Scientology Examined by the New Yorker

"When we need somebody haunted we investigate. When we investigate we do so noisily always." - L. Ron Hubbard, MANUAL OF JUSTICE, 1959



I first met Scientologists when they showed up (uninvited) at various and sundry Yippie events, particularly Smoke-Ins, throughout the 70s. They seemed to think they could convert pot-smokers. This is possibly because the only time their theology makes any real sense is when you are stoned out of your mind. We regarded them as just another kooky 70s cult, like the Moonies, who would usually show up wherever and whenever the Church of Scientology did. It's like they were competing for the same members.

The Scientologists used to set up shop in a little booth (always smiling smiling smiling in a spooky, eager-beaver fashion), with those little tin-can things for "auditing"--called an E-meter. You see the E-meter, you know who it is.

A band of Yippies trooped up to them at one such local event, rudely pawing the sacred E-meter and peppering them with dumb questions. Finally, one Yippie put one tin can to his ear as the second Yippie started bellowing into it: "What?! What?! Play some BLACK SABBATH!"... causing onlookers to guffaw appreciatively. Rather than becoming merely grim and humorless (as Christians might) or rolling their eyes and telling us all to GROW UP (as right-wingers would), the Scientologists suddenly appeared completely furious and could barely contain their anger. One became red-faced and livid: "Back off!" he hissed at the Black Sabbath fan, who seemed shocked and put the tin can down, appropriately backing off. "Those people are crazy," he whispered to me later. "You can feel the insanity vibe, just radiating off them," he said. Wow, really?

Some years later, I would walk by the same E-meter audit-set-up in downtown Columbus, Ohio (in front of the State House, no less), accompanied by some bright yellow balloons. My daughter, about three years old at the time, pointed at the gaily-colored balloons and wanted one. Pointing at the auditing cans (flanked by numerous copies of the tell-tale book Dianetics), I replied, "You don't want those balloons, hon, those are Scientologist Balloons!" --chortling at my own wit. Then I saw a business-suited-woman standing near the booth, and felt embarrassed she had heard me. I felt sheepish and giggled (exactly as I might act in front of a nun), but the Scientologist (auditing-Thetan, in this case) wasn't amused. She gave me the most hateful, evil look I have ever witnessed--and this includes nasty looks from right-wing maniacs and Reaganoids I have protested against over the decades. It was a glowering, focused, scary look. Damn, these people mean business, I thought. And from that point onward, I was very interested in the Church of Scientology. Rather like The Visitors who come in peace... well, sure they do.

Scientology-founder L. Ron Hubbard once wrote an amazing horror novel titled FEAR, which can scare the beJesus right out of you. After reading it and having a few nightmares, I realized that a man who could write like this could easily get to the bottom of an unruly or confused psyche and turn it upside down in record time. (I could not even bear to put the novel down, and I knew it was by L. Ron Hubbard.) FEAR's level of restrained paranoia/freak-out is incredible; the dramatic tension is not fully resolved until the last pages. Any religion started by this guy is going to be BLOODY HEAVY indeed, I thought.

And now, we have a famous Scientology-defector they can't eliminate, drive crazy or simply ignore: movie director Paul Haggis, who has gone public. He reached the second-highest level in the Church, Operating Thetan VII.

I have seen the New Yorker article titled The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology posted in about a half-dozen places already, so let me add my link.

It's long, but contains some real doozies. Brother and sister scandalmongers, you must read it:

Many Hollywood actors were drawn into the church by a friend or by reading “Dianetics”; a surprising number of them, though, came through the Beverly Hills Playhouse. For decades, the resident acting coach there was Milton Katselas, and he taught hundreds of future stars, including Ted Danson, Michelle Pfeiffer, and George Clooney. “Most of Hollywood went through that class,” Anne Archer told me.

...

Jim Gordon, a veteran police officer in Los Angeles, and also an aspiring actor, spent ten years at the Playhouse, starting in 1990. He told me that Scientology “recruited a ton of kids out of that school.” Like Scientology, the Playhouse presented a strict hierarchy of study; under Katselas’s tutelage, students graduated from one level to the next. As Gordon advanced within the Playhouse, he began recognizing many students from the roles they were getting in Hollywood. “You see a lot of people you know from TV,” Gordon says. He began feeling the pull of the church. “When you started off, they weren’t really pushing it, but as you progressed through the Playhouse’s levels Scientology became more of a focus,” he told me. After a few years, he joined. Like the courses at the Playhouse, Scientology offered actors a method that they could apply to both their lives and their careers.

