More Proof That Life As We Know It Shows No Improvement. By Jeff Smith MORMON MEN GET to have as many wives as they need to take care of business around the house, around the yard, around the kitchen, the nursery, the bedroom, back seat of the car, wherever. So one assumes that while Barbara Blewster is off to Phoenix to assure fellow legislators Barbara Leff that she doesn't look Jewish, and Tom Horne that he doesn't act Jewish, Mr. Blewster back in Dewey is still getting his daily bread and his nightly nookie. What? You say Mormons no longer practice polygamy? You say I'm an insensitive bigot? Well you're right, of course, but I practice the vices of ignorance and bigotry by way of turning Rep. Blewster's prejudice and stupidity on its head, so she can bite herself in her own nether-parts, if you will. Or if you won't. I don't much care. Barbara Blewster may very well be an able and effective representative of her constituency in Dewey. At any rate she very likely is a representative representative. Dewey, like Mayer, is one of those wide spots in the road after you exit I-17 at Cordes Junction and head west toward Prescott along Highway 69. (As an aside, are there any others out there who used to steal the markers off that road, to decorate their college apartments?) Dewey and Mayer once were cozy and picturesque little ranching communities on the backroad from Hell to Heaven. One could flee the urban squalor of Phoenix and seek the solace of Arizona and America's last, great Norman Rockwell small town: Prescott. Today Prescott is turning into a Victorian Western theme park, crawling with Phoenicians, Los Angelistas, even New Yorkers, and virtually every mile of Highway 69 between Cordes and Whiskey Row is lined with shit-box houses of the worst sort of sprawl. It's one of the prominent cysts of this cancerous growth that Barbara Blewster was elected to send to Phoenix to serve. Dewey, Mayer, Prescott Valley, Chino Valley and Cherry--once quaint little crossroads--are turning to pre-fab preposterousness. I would not be entirely surprised to learn that a majority of her constituents heartily approve of the moronic (which is not to say, "Mormonic") stereotypes she is perpetuating in her public dialogue. What she said, as reported in last week's dailies, issued out of a late-night work session in the Legislature. House Republican leadership kept the kids after school working on a budget, even on Wednesday night, the first night of Passover. Hey, ain't no thing: there are only two Jews in the state House. Who cares if they miss Seder? Not the Republicans who run the House, and certainly not Rep. Blewster. She expressed her surprise that Rep. Leff, a Paradise Valley Republican, would object to working through Passover, while the leadership promised that nobody would work on Good Friday. Leff reported that Blewster told her: "I didn't know you were Jewish. You don't look Jewish. You don't have a big hooked nose." Well there you are. How's a girl supposed to tell? And as to Horne, another Republican from Phoenix, Blewster said, "I'm surprised you're Jewish. You'd make a good Mormon." How Blewster arrived at the latter conclusion, Horne did not report. Could she have mistaken a glimpse of his Hanes for one of those Dr. Denton jobs your Mormon wears? Anyway, neither Leff nor Horne went crying to the principal over the affront: they just laughed it off among their more enlightened and empathetic peers. Eventually a story this ripe just has to get out and it did and Blewster issued the kind of outraged-virtue/offended-innocence you'd anticipate from a know-nothing of her sort. "This is not an issue to be discussed in the press at all," she said. Sorry. So I suppose Barbara Blewster's earlier remarks about gays, when she issued an official public message saying, "The perversion that follows homosexuality is bestiality and then human sacrifice and cannibalism," is not an issue to be discussed in the press at all either. But then what is? Perhaps Barbara Blewster's brain is fit fodder for the public prints. The problem there is that unlike a big hooked nose or a set of one-piece underwear with a barndoor for number one, a drop-seat for number two, and a hole for allowing two to become one, Blewster's brain--or the lack thereof--is not readily apparent. I think they ought to fit her with a screw-top head, like those Elvis decanters of whiskey, so we could take a peek into her cranium every now and again, to see if anything has started to grow in there.

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