café crema wrote:
Well if it was a real event...it was apparently well known that the woman's money ran out before the end of the month, why didn't she show up with food isn't that what "relief society" folks are supposed to do? If she really was a couple of days away from getting money and living on flour and water it speaks poorly of the "relief society".
So do these authors cut their teeth writing ridiculous maudlin stories for the Ensign and move on to work at Bonneville in their Heartsell department. God I just can't believe people read this stuff it's just awful, the same kind of crude emotional manipulation junk the JW's drop off.
Indeed. it really does seem unlikely that there is much that is true in this ridiculous little tale.
The question arises: what goes through the head of the person who is writing this kind of fantasy and passing it to the editor of the Ensign for publication? Presumably the same kind of thing that must have gone through the head of Paul H. Dunn before he stood up to tell one of his inspiring (but, as we now know, fictional) stories about himself in General Conference. It would be some mixture of these two modes of thought, I would guess:
1. The Church Is True and does so much good that we must be willing to fortify its members' loyalty and dedication by any means, including writing fiction and presenting it as truth. Anyhow, the story is essentially true because stuff like that happens all the time: I read about it in the Ensign.
2. Hey! If I give the editor a really good story, preferably with a poor widow in it, he may give me a salary raise. It's all crap anyway, so what the heck?
I wonder which mode dominated?