Finally, an explanation for why so many actors are Scientologists; they actually targeted the industry from the inside. I had mistakenly believed they zeroed in on celebrities from the outside, you know, like they did the pot-smokers. Nope, they get them while they are studying for something else entirely. Interesting.

Katselas received a ten-per-cent commission from the church on the money contributed by his students.

Katselas died in 2008, and Scientology no longer has a connection with the Beverly Hills Playhouse. Anne Archer told me that the reputation of Katselas’s class as, in Gordon’s words, a “Scientology clearinghouse” is overblown. “His classes averaged about fifty or sixty people, and there would be maybe seven to ten people in it who would be Scientologists,” she says. But the list of Scientologists who have studied at the Playhouse is long—it includes Jenna Elfman, Giovanni Ribisi, and Jason Lee—and the many protégés Katselas left behind helped cement the relationship between Hollywood and the church.

More goodies from the article, which you should read and pass around:

David S. Touretzky, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has done extensive research on Scientology. (He is not a defector.) He estimates that the coursework alone now costs nearly three hundred thousand dollars, and, with the additional auditing and contributions expected of upper-level members, the cumulative cost of the coursework may exceed half a million dollars. (The church says that there are no fixed fees, adding, “Donations requested for ‘courses’ at Church of Scientology begin at $50 and could never possibly reach the amount suggested.”)

That pesky inflation!

And by the way, although the church doesn't like it when you refer to the E-meter as "tin cans"--according to this article, it STARTED as mere SOUP CANS, seriously:

During auditing, Haggis grasped a cylindrical electrode in each hand; when he first joined Scientology, the electrodes were empty soup cans. An imperceptible electrical charge ran from the meter through his body. The auditor asked systematic questions aimed at detecting sources of “spiritual distress.” Whenever Haggis gave an answer that prompted the E-Meter’s needle to jump, that subject became an area of concentration until the auditor was satisfied that Haggis was free of the emotional consequences of the troubling experience.

And finally... yes, at long last, we're getting to Xenu! You knew he was coming!

Only a really great horror/sci-fi mind could have hatched Xenu:

The church, which considers it sacrilegious for the uninitiated to read its confidential scriptures, got a restraining order, but the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the [Thetan] material and printed a summary. Suddenly, the secrets that had stunned Paul Haggis in a locked room were public knowledge.

“A major cause of mankind’s problems began 75 million years ago,” the Times wrote, when the planet Earth, then called Teegeeack, was part of a confederation of ninety planets under the leadership of a despotic ruler named Xenu. “Then, as now, the materials state, the chief problem was overpopulation.” Xenu decided “to take radical measures.” The documents explained that surplus beings were transported to volcanoes on Earth. “The documents state that H-bombs far more powerful than any in existence today were dropped on these volcanoes, destroying the people but freeing their spirits—called thetans—which attached themselves to one another in clusters.” Those spirits were “trapped in a compound of frozen alcohol and glycol,” then “implanted” with “the seed of aberrant behavior.” The Times account concluded, “When people die, these clusters attach to other humans and keep perpetuating themselves.”

As that wise old shopkeeper on the old Friday the 13th TV show was always saying: It all makes a terrible sense.

And you wondered when Tom would show up.

In 2004, Cruise received a special Scientology award: the Freedom Medal of Valor. In a ceremony held in England, Miscavige called Cruise “the most dedicated Scientologist I know.” The ceremony was accompanied by a video interview with the star. Wearing a black turtleneck, and with the theme music from “Mission: Impossible” playing in the background, Cruise said, “Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them. So, for me, it really is K.S.W.”—initials that stand for “Keeping Scientology Working.” He went on, “That policy to me has really gone—phist!” He made a vigorous gesture with his hand. “Boy! There’s a time I went through and I said, ‘You know what? When I read it, you know, I just went poo! This is it!’ ” Later, when the video was posted on YouTube and viewed by millions who had no idea what he was talking about, Cruise came across as unhinged.

Ya think?

(More fun with Tom below. Could not resist!)

As the father of two gay daughters, Haggis finally broke with the church over their funding of anti-gay Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California. And then he studied and found out more...

As they say, read it all.

~*~



[NOTE: The only other time I have written about Scientology at DEAD AIR, was about the death of Jett Travolta, which was predictably covered up.]

