The broad humor of the 2011 South Park Book of Mormon Broadway musical is heavily rooted in the supposed naivety and sheltered nature of LDS mission service, juxtaposing the cringe of these painfully earnest and repressed American missionaries living in their own little bubble against the horrors of sub-Saharan Africa. The persistent popularity of this musical is a touch ironic nowadays, given how the LDS Church is currently experiencing its highest rates of growth in sub-Saharan Africa, but also because if there’s one group of young people who are emphatically not trapped in a sheltered bubble, it’s these self-same missionaries who are daily interacting with a staggering diversity of human beings, including drug addicts, abuse survivors, the broken, the despised, and the passionate. We were getting far more outside our comfort zones and interacting with a far greater diversity of human beings than the mockers in their great and spacious buildings.

Yet I must also concede that there is nevertheless still a bubble of sorts that missionaries inhabit; for during those two years of service, we were actively discouraged from following the news, watching TV and movies, or listening to Pop music. Most RMs upon their homecoming find themselves having to catch up on two solid years of Pop Culture and World events—and though there are obvious downsides to the latter, there are also underappreciated benefits: namely, if you are out of the loop on the news, you are also out of the loop on the propaganda.

I served in Puerto Rico (as I’ve detailed too often before) from September of 2002-2004, you see; my mission trainer was in the MTC during 9/11, and I myself entered the MTC just before the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Though George W. Bush was already making grumblings about Iraq as part of the new “axis of evil“ when I got dropped off in Provo, it didn’t occur to any of us that America would be starting a second war so quickly upon the heels of the first.

Hence you can imagine the shock of so many of us when the invasion of Iraq was announced in March of 2003, while I was still in my greenie area. This was a major development we learned from our various investigators and contacts and letters from home, never because we were following the news.

Hence, it was fascinating to observe the confusion among the slightly-older missionaries: “I thought we were hunting Osama Bin Laden, where the heck did Saddam Hussein come from?” they quite reasonably asked. Iraq obviously had nothing to do with 9/11, we all knew, so why were we wasting military resources on this massive distraction? I need to here emphasize that these were not nascent leftists or budding anti-war libertarians asking these questions, but a bunch of overwhelmingly born-and-bred Republicans from Utah and Idaho, who had simply been away from the propaganda for a year or two.

Because by contrast, the new greenies fresh out of the MTC in 2003 were totally gung-ho about the invasion: they had all their jokes and Simpsons quotes lined up about France being a bunch of “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and how this war was essential for securing our sacred freedoms and liberties for vague, amorphous reasons that they could never explain when pressed by their trainers, who questioned the rationale for the war not out of any partisan malice, but simple confusion based on the bare and obvious facts. It was wild to witness how quickly the propaganda had taken hold just within a half year of absence from the “real” world—or how easily a bunch of twenty-year-olds could see right through it after only a year or so of merely not watching the news.

So yes, there is indeed a mission bubble—and I argue it is an absolutely essential one. And especially in our latest era of governmental propaganda pushing us to invade yet another OPEC country without right or provocation, it may be more important than ever to get back in that bubble, so that we can see all the more clearly.

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Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief came out during my mission; it was one of those many pop-cultural artifacts I had to catch up on after my homecoming. Its title was in obvious response to the fraudulent 2000 election of George W. Bush who then promptly exploited a national tragedy for the invasion of Iraq. It was plain as day to Radiohead as well that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, that this was all pretext; hence how mad it drove them that all the clear evidence of one’s eyes were being disregarded.

Of course, we’ve been warned of such things before. The album’s lead single and opening track, in fact, “2+2=5,” is in direct allusion to George Orwell’s 1984, which describes a near-future totalitarian regime wherein “The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Tens of millions of people nation-wide, in both the US and the UK, had to do exactly that to justify the invasion. Hence Thom York’s snarling, repeated chorus of “You have not been/paying attention/paying attention/paying attention!” Nor is he declaiming against some passive ignorance, but a very willful and deliberate rejection of the evidence of your eyes. You have to consciously choose to reject the obvious fact that the Iraq invasion was always about oil and never anything but oil—as is Venezuela today. Just as you have to choose to ignore the obvious evidence of your eyes that an innocent woman was just summarily executed by ICE in Minneapolis. Or that annexing Greenland breaks the eighth commandment. Or that January 6, 2021 was a violent terrorist attack on American Democracy. Or that the sitting president is obviously a rapist on the Epstein list. And so on and so forth. You have to deliberately choose to “not pay attention.”

Mormon marks the final decline of the Nephites by noting how they “did willfully rebel” against God—that is, they actively chose to no longer pay attention. Even in 1984, the protagonist Winston had to be sadistically tortured into accepting that 2+2=5; today, tens of millions choose to believe so of their own free will and choice. The Jaredites did similar, willfully choosing not to pay attention as they were actively destroying themselves—and note that Ether’s solution was to withdraw into the “cavity of a rock.” That is, sometimes the only sane response to the world is to withdraw from it; which I dare say is exactly what we did on our missions. Ironically and paradoxically, withdrawing from the propaganda of the world is how we start to pay all the closer attention to it. It’s the lesson I wish so many more of us had taken home after our missions—which is exactly when most of us stopped paying attention again.