AoE Lookback: The Beginning

Featured Content by Thaddeus Stanley, Senior Publications Officer

The Army of Epiphenomenon was started in 1980 by a group of young, militant nogoodniks. The youths, having become disillusioned by the educational system that the government was providing “free of charge,” left high school and their small rural town in Southwestern Utah to search the hills surrounding Parowan, Utah for a militia to join. The area they chose seemed to be the ideal place to find a band of camouflage clad, gun toting hillbillies that shared the boys’ negative view of the ever-enlarging Federal Government. The young men chose well, for those very hills were indeed crawling with unwashed militiamen, but for as much as the AoE’s founders wanted to be apart of a militia, the Parowan militiamen were equally adamant about the boys getting “the hell out these dadgum hills.” And left they did, before the hillbillies “sent them back to Uncle Sam with their asses full of lead.”

It seemed that for all their angst, they were missing, or rather not missing, an essential characteristic necessary for membership in a militia; that, of course, being teeth. Unfortunately for the boys, they had grown up accustom to brushing two to three times a day. While each of them had their own specific routine, they could all agree that a good brushing consisted of up and down strokes, back and forth strokes, and certainly a fair bit of circular motion cresting and dipping at the respective gum lines. It must have been quite a shock for the Parowan militiamen to see three sets of brilliantly white gleaming teeth reflecting the horror that was the rot and decay of the hillbillies’ mouths. Perhaps it was jealousy or simply mistrust of those with clean, healthy teeth, but whatever the case, it seemed to be a pandemic of militiamen in rural places across this great land. 

The boys left Parowan in search of another militia to call their own, but every time they came across another militia, the response was the same. The greetings from the militiamen they encountered on their quest ranged from simple hostility to hellish rage. After one such encounter, the boys spent a week picking bird shot from one another’s buttocks. At one point, the boys even considered pulling a few of their own teeth and taking a few days off from brushing; but in the end, reason prevailed and they decided against defacing the teeth they had spent so many years caring for and polishing to perfection.

These young men, the outcasts of outcasts as they were, were left with only one way to release their pent up aggression; that of course being to start their own militia. Their militia was to be the militia for the rest of us, those with good teeth and bad teeth alike, hapless layabouts, and even those with college learning. In 1980, these three brave young men started, what truly was, the anti-militia militia.

To this day we still hold true to the vision of Barnaby Jensen, Dixie Larkin, and Frank Stahlie. We hold fast to the belief that good dental hygiene should be rewarded, not despised. We believe that the government is too large and too flippant with their destruction of the Bill of Rights. We look to the past to seek wisdom for facing the future, and we stand ready, toothbrushes and all, to defend the spirit that guided the foundation of this once great county.