Edit: The last few seconds of the video cautions that all copies are quickly removed by the church of Scientology, so you should download it yourself and upload it to YouTube after this copy is removed. Create a different account for this purpose, since they go after that, too.

The Death of Jett Travolta

John Travolta and his son Jett, from UK Mirror.



As I commented briefly on this thread, I am sometimes alarmed by people in my own profession.

To put it bluntly: Alternative medicine can get wackadoodle as hell. I am considered a somewhat middle-of-the-road sort, since I don't issue blanket criticisms of conventional Western medicine (known as allopathic in alt-med parlance), although I will give major hell to Big Pharm. But certainly, I take thyroid hormone every day, am bloody grateful to get it, and I appreciate the blessing of modern medicine. My problem is with its common abuses, as well as its overwhelming obstinacy concerning the allowance of any other disciplines to take part in healing. I think we have plenty to learn from native herbalists, Ayurveda, yoga, and many other alternative sources/approaches.

Having said all that, of course, I get worried. In fact, plenty worried.

And so, when I heard about the death of Jett Travolta, I took a deep breath. Several, in fact.

Ohhhh, no, I thought. No, no, no.

You know why. Or maybe you don't? In any event, the (UK) Times Online, sure does:

A post-mortem examination determined last night that John Travolta’s chronically ill son died of a seizure, as controversy erupted over the Scientologist actor’s handling of the boy’s medical condition.

According to the family, Jett, 16, suffered a seizure and hit his head on a bathtub at their holiday home in the Bahamas, where he was found dead on Friday.

Glenn Campbell, the assistant director of a local funeral home, said that the body was in “great condition” with no sign of head trauma. He said that the death certificate, based on the post-mortem examination, gave the cause of death as “seizure”

Uh-oh. Seizures.

And this is when I began taking the deep breaths. I could see this coming like a freaking freight train... Seizures usually require, you know, MEDICATION. And the Scientologists don't like medication.

Already, I have read dueling versions of events: yes, they were giving him medication... no, they weren't.

We will likely never find out. Travolta and his spouse, Kelly Preston, already had the body of Jett cremated before entering the USA. There can be no toxicologist report, in that case, to determine if he was taking seizure meds.

The cremation appeared to have been dealt with swiftly, Jett’s body having undergone a post-mortem examination just hours earlier. It concluded that Jett died as the result of a seizure at the family’s luxury holiday home last Friday.

An unconfirmed report on the show-business website TMZ.com claimed yesterday that Jett still had a faint pulse when he was discovered lying in the toilet area of the bathroom, with the door closed. There was “a considerable amount of blood after the resuscitation efforts,” it claimed.

For years, various Hollywood media reports have claimed that Jett had autism, and that the Church of Scientology had it's own particular treatments for this. Some of these (as stated above) are undoubtedly alternative-medicine treatments; I am familiar with most of them. But here it is:

As critics of Scientology questioned Travolta’s handling of his son’s medical condition, Mr Davis stressed that while the Church does not believe in drug treatments for psychological diagnoses, it does not oppose the use of drugs for medical conditions.

Is autism "psychological"?

Does the Church of Scientology believe that it is?

Here is Kevin Libin, writing in the National Post:

One thing the Church might not consider an “ethics breach,” though, is if the Travoltas had refrained from medicating Jett with any drugs he may have required to control a mentally related illness. So far, the nature of Jett’s sickness remains one of the big mysteries surrounding his death: medical experts have disputed the family’s story that the boy suffered from Kawasaki Syndrome, caused (the Travoltas claimed) by environmental pollutants, which others have said was simply a cover story for his autism, a disorder Scientology does not recognize but believes is caused by spiritual disharmony (Scientology, you’ll recall from the Tom Cruise absurdity some years back, dismisses psycho-related illnesses as concoctions by the psychiatric profession—which it unaffectionately calls “an industry of death”). There’s reason to be skeptical: Kawasaki is rarely fatal, seldom affects children older than 8, and isn’t known to cause seizures—though some reports claim the parents did stop medicating for Kawasaki, as the treatments didn’t work—and autism even less so (Jett reportedly had a history of seizures but I can’t find any evidence that autism causes seizures, let alone deadly ones—though I stand ready to be corrected by those who know more about this than I do). (UPDATE: this story suggests autism can cause seizures)

The family’s spokespeople originally insisted the boy had fallen and injured his head on the bathtub. Making things even more mysterious, this doctor—the first, likely, on celebrity reporters' rolodexes since he conducted Anna Nicole Smith's post-mortem—claims that it would take a pathologist weeks to accurately determine a death was caused by seizure. This was no Nassau Medical College graduate making some slap-dash diagnosis: the Travoltas flew in a top medical officer from California. She prepared her report in just a few hours, before the family had the body cremated immediately afterward and flown back to their home in Florida on dad’s private Boeing 707, named after Jett and his sister.

