by traditional tropes. There’s an odd-couple pairing of two 19-year-old missionaries, Elder Price, a golden goody-goody, and Elder Cunningham, a schlubby boy with a penchant for lying; and a cultural collision between white-bread missionaries and Ugandans plagued by AIDS, warlords, maggots and female genital mutilation.
“Africa is nothing like ‘The Lion King,’ ” a befuddled Price says. “I think that movie took a lot of artistic license.”
Cunningham manages to baptize a lovely young Ugandan named Nabalungi, but he keeps calling her Neosporin, Noxzema and Neutrogena.
The sly writers send up the church for its belated admission of blacks to temple ceremonies. In 1978, beset by protests, the president of the Mormons announced that God had changed his mind about black people.
But they also send up do-gooding celebrities like Bono and Angelina when the Mormon boys sing “We Are Africa.”
Some connected with the production have been monitoring the reaction of the Mormons, but so far, the church has put out one bland statement, and some Mormons who have seen the show told reporters they were pleasantly surprised. At least it doesn’t dwell on polygamy, they said, and its ribald humor seems braced by traditional values and affection for the Mormon characters.
If you already find some aspects of Mormonism exotic and strange — including its start with crystal-gazing Joseph Smith, the buried gold tablets with hieroglyphics and an angel named Moroni — the musical won’t assuage your doubts.
Smith claimed Jesus appeared to him in upstate New York. “Did you know that Jesus lived here in the USA?” calls out a Mormon boy in the musical. Elder Cunningham offers this lyric about the crucifixion: “Jesus knew he had to man up.”
Elder Price sings, “I believe that God lives on a planet called Kolob.” In Mormon scripture, God lived on or near Kolob — the inspiration for the planet Kobol in “Battlestar Galactica,” written by Glen Larson, a Mormon.
The authoritarian Mormon church still does not have equal status for women, blacks and certainly not gays. It provided the majority of the funding for California’s Prop 8 against same-sex marriage.
The Mormon boys do a tap dance wearing glittery pink vests, singing about how to switch off feeling gay: “Go flick; it’s a nifty little Mormon trick.”
When Ugandans cannot relate to Mormon history, Cunningham blends in other myths from “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars,” putting the Angel Moroni on the Death Star.
In the end, the message is not against Mormonism but literalism: that whatever our different myths, metaphors and rituals, the real purpose of religion is to give us a higher purpose and a sense of compassion in the universe.
“The moral,” the writer Andrew Sullivan observed on opening night, “is that religion is both insane and necessary at the same time.”
Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:
With Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria now all embroiled in rebellions, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that the authoritarian lid that has smothered freedom in the Arab world for centuries may be coming off all 350 million Arab peoples at once. Personally, I think that is exactly what is going to happen over time. Warm up the bus for all the Arab autocrats — and for you, too, Ahmadinejad. As one who has long believed in the democracy potential for this part of the world, color me both really hopeful and really worried about the prospects.
I am hopeful because the Arab peoples are struggling for more representative and honest government, which is what they will need to overcome their huge deficits in education, freedom and women’s empowerment that have been holding them back. But getting from here to there requires crossing a minefield of tribal, sectarian and governance issues.
The best way to understand the potential and pitfalls of this transition is to think about Iraq. I know that the Iraq war and the democracy-building effort that followed have been so bitterly divisive in America that no one wants to talk about Iraq. Well, today we’re going to talk about Iraq because that experience offers some hugely important lessons for how to manage the transition to democratic governance of a multisectarian Arab state when the iron lid is removed.
Democracy requires 3 things: citizens — that is, people who see themselves as part of an undifferentiated national community where anyone can be ruler or ruled. It requires self-determination — that is, voting. And it requires what Michael Mandelbaum, author of “Democracy’s Good Name,” calls “liberty.”
“While voting determines who governs,” he explained, “liberty determines what governments can and cannot do. Liberty encompasses all the rules and limits that govern politics, justice, economics and religion.”
And building liberty is really hard. It will be hard enough in Middle East states with big, homogenous majorities, like Egypt, Tunisia and Iran, where there is already a powerful sense of citizenship and where national unity is more or less assumed. It will be doubly hard in all the other states, which are divided by tribal, ethnic and sectarian identities and where the threat of civil war is ever present.
Not one was more divided in that way than Iraq. What did we learn there? First, we learned that when you removed the authoritarian lid the tensions between Iraqi Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis erupted as each faction tested the other’s power in a low-grade civil war. But we also learned that alongside that war many Iraqis expressed an equally powerful yearning to live together as citizens. For all of the murderous efforts by Al Qaeda to trigger a full-scale civil war in Iraq, it never happened. And in Iraq’s last election, the candidate who won the most seats, a Shiite, Ayad Allawi, ran on a multisectarian platform with Sunnis. Lesson: While these tribal identities are deeply embedded and can blow up at anytime, there are also powerful countertrends in today’s more urbanized, connected, Facebooked Middle East.
“There is a problem of citizenship in the Arab world,” said Michael Young, the Lebanese author of “The Ghosts of Martyr’s Square,” “but that is partly because these regimes never allowed their people to be citizens. But despite that, you can see how much the demonstrators in Syria have been trying to stay nonviolent and speak about freedom for the whole nation.”
