It has now been a decade since Devin G. Durrant, then-First Counselor in the Sunday School General Presidency, infamously introduced the term “ponderize”^[1]Portmanteau of “ponder” and “memorize” in a General Conference talk about scripture study, only to then have to issue an immediate apology when a website selling “Ponderize”-branded t-shirts and wristbands went live that same day. Accusations soon abounded that this General Authority had engaged in “Priestcraft,” wherein “men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world, that they may get gain and praise of the world; but they seek not the welfare of Zion”^[2]2 Nephi 26:29. In a statement on his Facebook page, Brother Durrant acknowledged that the site–supposedly set up by his son–was in “poor judgment on my part.”^[3]Also in poor judgment was him basing an entire General Conference talk around a dork-ass portmanteau literally untranslatable into any other language—seriously, are we an international church or … Continue reading He swiftly promised all profits would go directly to the Church’s mission fund, and the site was taken down later that evening.

I’m not here to re-litigate or dogpile on this ten-year-old gaff, one that I’m reasonably certain Brother Durrant remains deeply embarrassed about, would prefer everyone just forget about already, and has overall been only a footnote in the history of LDS General Conferences^[4]Though boy, what a way to ensure that no one ever forgets your one and only GC talk!. Rather, in fairness to poor Brother Durrant, I would like to instead explore how that whole little “ponderize” kerfuffle was symptomatic of larger trends not only within the Church, but in the world at large that our Church also inhabits^[5]We try to be in the world but not of the world, but let’s be honest, we are still kinda of the world too, aren’t we..

To make a round-about comparison: I’ve been listening to a lot more Political Punk Rock and Hip-Hop lately (for what I trust are fairly self-evident reasons), which has also led me to revisit Gang of Four’s deeply influential^[6]REM and Red Hot Chili Peppers both claimed them as a chief influence; Kurt Cobain once said Nirvana began as a Gang of Four rip-off; they were also regularly cited as an influence by various 2000s … Continue reading 1977 debut album Entertainment! of late. The album was part of the very first wave of British Punk bands^[7]Alongside The Clash and Sex Pistols with explicit political slants^[8]e.g. the very first song on Entertainment!, “Ether,” is about the Long Kesh internment camps in Northern Ireland–which later served as a model for U.S. internment camps in … Continue reading. Here it is relevant to note that vocalist and lyricist Jon King in 1980 acknowledged that Entertainment! was heavily influenced by the Situationists: a collection of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists, prominent in Europe from the late-’50s through the early-’70s. Their political theories were derived from “libertarian Marxism,” which emphasized worker self-governance and direct democracy, as opposed to the state-controlled command-economies and dictatorships of the Soviet Union–not to mention the worker-exploitation and sweat-shops of Western capitalist economies. The Situationist artists, in turn, took their cues from the early-20th century Surrealists and Dadaist painters.

Although the Situationist International had dissolved five years before Entertainment! first dropped, their influence on the fledgling young band was palpable; per Jon King, “where I think that Situationism was good was in the development of its revolutionary tactic: ‘reinvesting’ the cultural past. Situationism conspicuously used popular imagery in order to subvert it–to make the familiar strange, rather than rejecting the familiar out of hand.” His go-to example was a vandalized picture he once found in a book about the 1968 Paris protests: he described it as “a photograph for some kind of perfume and a very glamorous-looking woman on this poster, [but] someone had written on it in French: ‘You know I know I’m exploiting you, but I’m not doing it on purpose’. I got terribly excited by the fact … you can change the meaning of things by the label… I wondered how one could play around with these sorts of ideas in music.” This subversion of commercial imagery into revolutionary slogans became a key facet of Gang of Four lyrics and album art.

Yet what is also interesting is how Gang of Four also did the inverse: took slogans and artifacts of revolutionary intent and subverted them–or at least exposed how they had already been subverted–into something thoroughly commercial and fangless instead. Entertainment!‘s album title, after all, comes from the penultimate track “5.45,” about watching the news about overseas guerilla fighters getting killed overseas on an 18-inch television screen, as though it were just another TV program; in the closing chorus, Jon King belts out repeatedly “Guerrilla war struggle is a new entertainment!” That is, organized revolt had become reduced to mere entertainment in the age of mass-media.

