Stink Off 

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When I was young growing up in Bingham Canyon, there were still a couple of functioning outhouses. Bingham Canyon is no longer there, you know, as the gigantic minerals mine up in the Oquirrh Mountains has eaten nearly every last bit of it, save for the very bottom of what was once the canyon around the area of Copperton.

Amazing to me is that my old homestead of Lead Mine, just up the road from Copperton, is not yet dug up and buried. The homes are all gone—the gardens, the yards, the bar, the café, everything. But up on a hillside, I can still see a small divot where the outhouse once stood behind one of the old shanty shacks that comprised Lead Mine.

For a short time, I collected antique bottles with my friend Max Davis. A favorite dig was at a former town dump right along the sepia-hued Bingham creek—sepia-hued because it also served as the town sewer. All things imaginable would float by. You don't want to know. The dump site was a rich trove and we'd sell some of our finds to the local antique dealer.

It was also known that digging for goodies at former outhouse locations could yield treasure, too. People using outhouses accidentally dropped coins into their pits, or used them to hide things like the whiskey bottles they weren't supposed to be drinking from.

If a fellow dropped something from his drawers, or if a lady spilled her purse, whatever was fallen into the pit was left behind, not worth the burden nor stench to go digging for. Today, however, such items as mobile phones are falling into outhouses—at campsites for instance—and really nutty folks have taken to diving in after them.

In April, a woman in Olympia National Park fell eight feet into an outhouse pit trying to retrieve her mobile phone. For sure, Hunter Biden wouldn't have done that. She was rescued and washed down sometime later, fully disgusted with herself, but not fully removed of the stink that comes with spending a time with other peoples' business.

And this past week, it was reported via photograph on Reddit (100% true therefore!) that a fellow fell into an outhouse "vault" after removing his clothes and diving in after his dropped cell phone. He became wedged and was only gotten out when passersby heard his shouts three hours later—but not before one of them took his picture. He too was a mess and he too stunk to high heaven.

The above are the modern versions of the old adage to never play with pigs because you both get dirty—but the pig likes it. Politicians use that phrase often. Not only do politicians not care if you wrestle with them and get dirty, some rather enjoy it.

One in particular, our former President Donald Trump, was expert at pig wrestling. He took on all comers and beat them all, such is he expert at winning at all costs. Everyone who ever wrestled Donald Trump became dirty.

You remember the year 2016, of course, when nearly everyone in the Republican Party was fast distancing themselves from Trump. Utah Republican politicians like Senator Mike Lee and Representative Chris Stewart were not even close to the Trump wagon back then, with Curtis proclaiming that Trump "did not represent Republican ideals ... he is our Mussolini," and Lee, who did not vote for Trump in 2016 and asked that Trump leave the race because he was "weighing down the American people."

After Trump won, both men became supplicants: Lee famously comparing Trump to the Book of Mormon's Captain Moroni; and Stewart trading his military integrity to became a reliable pro-Trump cable TV talking head.

There may be a short term reward, but no matter what, the stink of playing with pigs is tough to remove. Both those men stink to high heaven these days—worse than they did just months ago, if you thought that impossible.

Lee has gone nearly full radio silent since it was reported that military nuclear secrets may have been among the documents removed from Trump's Mar-a-Lago home. To Lee, dooming a democracy and overthrowing a government wasn't a high bar. But fearing for his radioactive soul is, apparently.

Same for Stewart. He was known to mildly disavow a Trump action here and there, like saying that it's "inappropriate" to call for violence, for instance (Owey, Chris. Ouch!). But he's been just as rabid in defending Trump since, after all, the dual devils of Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are worse. Chris, then, is just a whiner who hasn't done a damn thing for his district other than to whine.

Last week, he stood arm-in-arm with what is now the low bar of GOP intelligentsia: some of his fellow Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee (or as Trump calls it, the House Un-Intellegence committee and now we know why). There he was with fellow flunkies like Elise Stefanik, Paul Gosar, and Mike Turner as he said—in all seriousness when speaking about the contents of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago and how they came to be there in the first place—"Was it nuclear? Heck, maybe it was aliens."

Really, Captain Stewart? Really? American citizens trained and paid you to defend our flag and nation, not rip it apart. If an alarm sounded today, I'm not sure Stewart would aim his missiles at an adversary or at Washington, D.C. He's far from the clean young man who swore on a bible to protect our nation.

He's become the lifelong smoker who can't smell the tobacco on his own flannel jacket. He has anosmia. He thinks he's clean. Nope. And he'll never wash the stink off, either.

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