Lesson two: What was crucial in keeping the low-grade civil war in Iraq from exploding, what was crucial in their writing of their own Constitution for how to live together, and what was crucial in helping Iraqis manage multiple fair elections was that they had a credible neutral arbiter throughout this transition: the U.S.
America played that role at a staggering cost, and not always perfectly, but played it we did. In Egypt, the Egyptian Army is playing that arbiter role. Somebody has to play it in all these countries in revolt, so they can successfully lay the foundations of both democracy and liberty. Who will play that role in Libya? In Syria? In Yemen?
The final thing Iraq teaches us is that while external arbiters may be necessary, they are not sufficient. We’re leaving Iraq at the end of the year. Only Iraqis can sustain their democracy after we depart. The same will be true for all the other Arab peoples hoping to make this transition to self-rule. They need to grow their own arbiters — their own Arab Nelson Mandelas. That is, Shiite, Sunni and tribal leaders who stand up and say to each other what Mandela’s character said about South African whites in the movie “Invictus”: “We have to surprise them with restraint and generosity.”
This is what the new leaders of these Arab rebellions will have to do — surprise themselves and each other with a sustained will for unity, mutual respect and democracy. The more Arab Mandelas who emerge, the more they will be able to manage their own transitions, without army generals or outsiders. Will they emerge? Let’s watch and hope. We have no other choice. The lids are coming off.
And now here’s Mr. Kristof:
Before she was arrested, tortured, stripped and subjected to a “virginity exam” — all for her pro-democracy activities — Salwa al-Housiny Gouda admired the Egyptian Army.
Her odyssey is a reminder that the Egyptian revolution that exhilarated so many around the world in January and February remains unfinished. The army is as much in charge as ever, and it has taken over from the police the task of torturing dissidents. President Hosni Mubarak is gone, but in some ways Mubarakism continues.
Ms. Gouda, a 20-year-old hairdresser, is unmarried and strong-willed. She threw herself into the democracy movement early this year, sleeping in a tent on Tahrir Square, also known as Liberation Square, the movement’s epicenter.
Like the other activists, she focused her rage initially on Mr. Mubarak and on the police, rather than the army. “I trusted the army,” she told me, and she and other protesters often chanted slogans like, “The army and the people are one.”
But that was an illusion. Never squeaky clean, the army has increasingly taken over the role of domestic security from the police and seems fed up with disorder. On March 9, it moved in to clear Tahrir Square, pulling down tents and detaining more than 190 demonstrators.
Ms. Gouda was one of about 19 women arrested that day. Though the army has denied all such accusations, her testimony is confirmed by other detainees and by human rights groups. They say that the women were taken to the Egyptian Museum, a tourist landmark beside Tahrir Square, tied up or handcuffed to the gate outside it, and then slapped, beaten and subjected to electric shocks.
“They didn’t give us a chance to speak,” Ms. Gouda said. “They used an electric prod whenever we tried to speak.”
The prisoners were later taken to the military prosecutor’s office, where the men were photographed as criminals beside a table full of clubs and Molotov cocktails supposedly confiscated from them. (In my experience, the people with such weapons in Egypt are usually plainclothes police officers.) The women were paraded before cameras and told that they faced charges of prostitution — leaving them terrified at the thought of the accusations being broadcast on state television.
Ms. Gouda was extraordinarily strong in telling her story. But at one point she broke down in tears. “They know that the way they can harm a woman the most is by accusing her of prostitution,” she said.
Later, the detainees were taken to a military prison. Ms. Gouda said that the women were strip-searched by a female guard, but — perhaps to add to the humiliation — the search was conducted in a room with doors and windows wide open. She said she did not know if anybody looked in.
Then the unmarried women were subjected to a forced “virginity exam,” conducted on a bed in a prison hallway, by a man. When the women pleaded to be examined by a woman instead, they were threatened with cattle prods, Ms. Gouda said.
“I was shattered,” she recalled. “My whole body was shaking.” Her legs were covered with a blanket, but a half-dozen military men stood behind her as she was examined, Ms. Gouda said.
“I was ready to be beaten,” she added. “But the worst moment was when I was stripped and examined.”
Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch said that such exams were not customary in prisons and that the point was to humiliate female activists. “In this context, they’re sexual assaults,” she noted — but added that the military is above the law.
Ms. Gouda and the other women were all released after a few days, and in the end none were actually charged with prostitution. But many male democracy activists have been sentenced to prison terms.
A Cairo human rights lawyer, Ragia Omran, estimates that perhaps 1,000 Egyptians who have been arrested by the military since the protests began remain in detention today. Some have been sentenced to five years in prison after military trials lasting 30 minutes or less, without any right to choose their own lawyers, she said.
Ms. Omran is accustomed to representing other detainees. But during a referendum on constitutional changes this month, she herself was seized by soldiers while observing the polls. By her account, she was roughed up, strip-searched, shouted at and detained for hours until her well-connected family and friends managed to get her released.
All this is a huge letdown from the triumph when “people power” toppled President Mubarak. The lesson may be that revolution is not a moment but a process, a gritty contest of wills that unfolds painstakingly long after the celebrations have died and the television lights have dimmed.
“The revolution isn’t over yet,” Ms. Omran told me. “Freedom isn’t for free.”