For that matter, the band name itself is derived from the Chinese “Gang of Four” (四人帮)–composed of Mao’s last wife Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen–who oversaw the disastrous “Cultural Revolution” in mainland China under Mao Zedong from 1971 till Mao’s death in 1976. The stated purpose of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the nation of the last remnants of traditional feudalism and Western “bourgeois” decadence; in practice, this resulted in a wide-spread reign of terror, lawlessness, governmental purges, destruction, vandalism, targeting of academics and intellectuals, and economic contraction.^[9]All comparisons to the current regime in Washington D.C. are strictly incidental. When Deng Xiaoping consolidated power after Mao’s death, he swiftly deposed, arrested, and imprisoned the Gang of Four for treason, and the Chinese government began aggressively dismantling all of their worst excesses; mainland China has since gone so far to repudiate the Cultural Revolution that, if there’s two things the nation is now known for today, it’s the great pride they take in their traditional past, and in the strength of their Western-style capitalist economy.^[10]Contemporary China has basically abandoned all forms of communism except the authoritarianism.

But then, that Chinese shift from communism to capitalism had already begun even while the Gang of Four was still newly in power: President “Only-Nixon-Could-Go-To-China” famously visited Beijing in 1972 to formalize economic and political relations with the People’s Republic,^[11]Upsetting not only the government in Taiwan, but also China’s nominal Viet Cong allies, who were still in the midst of a long war with the U.S. under Nixon. beginning the integration of China into the U.S.-dominated global economy and setting them up onto their current trajectory. That is, when this English Post-Punk band^[12]And how fascinating is it that almost in the very moment that Punk first became established as a genre, that Punks immediately began to rebel against that, as well! named themselves Gang of Four in 1976–the same year the original Gang of Four were deposed in China–it was with full awareness that the so-called “Revolution” was already being co-opted by the larger market economy. It was no longer that a French perfume ad could be subverted into a revolutionary slogan, but that a revolution could be subverted into a commercial. As their own first album declared, even Guerilla warfare can be reduced to mere “Entertainment!”; and the Chinese Gang of Four could be co-opted by a British Rock band.^[13]Seriously, I don’t think the Situationist-influenced Gang of Four ever actually supported the brutal Maoist dictatorship when they named themselves that, any more than the anti-KKK Ramones were … Continue reading You can now buy a Che Guevara shirt sewn in a Chinese sweat-shop at the mall. The satire here is biting.

To finally loop back to Brother Durrant: as this site has perhaps all-too-often noted, Joseph Smith, Jr. announced at the organization of the Church, on that very first General Conference on April 6th, 1830, that he wished to lay the foundations of a system that would “revolutionize the world.” Within a year, he was already attempting to establish a Law-of-Consecration, United Order society of neither-rich-nor-poor in Missouri, in accordance with Acts 2:44-45, the Savior’s own pronouncements in Matthew 19:202-24, the Book of Mormon’s own 4 Nephi 1:3, and his own personal revelations in D&C 42:30-39. This is the same Zion society that Smith’s successor Brigham Young attempted to set up in Utah territory, in the communities of Brigham City and Ordersville specifically. If ever there was a new religion fully set-up to resist its own co-option and commercialization into the global market economy, you’d think it would be this self-same Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Yet if there’s a more deep-red, anti-Socialist state in the union today than Utah, I don’t know it; nor was it especially unusual or odd when Brother Durrant awkwardly tried to release a line of “Ponderize” t-shirts and wristbands in 2015. It was, honestly, completely believable that it hadn’t even occurred to Brother Durrant that his new website would go over poorly until it did–because, what, do we as a general Church culture behave all that differently? Can you not purchase pictures, figurines, tie-pins, necklaces, home-decor, and, yes, wristbands with the Temple on it–you know, the place where we make our highest covenants to keep the Law of Consecration? Can you not purchase BYU t-shirts today that were also sewn in Chinese sweat-shops? Have we not become just as commercial as modern China–and everyone else, for that matter? It’s all just Entertainment now.

So I’m willing to be charitable to ol’ Brother Durrant, because it’s not like the whole rest of the world is doing any better–is in fact doing far worse, frankly. But it’s a difference of degree, not kind; and it’s worth recalling in moments like these how sincerely the Savior meant what he said about camels and eyes of needles^[14]Matthew 19:20-24; another scripture to “ponderize.”—and what He therefore expects the Church that bears his name to do before He comes again. Ponderize that.