Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Hubbard

DTron2.jpg All over the Internet today you'll find the video of a BBC reporter John Sweeney going quite berserk at a member of the Church of Scientology. He looks a complete berk and is rightly embarrassed by it all, but one shouldn't forget about the nature of the beast he's wrestling with. How the Church of Scientology deals with critics - known in the Church as "suppressive persons" - is well documented, and it's not impossible that Sweeney is the victim of a successful "attack the attacker" campaign, a plan of action originally mobilised by the Church of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. In the shady corners of the 20th century, they don't come much more interesting than Ron, and millions of words have been written declaring Hubbard a fraud, most notably three books, all available for free on the Internet: A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack, a former member of the Church; L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman by Bent Corydon, a former member of the Church, and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., a.k.a. Ronald DeWolf (Hubbard's son); and The Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, whose work was based in part on the admissions of former Scientologist, Gerald Armstrong, whose chance discoveries about the man he had once believed to be "the greatest man who ever lived" saw him declared a "suppressive person" by the Church of which he had been a loyal member for more than a decade. It's no wonder the Church of Scientology is touchy about investigation, for the life of its founder certainly warrants a close look.

L. Ron Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, his family moving shortly thereafter to the state of Montana. It was here, according to Hubbard himself and the official Church biography, that the four-year-old boy struck up a "unique and rare relationship" with a local Blackfoot Indian medicine man known as "Old Tom", Ron's inquisitive nature so impressing the whole tribe that, at the age of six, he was "honored with the status of blood brother of the Blackfeet in a ceremony that is still recalled by tribal elders."

Curiously, officials of the Blackfoot Nation, who never practiced the act of blood brotherhood, do not recall anyone called "Old Tom", the name appearing nowhere in the tribal scriptures.

By his own account, Ron was a tough kid, breaking in broncos at the age of three and dominating the streets of his town until the "neighborhood was safe for every kid in it." As he recalled in his autobiographical transcript:

"My grandfather taught me lumberjack fighting and I went out on the prowl to find the youngest and smallest O'Connell kid alone. I licked him, then took on the next one and the next one and the next one, and by the time I had worked up four sizes, the rest of them decided that I was an inevitable part of the scenery and left me alone."

Subsequent research of the Helena school records has shown that the five O'Connell kids did indeed exist, the eldest being 16 years old when his nemesis was the tender age of six. In 1986, Russell Miller interviewed Andrew Richardson, a childhood friend of Hubbard's from Helena, whose recollections tend to cast some doubt on Ron's version of events.

"He never protected nobody," Richardson said. "It was all bullshit."

As a young man, Hubbard allegedly developed an early curiosity for life's great mysteries, an inquisitiveness instilled in him during his "extensive" travels throughout the inscrutable orient, his wanderings to the age of 19 meaning he had "travelled over a quarter of a million miles on the surface of Earth". As the 1978 edition of What is Scientology? recalled:

"Deep in the hills of Western China, Ron visited the lamaseries. There he conversed with monks and made friends with them and the people. In the isolation of the high hills of Tibet, even native bandits responded to Ron's honest interest in them and were willing to share with him what understanding of life they had."

In fact, Hubbard never went to Tibet and journeyed the orient on YMCA trips with his parents, the entries in his tourist diaries probably more reliable testaments to the Eastern impact on the young boy's psyche, the Great Wall eliciting a comment about its possible use as a rollercoaster, while China's "problem", according to Ron, was that there were "too many chinks".

Back in the USA, after graduating from High School, Hubbard attended George Washington University, where, according to the Church, he studied "engineering and atomic and molecular physics" in the name of "a personal search for answers to the human dilemma". The Church does not record that Ron was a terrible student (he scored an "F" for "molecular and atomic physics"), placed on probation for "deficiency in scholarship" in his second year, at the end of which he was chucked out with no degree. Nevertheless, Hubbard continued throughout his life to refer to himself as a "nuclear physicist", citing his education at George Washington University and "Princeton", where he was never a student.