Libin also links to a comment from ex-Scientologist Michael Pattinson, who writes some fascinating stuff about the whole top-secret process that will now kick in, back in Clearwater:

Scientology spokespeople will very likely give out generalized "press releases" through lawyers or PR personnel that will give no real substance for informing the public.

Secondly, the questions that have arisen about whether the anti-drug/anti-pharmaceutical tenets of Scientology might possibly have actually prevented Jett from receiving proper medical treatment or preventative assistance will be downplayed, denied, ridiculed and/or harshly criticized to try to get attention off the issue as fast as possible. This aspect, however, may not just "go away". It is a question of life or death, after all...

Thirdly, the family will very likely go to Clearwater, Florida (or maybe have Scientology professionals come to their Florida home, but this is far less likely) to the Oak Cove building and/or Sandcastle Hotel for what Scientology calls "handlings".

NOTE: They really should get some new nomenclature. Us conspiracy junkies buzz around over-charged terms such as "handlings"; the proverbial moth to the flame.

Okay, what are "handlings"?:

1.Ethics interviews and associated procedures. (Scientology's "Division 1" services.)

This aspect of services would look into the unfortunate and tragic event of Jett's death being a possible result of some kind of personal ethics breach or lack of integrity by the parents. In particular the individual parents would have separate interviews about their own role in the tragedy or how come they "pulled in" (a Scientology ethics jargon term) such an awful situation by something in their own behavior.

The Scientology celebrity ethics officer would also actively look for one or more people in the Travoltas' circle of friends, acquaintances who might be antagonistic to or even anti-Scientology and who could have had sufficient negative influence to "cause" such a tragedy. That person would then be the target of possible disconnection (shunning), firing or lawsuit/fair game. There would be many steps possible for John and Kelly coming out of the "Ethics" handlings, and these could not be predicted here.

***It is worthy of note that the potential question of NOT giving proper or adequate medication would not be considered a Scientology ethics violation due to L.Ron Hubbard's indoctrination to avoid such medical or psychological types of treatment. In fact, the failure to give doctor-recommended drugs or medications to Jett might factually be considered to be a laudable Scientology ethics matter.***

WOW--all you can say to this is WOW! This is looking hairier and hairier.

Some of this information recalls Rolling Stone's amazing article on Scientology back in 2006, wherein several of author Janet Reitman's sources kept backing out and begging for anonymity.

As a confirmed religion/mythology junkie, I tend to give even the flakiest religion the benefit of the doubt... but it was this article that started giving me the major creeps... just because so many people refused to go on the record. (That article is still one of the best and most comprehensive investigations of Scientology that I have found.)

Pattinson continues, describing the upcoming agenda for the Travoltas:

2.Correction interviews and procedural steps (Scientology's "Division 5" services).

These steps, sometimes called "Review" would be services designed to address any failures of John or Kelly (and/or Jett's caretaker, as I believe he is a Scientologist) to have properly applied relevant Scientology technologies to their son or his living situation within the family. Any strictly Scientology-dictated ways of living that are detected as to having been omitted or misapplied would have to be re-studied and drilled till they become second nature.

3.Technical sessions ("auditing") (Scientology's "Division 4" services.)

This would be some very expensive counseling sessions and personal programs designed to remove, if possible, all the negative emotions from this awful tragedy. This can cost up to $1000 an hour. The outcome of this step is varied in its success and can take weeks or months to complete.

Did he say $1000 an hour? Are these the Travolta rates? Do they have a sliding scale for indigent members, or as one of my friends quipped, don't they HAVE any indigent members?

Pattinson adds:

A more cynical prediction: I would also comfortably estimate that Scientology, as an organization, would attempt to get the maximum financial and public relations benefit from this horrible tragedy. It will be interesting to watch how they go about doing this. In any case the organization through its spokespeople will tend to avoid truth, responsibility and facts. It will also use the media without being of any real service to the media. [L. Ron] Hubbard hated journalists almost as much as he hated psychologists, doctors and psychiatrists.

I guess we'll be finding out?

Or maybe we won't.

Stay tuned, sports fans.