Grondahl, Bagley, Kirby Show There Is a Place for Mormon Humor
No CommentsUpdated: 12/12/2009 11:38:20 AM
Thirty-one years ago this Christmas, a little book of Mormon cartoons by Calvin Grondahl, Freeway to Perfection , hit the LDS market like an underwater earthquake, suddenly erupting on the surface.
Brigham Young University students lined up by the hundreds to get a signed copy. Deseret Book couldn’t keep it in stock. The green-covered wonder was passed around surreptitiously at church and openly at Mormon family parties. White-haired Relief Society presidents bought dozens for their children and grandchildren.
“It was as groundbreaking as Columbus finding the new world,” recalls longtime Salt Lake Tribune political cartoonist Pat Bagley, who has published about a dozen Mormon cartoon books. “It opened up a new world of Mormon humor.”
Tribune humor columnist Robert Kirby says Grondahl, then an editorial cartoonist at the Deseret News , set the standard by which every LDS humorist would be measured.
Kirby remembers flipping through Freeway during a Mormon sacrament meeting when he landed on Grondahl’s cartoon of a father holding up a monster baby for congregational approval.
He couldn’t stop laughing and had to leave the chapel — a moment he marks as the beginning of his (more…)
A Failure of Capitalism by Richard Posner
No CommentsRichard Posner’s New Book
A Failure of Capitalism: Preface
The world’s banking system collapsed last fall, was placed on life support at a cost of some trillions of dollars, and remains comatose. We may be too close to the event to grasp its enormity. A vocabulary rich only in euphemisms calls what has happened to the economy a “recession.” We are well beyond that. We are in the midst of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
It began as a recession–that is true–in December 2007, though it was not so gentle a downturn that it should have taken almost a year for economists to agree that a recession had begun then.(Economists have become a lagging indicator of our economic troubles.)
The recession had been triggered by a sharp nationwide drop in housing prices the previous summer that had caused the market in “subprime”–very risky–mortgage loans to collapse. Housing prices had been bid up to unsustainable heights in the early 2000s. When the market decided that houses were no longer such a super investment, many people who were over-mortgaged relative to the value of their houses defaulted, and either abandoned their houses or were forced out by foreclosures.
The result was a glut of unsold houses and a drastic reduction in the amount of home building, as well as a great many nonperforming mortgages. Two mortgage hedge funds owned by the investment bank Bear Stearns went broke in the summer of 2007, along with American Home Mortgage Corporation and three investment funds owned by the French bank BNP Paribas ( BNPQY.PK – news - people ). Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, narrowly averted bankruptcy.
The recession was overtaken by a financial crisis in March 2008, when Bear Stearns itself collapsed. The crisis became acute in mid-September, when the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers ( LEHMQ – news - people ), the distress sale of Merrill Lynch, the near collapse and ensuing government takeover of Fannie Mae ( FNM – news - people ) and Freddie Mac ( FRE – news - people ) (giant buyers and insurers of residential mortgages), and the bailout of American International Group ( AIG – news - people ), the nation’s largest insurance company, triggered a sharp drop (more…)