Not surprisingly, Hubbard eventually turned his hand to fiction, writing for periodicals like Astounding Science Fiction magazine, gaining a pretty good reputation among fans of sci-fi and pulp. He was a good storyteller. In his book, The Pulp Jungle, fellow writer Frank Gruber recalled an evening with the 23-year-old Hubbard in New York in 1934, when several hours of listening to Ron's tales prompted Gruber to respond:

"'Well, you were in the Marines seven years, you were a civil engineer for six years, you spent four years in Brazil, three in Africa, you barn-stormed with your own flying circus for six years... I've just added up all the years you did this and that and it comes to eighty-four years...' He blew his stack...Most of the other members expected their yarns to be taken with a pinch of salt, but not Ron. It was almost as if he believed his own stories."

With the outbreak of World War II, Ron served in the US navy, emerging, by his own account, as a battle-hardened and highly decorated serviceman, awarded numerous medals for valor and bravery, including the Purple Heart. Unhappily, official naval records tell a significantly different story.

The first signs of the character traits that would dominate Hubbard's later career were identified in 1942 by the Naval Attache in Brisbane, Australia, where Ron, on leave from the SS President Polk, had become "the source of much trouble" for the navy. Explaining why Hubbard was being sent back to the United States, the memo noted:

"This officer is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance. He also seems to think he has unusual ability in most lines."

Hubbard was no more impressive to superiors at home, his Commandant at the Boston Naval Shipyards requesting he "urgently" be reassigned to a more junior position. But Ron was at least determined, and before war's end he found himself given one more chance at command, this time of a small PC-class submarine destroyer deployed in San Diego, California, presumably far from harm's way. Nevertheless, the most notable moments of Hubbard's command are the two whole days during which he ordered the depth-charging of a Japanese submarine that was never there and his decision to conduct unauthorised gunnery practice while illegally anchored in Mexican waters, the latter finally scoring him relief of his command with an official letter of admonition.

Interestingly, the Scientology version of Hubbard's wartime achievements makes much of the "action" he saw "in both the Atlantic and Pacific", during which he "thoroughly distinguished himself in the eyes of those who served beneath him." How Ron appeared in the eyes of those who served above him is not recorded by the Church.

In later years, Ron would ponder the "2,000 ton Japanese submarines, worth perchance a score of million dollars to the enemy before my depth charges sunk them" and lament his actions that assured "not less than three hundred enemy lives struggled wetly out to Soldier Heaven". However, there is no evidence that L. Ron Hubbard contributed a single moment of distress to any defence force besides the US Navy, and Hubbard's claim to medals and citations appear, for the most part, to be complete fabrications.

In the post-war years, Hubbard turned back to writing, his preferred theme still futuristic invention, though his outlook was now considerably different. "Y'know, we're all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction," he allegedly told SciFi author Theodore Sturgeon. "You wanta make real money, you gotta start a religion!"

The first article on Dianetics appeared, appropriately enough, in a 1950 edition of Astounding Science Fiction. Within a year, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, was on the bookshelves. An unusual collision of Freudian psychology, Asimovian science fiction and P.T. Barnham chutzpah, Dianetics was instantly canned by the American Psychological Association as "a hodge-podge of accepted therapeutic techniques with new names" (the beginning, it seems, of Ron's life-long hatred of the psychiatric sector). Nevertheless, Dianetics was an instant bestseller and the first Dianetic Research Foundation was opened in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with branches opening in five other US cities before the end of 1950.

The cash was rolling in, but, strangely, the Foundation was not benefiting. In her book Dianetics in Limbo, one-time DRF manager, Helen O'Brian, recalled:

"I was an awed outsider with an associate membership during the boom to bust cycle of the first Dianetic Foundation....One man who was an important member of the organizing group told me a few years ago that he still retained copies of the bookkeeping records that made him decide to disassociate himself from the Elizabeth Foundation fast. A month's income of $90,000 is listed, with only $20,000 accounted for. He was one of the first to resign."

Within a year Dianetics was bust, with everyone from creditors to US Marshals hammering on Hubbard's door. Ron's response was quite brilliant: the Hubbard Association of Scientologists became The Church of Scientology, a letter from Hubbard to Helen O'Brian in 1953 stating his reasons quite candidly:

"I am not quite sure what we would call the place - probably not a clinic - but I am sure that it ought to be a company, independent of the HAS but fed by the HAS. We don't want a clinic. We want one in operation but not in name. Perhaps we could call it a Spiritual Guidance Center. Think up its name, will you. And we could put in nice desks and our boys in neat blue with diplomas on the walls and 1. knock psychotherapy into history and 2. make enough money to shine up my operating scope and 3. keep the HAS solvent. It is a problem of practical business."

