by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After The Ice Follies of 1939 I watched the two latest episodes of Leah Remini’s “unscripted” Arts
& Entertainment series Scientology and Its Aftermath, including one I’d missed the week before so I could
watch the second half of the Tony Bennett 90th Birthday special on
NBC. One was about the current head of Scientology, David Miscavige, who in
these pages before I’ve described as the Stalin to L. Ron Hubbard’s Lenin.
What’s more, Miscavige took over Scientology after Hubbard, its founder,
“dropped the body” (Scientology-speak for “died”) in 1986 — given that one of
Scientology’s principal claims is that it can make people immortal, Hubbard’s
death became a P.R. problem for the Church which Miscavige handled by saying
that Hubbard’s body was no longer an aid to his researches but had become an
impediment to them —much the same way that Stalin had taken over from Lenin,
first by controlling access to the Founder during his final illnesses and then,
once the Founder had actually croaked, ruthlessly outmaneuvering his rivals
(including Marty Rathbun, who’s only briefly mentioned in these programs — and
then only by his first name — but who was essentially Scientology’s Trotsky). What’s more, Miscavige turned out — at least in the accounts of many who’ve
quit the church since he took over, including the three Remini interviewed for
her show (Miscavige’s father Ron, Jeff Hawkins and Tom De Vocht) — to be a
psychopath, literally assaulting
people who get in his way, despite (or maybe because of) his diminutive
stature: it’s odd indeed to see a two-shot of him with Tom Cruise in which
Cruise, for once, is taller than the other person in the photo.
The other Scientology
and Its Aftermath episode shown last night
was the newest one, a joint interview with Marc and Claire Headley, one of the
rare examples of a Scientology couple who actually got out together — though
they still suffered “disconnection” from their other relatives, including
Marc’s mom. “Disconnection” is the policy by which members of the Church of
Scientology are required to cut off all ties with family members who’ve “escaped” the church — that’s the term
the Scientologists literally use to describe anyone who leaves, and the
pictures of their central compound outside Hemet, California (who would have
thought Hemet, of all places,
would end up as Scientology’s Vatican?), with its locked gates and barbed-wire
fences topped with intimidating metal spikes pointing in both directions
(indicating that their function is as much to keep people in as out) make it look like a prison for members of
Scientology’s highest body, the Sea Organization (“Sea Org,” as it’s generally
abbreviated). It’s called the Sea Organization not only because during World
War II Hubbard had been a minor (very minor) officer in the U.S. Navy and adopted nautical terms for the
ranks of his officials, but because during the 1960’s and occasionally
thereafter he literally took the
governing elite of Scientology to sea, buying old ships, having them refitted
and sailing them in international waters (except when he had to put into a port
somewhere for provisions) so no
government in the world would have jurisdiction over him. Like a lot of the
early Scientologists, Marc Headley drifted into it as part of a hippie-like
spiritual search in the 1960’s; he was interested in audio-visual productions
and got involved in Scientology’s media company, Golden Era Productions. As
part of Golden Era he produced Scientology’s big annual events — clips of which
are shown in this documentary — which made frankly absurd claims about all the
good Scientology was doing in the world, all the hungry people in the Third
World the Church had fed, the dramatic turnarounds they had made in people’s
lives through their anti-drug Narconon program and their work as consultants to
schools in Detroit and other dying American cities — where they claimed to be
able to turn around failing students and get their grades up from F to A+ in a
month or so.
One of the things these episodes dramatized is the extent to which
Scientologists live in a media bubble in which they literally never get
information from the outside world; especially if you’re in the Sea Org, you
not only have to live in a dorm but all information is monitored, your letters are censored before they’re
sent out (yet another similarity between the Sea Org and a prison!), your food
is cooked for you (Marc Headley recalls the shock when he and his wife Claire
escaped and she made him a dinner their first night together on the outside —
he’d been married to her for 13 years but since they were both in the Sea Org
he’d had no idea she could cook!), you’re not allowed outside the Scientology compound
without a “minder” to keep you in line, and you’re not allowed access to the
Internet except on heavily filtered computers that don’t allow you to access
sites critical of Scientology. Ron Miscavige recalls that his disillusionment with the Church (which he had joined
before David and his brother, Ron Jr., were born) began when the Church allowed
him to receive an Amazon Kindle, not realizing that this device included an
Internet connection. Full of pride at all the great things he’d been told Scientology
was doing, he Googled “Scientology” on the Kindle — and came face-to-face with
all the anti-Scientology sites, many of them written and posted by
disillusioned former Scientologists. The thing the Headleys are bitterest about
was that Claire Headley was forced by the church to have an abortion — if
you’re a woman in the Sea Org, you’re not allowed to get pregnant and if you do get pregnant, you’re required to have an abortion —
also you’re not allowed to have sex unless you’re married (and though the series
so far hasn’t mentioned Scientology’s attitude towards Queers, it is well known
from the “black” literature on L. Ron Hubbard that he drove his Gay son Quentin
to suicide). I’m pro-choice enough to be as opposed to a church that tells its
parishioners they must have abortions as I am to the churches that say abortion
should be illegal for all women.
The show also mentioned the so-called “Freeloader’s Debt” bills that
individuals who successfully escape the Sea Org receive, often amounting to
hundreds of thousands of dollars, for Scientology audits and trainings that are
free to Sea Org members but are billed back to them at retail rack rates if
they leave.
I’m still surprised
that so far this series, which is half over, hasn’t mentioned one of the most
intimidating aspects of Scientology — the fact that by “auditing” its members
continually with a crude lie detector called an “E-Meter,” the Church routinely
collects intimate personal information on its adherents which, since auditing
is not protected by
confidentiality requirements the way normal psychotherapy is, the church can
use against them in any way they see fit. The Headleys did mention that their suit against the Church for what
it did to them finally was defeated in court on First Amendment grounds that
once you sign on to a religion, it has the right to do just about anything to
you under the “free exercise” clause and if you don’t like it, your only
recourse is to leave. I never had much use for Scientology but have always been
fascinated by the sheer wackiness of it — not only is it a religion founded by
a science-fiction writer but the books L. Ron Hubbard wrote and offered as the
scriptures of Scientology bear a striking resemblance to the ones he wrote and
sold as science-fiction in the ordinary commercial literary marketplace —
though Remini’s program, like much of the critical literature that’s come out
about Scientology in recent years, is making it seem like a much more
diabolical and sinister cult than it seemed in Hubbard’s time. Indeed, there’s
a division within the community of ex-Scientologists as to whether Scientology
was any good — Remini’s own
position is that Scientology is, was and always will be useless and the three
decades she spent in it were wasted, while her principal source, Mike Rinder,
still believes (according to his blog) that Hubbard’s original Scientology was
valid and it was only when Hubbard died and Miscavige replaced him that
Scientology really went off the rails. Also, Scientology and Its
Aftermath is one more cultural artifact of
the Obama years that comes off very differently now that Donald Trump is about
to become President, if only because Miscavige and Trump seem very much
brothers under the skin in their sensitivity to criticism and their
take-no-prisoners attitude towards their enemies, which is not only to declare
them wrong but to demonize them and at the same time proclaim their irrelevance
to the greater glory of the Leader.
