If
there’s one article that came out a year a half ago that I’m still floored by
(but have just gotten around to writing about now), it is Lawrence Wright’s
brilliant piece in the New Yorker about Scientology viewed through the exhausted
lens of Hollywood screenwriter Paul Haggis.
No matter how insurmountable my hatred may be for some of his movies (he
fucking wrote and directed Crash, a film that made me feel less like a
human, and more like a bleeding pile of ears and eyes), Haggis’s depiction of
life as a Scientologist-turned-defector left me whispering to myself, “this is
astounding” and “something strange is afoot at the Gold Base”.
Reading
really weird stories about America’s
most successful twentieth-century religion isn’t anything new. Since
2005, I think at least half the country cocked our heads in a niacin-induced
haze trying to figure out whether Tom Cruise pulled the old
man-eating-toaster-bit on Katie Holmes, or if he and she were actually engaging
in love-sex. But having grown up in a state famous for its comparably cultish
and highly ridiculed religion myself, I’ve been used to people inflating rumors
they hear about Mormonism to a ludicrous degree; so when I read things like how
Jenna Elfman and Giovanni Ribisi play hospital in the middle of a volcano, I
tend to take them with a grain of salt.
But
whoa. Sea-Org. Coerced abortions. Human-trafficking. Girlfriend auditions. Disappearances! I’ve heard most of it before, but for it to
be taken seriously by a highly respected journalist!? If any of the claims born out of this
voluminous amount of research hold any water, we’ve got a little monster on our
hands.
The
interminable length of the piece may dissuade some from even giving it a
chance, but I highly recommend reading the article in its entirety. Not so
you’ll have more ammunition for shitting all over religions in general at your
parents’ house on a Sunday night (because people fucking suck when they do
that. Please don’t fucking suck by asserting
your own unsolicited superiority on people with different views). No, no.
But just so you get to behold what a microcosm Scientology is of the older,
more popular religions of the world. You start making sense of why such a
bizarre-seeming faith began, and why it has prospered. Speed, self-regard, celebrity and mountains
of money may not have been the cornerstones of L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings, but
he certainly had his finger on the pulse on what modern society would be
obsessing over in the near future. In
other words, he picked followers that would stick. Also, whether you like cults or loathe cults,
watching Scientologists have to flounder through every single PR blunder they
make in front of today’s intense media scrutiny is fascinating! We didn’t get to see the Grand Inquisition
televised, but we do get to watch Kirstie
Alley nose dive into the Celebrity Centre parking lot (I think it’ll happen in
2014…right around the time she graduates to OT VII, and thinks she can fly).
I
guess it would have been simpler just to say that the article is
riveting. Also, if someone out there would please come over to my place
to clean my room, cut my toenails, give me a multivitamin that doesn’t make me
itch all over, and make me generally healthy again (while keeping me skinny, of
course), I will present you with a bouquet of love. Serious, folks.
I think my leg nerves are starting to give out.
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