Thus Scientology became a religion, protected by the United States Constitution, assaults upon it by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the Government itself seriously handicapped, its critics branded religious "bigots". In the words of Jon Atack:

"To the general public, Scientology was represented as a humanitarian, religious movement, intent upon benefiting all mankind. Its opponents were dangerous enemies of freedom, and were tarred with unfashionable epithets such as communist, homosexual, or drug addict. Opponents were portrayed as members of a deliberate conspiracy to silence Hubbard, and bring down the 'shades of night' over the Earth."

Hubbard was able to do this thanks to a notable shift in doctrine, a historical addendum to the Dianetics story that elevated mere "science" into the untouchable realm of the supernatural.

In a discovery that seemed to owe more to Hubbard's science fiction career than any knowable reality, Ron identified the "thetan", an entity similar to a soul or spirit, whose meddlings inside the human body gave rise to near every ailment or mental condition. Hubbard first spoke of thetans in 1952, but his explanation of where they came from emerged later, during a lecture series about "Advanced" Scientology in 1968.

Briefly, thetans were the regrettable result of the actions of the evil galactic dictator, Xenu, who, approximately 75 million years ago, tricked billions of aliens into travelling to Earth, then known as "Teegeeack", in modified DC8 aircraft, before blowing them up with hydrogen bombs. The wretched souls of the victims, the "thetans", blown into the air by the explosions, were then captured by Xenu and forced into cinemas (located in either Hawaii or the Canary Islands) where they were made to digest a series of motion pictures that depicted all manner of nonsense, including the basic doctrines of Christianity and psychiatry. The thetans then gathered together in groups and infected the bodies of the few who'd survived the bombing, their indoctrination in the movie cinemas cursing humanity to this very day. The only known way one can become "clear" of thetans is through the Church of Scientology...

L. Ron Hubbard died in 1986, Forbes magazine estimating his fortune at some US $200 million.
Before his death, Hubbard, in a move he was to regret, gave his permission to Church member Gerald Armstrong to search through his massive stockpile of personal documents with a view to writing a biography.

"I was finding contradiction after contradiction," Armstrong told Russell Miller. "I kept trying to justify them, kept thinking that I would find another document that would explain everything. But I didn't. I slowly came to realize that the guy had consistently lied about himself.

"My approach was, 'OK, now we know he's human and tells lies. What we've got to do is clear up the lies so that all the good he has done for the world will be accepted'. I thought the only way we could exist as an organisation was to let the truth stand. After all, the truth was equally as fascinating as the lies.'"

Armstrong shared his views with his friends in Scientology, in an official report that argued the Church best not "present inaccuracies, hyperbole or downright lies as fact or truth...it doesn't matter what slant we give them; if disproved, the man will look, to outsiders at least, like a charlatan." It's a declared opinion for which Armstrong claims to be still paying today.

"The betrayal of trust began with Hubbard's lies about himself," says Armstrong. "His life was a continuing pattern of fraudulent business practices, tax evasion, flight from creditors and hiding from the law. He was a mixture of Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Baron Munchausen. In short, he was a con man."

The question that begs asking is how the belief system started by a man so comprehensively revealed as a huckster could possibly still have so many apostles, many of whom are notable, successful human beings with easy access to the known facts. It's true enough that the tenets of Scientology are no more or less ludicrous than those of any other established religion, and if we could access naval memos from Biblical times there'd surely be more than a few discrepancies regarding those who claimed to part certain seas or walk on certain waters.

But what sets Hubbard apart from the others, from Jesus Christ to Joseph Smith, is that Ron did not claim to be the mouthpiece for the Divine, a mere conduit for the Good News. Scientology was a result of Hubbard's own "research", though he steadfastly refused to quantify his own investigative protocols. In short, Scientology begins with Hubbard, and stands or falls on his reliability. That's troublesome news, surely, for Scientologists.

