Spooked by democracy, Utah lawmakers swarm like angry wasps. 

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This week's column is going to be more difficult to read than normal. It's never easy to read in the first place.

I'm not one to make excuses for my lack of cogent thought or for the weaving meanderings that occur when I take to typing. I'm especially not one to make excuses to the people who often point out those blemishes, for I have come to note—and not reluctantly—that most of the people who don't like what I have to say primarily comprise a group of Utahns that some might consider to be indoctrinated knuckleheads.

Not me, however. I've grown to like them, in the same way a child likes to be served beef liver—with both awe and disgust, but somehow knowing that in time I might get used to them.

So I sometimes cut them some slack. If I'm being honest, however, they don't see me in the same potentially positive light (given the indoctrination part) and it's always a song and dance with them, with me usually being their private dance floor.

Per my imprecision today, I've already hit the backspace and delete keys at least 14 times, though you wouldn't know that unless you were some kind of ether savant. The reason for this spastic keystroking is that a couple of my fingers are swollen, my wrist aches, my forearm looks like a single welt and I itch like crazy at every body location where wasps stung me a couple of days ago.

I was minding my own business, pruning a holly shrub of some variety when my daughter, raking nearby, scraped open a ground-level wasp nest. "Game on," said the wasps.

In seconds, we'd both been stung too many times to count and we were quickly escorted out of the yard and into our house where about a dozen or so of them gallantly followed us inside. I don't know if wasps award each other for valor or gallantry. Probably no one does.

I doubt that even Karl von Frisch knew. He—as some students in the Utah public school system well know—was the noted apiologist who discovered that bees communicate via a particular waggle type of dance, and he was summarily awarded the Nobel Prize for his research.

I mentioned that only "some" Utah students will know who Von Frisch was. That's because a good many of other Utah students are disallowed by their home school teachers and local school board monitors from studying tomes that include mysterious words like apiologist—or even melittologist for that matter—because, well, such a subject potentially regards the machinations of all things related to how the birds and the bees do "it."

Topics related to sex and sexuality (birds and bees, even real ones) are not particularly welcome in the proper schools of Utah. Anyway, such is better learned as God intended, behind a Fairview haystack.

Thus, Utah faces the uncertain future of educating a populace that cannot tell the difference between a wasp, a bee and a hornet. Our children will not learn if a wasp can or cannot do the waggle dance.

Ahh, well. Just so long as Utah kids eventually come to learn that, allegorically speaking (Utahns love their allegories), today's story of gallant backyard wasps is no different that the story of our own spew of Utah's primarily Republican politicians: they are pissy little creatures, who don't give thanks for the nectar within the many flowers and garden vegetables provided them and rather, they return the good favor by stinging the hands that feed them.

By now, you've likely heard the Republican supermajority up on Utah's Capitol Hill is making moves that are intended to keep silent Utah citizens who disfavor heavy-handed, pushy, arrogant and dangerous supermajority rule. It's been a consistent theme in my lifetime that the Utah Republicans who run our state are prone to run roughshod over people at any opportunity.

The trigger for their latest democracy suppression act is that Utahns are striking back at attempts to keep their snobby rule in place for all time and eternity. Witness—the Utah Supreme Court recently upheld that a decisive citizens' initiative intended to construct fair congressional boundaries, replete with objective suggestions for sensible and fair congressional districts, was constitutionally protected.

"Game on," said the wasps (no pun intended) who comprise the Utah House and Senate.

Faster than one could say "let's get the Eff outta here," our Republican leaders (save but a few, notably retiring Sen. Daniel Thatcher of West Valley) responded with some new ideas of their own. What they want is this: To abandon any semblance of fair play and to be able to pass the legislation they deem best, the public be damned.

They can sugarcoat it all day long, but their efforts will allow them to disregard, amend or repeal public initiatives. It's a power grab that flies in the face of what those same elected officials were sworn in to do—protect and serve the public good. It is antithetical to anything ever taught to a Utah school child about what it means to be an American and to live in a just and fair society.

In their view, serving the public means ignoring the public, because they know what is best for the public and the public does not. That's usually a sermon left best at a Sunday pulpit, but there's no mistaking that such sentiment does not derive of community need, but of top-down management style. And where have we seen that?

In the hive, ladies and gentlemen. What we project as a hive of unified worker bees has been taken over by angry wasps.

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