Space Opera

In a sense, no book, movie or any media experience fails to change the life of the person experiencing it.  Assuming one is paying attention at all, each such experience will, even if poorly, convey a lesson in story-telling.  At its best, that lesson might lead to wonder, epiphany even.  At worst, the consumer might complain of two hours wasted on a terrible movie, or close the back cover of a book just happy it’s over.

But there are stories, ideas, that poke above the surface of the churning sea of media we’re swimming.  For me, the winnowing process starts with identifying those writers and directors whose work stays with me.

Kurt Vonnegut topped a list, and Wes Anderson.  Then David Foster Wallace, Buster Keaton–so many others that the list becomes unmanageable, maybe meaningless.  And those are just the makers.  Drilling down to one work that changed me seemed impractical.  As I grappled with the question, my partner asked whether “all that scientology stuff” I read about might not be the thing.  It is the thing.

More than twenty years ago, on one of my endless rounds of tag sales, libraries and used book stores, I bought a copy of Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.  Gardner, a mathematician and science writer for “Popular Science” also wrote a good number of books designed for the lay reader.  Fads & Fallacies became one step on a long and skeptical trip  I’m still taking.

I own at least four copies of Fads and Fallacies, and I’ve given some away.  For the book, Gardner compiled separate articles on various forms of crankery and pseudoscience.  I have sampled the various chapters many, many times-some more than others. From Bridey Murphy and ESP, to UFOs and hollow earth histories, if there was an off-kilter business plan or philosophy available in mid twentieth century, Gardner likely covered it.   Those he got to he tears right down to size.

It is for his section on the writings of L. Ron Hubbard that I have to thank Mr. Gardner particularly.  There was no “aha” moment, no breaking of the clouds, but I can truly say that reading about dianetics for the first time changed my life.

Before I too am perceived as a crank, allow me to point out that I am not now nor have I ever been a scientologist.  I’ve read millions of words on the subject, many by Hubbard, but far more from critics and ex-members.  From self-published books direct-to-the-internet, to the book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief by Pulitzer winner Lawrence Wright, I have read more books on this subject than is perhaps good for me.

For those thinking that a religion founded by a pulp writer in the fifties couldn’t possibly be relevant today, know that Scientology marches on, with tens of thousands of followers around the world, and billions in assets.  That is billions with a “b”.

Most think of Hubbard’s creation, if they consider it at all, as that Hollywood UFO religion, the one with Cruise and Travolta. That view is limited, and dangerous.  It’s about more than loony celebrities with money to burn.  I could truly go on for days about it.  Broad and nearly gleeful criminality, insidious innate evil, in word and deed.

Belief, true believers, can be powerful, awful things.  Just from a subset in my lifetime, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Reverend Moon, Osama Bin Laden, Shoko Asohara, Westboro Baptist Church, David Koresh, Marshall Applewhite, all the Kim Jongs, Warren Jeffs and many others illustrate the outsized power just a fervent, motivated few can wield.  As I type, true believers of some stripe are having their bodies collected after attacking and killing at least fourteen in San Bernadino, California.  This is live on TV in the other room.   Right now.

While it is a peculiar lens through which to view things, Scientology presents a new way for me to examine the nature of belief, and the actions which inevitably unwind.  With Scientology, as many things, it is much worse than you think.  I read about it every day.

One of the books I considered as a life changer is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.  I remember it as harrowing, lonely and difficult.  But I have no real recall of the characters and their times.  One thing I won’t forget is a comparison made there between fire and rust.  Anderson allows that each of these destructive processes is,essentially, the same.

An object combines with oxygen and disappears from the world.  Rust just eats more slowly, chewing away.  As Waco is to fire, Scientology is to rust? Sixty five years on, Hubbard’s ideas are still destroying lives and families, chewing away, visible only as a tabloid label, or a late night show monologue joke.  Thank you Mr. Gardner for making me aware this is more than ephemera.

PS–The Lawrence Wright Scientology book was adapted by Emmy and Oscar winning documentarian film-maker Alex Gibney.  His devastating Scientology film “Going Clear” is on the short list of fifteen for best documentary Oscar this year.

PPS–Californians Charles Manson and Senator Sonny Bono studied scientology extensively.  Charlie was in prison when he did dianetics, though.  It’s not like they sat in class together.