One wonders why today's Church, faced with the overwhelming weight of truth about its founder, might not have chosen to distance itself from Hubbard, to declare that, by some fortunate accident, the simple psychological system devised by a man of questionable character and intent seems to work nonetheless, as it obviously does for some. Instead, the Church of Scientology still reveres L. Ron Hubbard as something like a prophet, its robust defense of the apparently indefensible making it appear more of a garrison than a religion, its energy for doing combat with criticism more suited to a militarist cabal than a church.

It is one invention from the mind of its founder that the Church of Scientology could well dispense with.

In New York in 1947, destitute and near suicidal, L. Ron Hubbard scribbled his thoughts into notebooks that would one day be tendered as evidence in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The miracle of Scientology, and the character of its founder, were yet to be known to the world.

"You can be merciless whenever your will is crossed," he wrote, "and you have the right to be merciless.

"All men are your slaves."

(First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, May 16, 2007).

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Why Oscar belongs in the trashcan

To appreciate why the Ocars are rubbish, one first has to understand exactly what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is. AMPAS is a circle of peers - producers, directors, actors, cinematographers, screenwriters, publicists - all of whom owe the pits and troughs of their careers to the very organizations they are due to vote upon every January. It would be naive to think that each of the 6000 odd members of the Academy does not have a shed full of axes to grind. Could there possibly be a more monstrous collective ego than that of a Hollywood performing arts league, exhibitionists by trade, prima donnas of legend, each one of them driven by unfathomable depths of loyalty, malice and enduring memory? He who was fired by Paramount studios in the 50s is not going to forget the past any quicker than did those who refused to clap for McCarthy-era collaborator Elia Kazan in 1999. "Their dirty little secret is that they take too much into account when filling out ballots," wrote veteran Hollywood business reporter Nikki Finke in Salon.com in February 2002. “The Oscars are their payback time, pure and simple."

One can't simply join this most prestigious party of Hollywood lawgivers - you have to be invited. Invites, according to the Academy's own criteria, are "limited to those who have achieved distinction" in the film industry. In other words, you can't be young and vital - you have to have been around long enough for all to consider your best work behind you. Consequently, when you have a dizzyingly innovative idea such as Pulp Fiction running against a sentimental old boot like Forest Gump, it's a one-horse race - there are no prizes for guessing which film scored the votes of Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Shirley Temple and the thousands of other Academy members whose hearing aids farted with distortion at the opening bars of Miserilou.

Nikki Finke claims to have spoken to Academy members who admitted to voting in 1998 despite not having seen Saving Private Ryan at all - the poor old buzzards knew they wouldn't hack the violence, so gave the film a wide berth. The same queasy Academy tummies, claims Finke, dashed the chances of Edward Norton despite his perfectly brutal portrayal of a racist skinhead in 1997s American History X. As one screenwriter told The Daily Standard's Jonathon V. Last in 2003, "I liken Academy voters to an audience of grandparents at an elementary school play - they like Oliver and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."

Onto this stage of derelict judges, ancient grudges and petty jealousies writ large, the studios present an annual performance so corrupt and fraudulent that it's…well, worthy of an Oscar. Publicity-driven Oscar campaigns are nothing new - the studios schedule their big releases with Oscar time in mind, and every holiday season the Hollywood trade magazines like Variety flutter with "For Your Consideration" ads, designed to 'remind' Academy voters of particular nominees. But a new era in Academy Award skulduggery began, it seems, with the 71st Academy Awards in 1998, the end of an Oscar race that set new standards in sleaze.

From the moment the soldiers hit the beach in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, it was clear to everyone that the Dreamworks war epic was a "lock" for Best Picture of 1997. Over at rival Miramax, studio boss Harvey Weinstein had other ideas. No sooner had the crowd sobered up from the previous year's awards when Weinstein hired the services of Warren Cowan, Dick Guttman, Gerry Pam and Murray Weissman, four veteran Hollywood publicists who remained on the Miramax payroll for the next 12 months, their job to wine and dine Academy members to the virtues of 1997s two big Miramax contenders, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful and a decidedly underwhelming Elizabethan comedy called Shakespeare In Love. Weinstein defended the appointments by claiming simply that the men were publicists and it was a studio's job to publicise its films. It didn't seem to matter that the publicists in question had been retired for decades and were themselves all members of the Academy.

When the British Shakespeare In Love director John Madden arrived in New York just prior to the awards, Miramax hosted a "Welcome to America" party in swanky Manhattan restaurant Elaine's, the guest list flecked with Academy members in clear violation of a standing AMPAS canon that members not be serenaded by nominees. Then rumours began circulating of a smear campaign against Private Ryan, with several top Hollywood reporters complaining that Miramax spin-doctors were trying to influence them into giving Speilberg's film bad press. Tony Angellotti, one of the publicists named in the scandal, seemed to confirm the rumours in his own denial. "My job is to analyse," he told a reporter, "and if I said anything negative about Private Ryan or any other film, it was in the context of what someone else said."

It was an expensive campaign for Miramax (an estimated cost of US$16 million) but if the words "Academy Award-winning" are as valuable on an advertisement or rental box as everyone seems to agree they are, it was indeed an excellent investment - Shakespeare In Love shocked everyone by winning Best Film and being nominated for a record 13 awards. Life Is Beautiful, too, was a surprise success with seven nominations and three wins, and when an Oscar-clutching Benigni announced he felt he should "make love to everyone" in the audience, it may have been less of a joke than an expression of what Roberto thought would be his obligation - the Oscar lead-up had seen him dutifully grinning his way through intimate dinners with the likes of Kirk Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Elizabeth Taylor, all influential Academy members and one-time clients of Miramax 'publicist' Warren Cowan.

The bar had been raised, and today all the big studios hire their own 'Oscar strategists' with multi-million dollar campaign funds to ensure that Academy decisions aren't left to chance or, worse, merit.

"Oscars have always been about more than 'pure' artistic merit,” says Lisa Schwarzbaum, movie critic for Entertainment Weekly. “With thousands of people voting, each with personal agendas and interests, what wins is inevitably a mix of merit, zeitgeist and odds. What's shifted in recent years is the degree to which the campaigning has become visible."

It has now reached the point where the studios don't consider it at all unsavoury to have bullied a nominee over the line - on the contrary, the flaks view it as a point of professional esteem, in much the same way as a legal defence team considers it an accomplishment to release an obvious killer back into the community.

When Tilda Swinton failed to get nominated in 2002 for her outstanding perfromance in The Deep End, Nancy Utley, Fox Searchlight's president of marketing, seemed utterly oblivious to the cynical core of her own agenda when questioned by Amy Wallace of Los Angeles Magazine. "I honestly have a very clear conscience about this," she declared. "We attacked it (the Academy) with incredibly strategic thinking…This was as complete, as expensive, and as aggressive as the campaigns for Quills and Boys Don't Cry, which I personally oversaw."
Swinton herself was philosophical, according to The Deep End co-writer and director David Siegel. "It was much more important to the Fox publicity people than it was to her," he said. "She just didn't want to let them down."

Recently, the Academy has made very public but ultimately feeble attempts to clean up the increasingly dirty image of the Oscar campaign. Those published on the Academy’s website include the banning of nights out “specifically designed to promote a film or achievement for Academy Awards”, limits regarding studio contact with Academy members (“Telephone calls to verify a member’s address are permitted”) and austere restrictions on the weight of card and paper stock used as inserts for ‘screeners’ (DVDs and videos of films sent by studios to Academy members). The studios, naturally, have no trouble making a mockery of the Academy’s efforts. Last January, Michael Goldstein of the New York Daily News reported on the abuse of the right to hold private screenings for Academy members, claiming that the studios “lavish Oscar voters and key taste-makers with free screenings in New York, Los Angeles and even hideaways like Maui, Hawaii.” The studios, he claimed, were picking up the tab “for $5,000 a day hair stylists and $50,000 a day private jets so stars can look their best.”

Meanwhile, the Academy “diligently protects the reputation of the Oscars” in America’s courts. Last year, AMPAS successfully prevented a small-time bookie from registering the website oscarbetexchange.com, Lawyers for AMPAS, oblivious to the irony of their own words, arguing that “the integrity of the Academy Awards would be undermined if the public believed the Academy participated in or sponsored gambling on the results of the Oscars.”