The L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition - The Scientology of Selling - The Hubbard is Bare
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MAY 24-MAY 30 1991 LA WEEKLY
"The L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition"
By RALPH RUGOFF
Welcome to the jungle.
The Scientology of Selling
The Hubbard is bare
ARMED FOR MY APPOINTMENT AT THE L. RON Hubbard Life Exhibition Hall a
few minutes early. Unlike in other commemorative mausoleums, such as
the Nixon Library and Birthplace, you're not allowed to walk around
the Hubbard by yourself. Instead, you must sign up for an
hour-and-a-half guided tour. Possibly they don't trust the unassisted
viewer to fully reap the museum's rewards, though it might also be a
matter of security. The presence of a young guard dressed in the
Church of Scientology's special uniform, a khaki outfit appropriate
for a paramilitary force, suggests the latter. Wordlessly presiding
over the defense of the lobby is a bust of Hubbard himself, his open,
toothless mouth suggesting the appearance of a hooked bass.
It doesn't seem like a very respectful way to represent a cult icon,
but then, even a quick walk around the lobby tells you that this isn't
your run-of-the-mill Graceland. While places like Las Vegas' Liberace
Museum seem content to promote the glory of a dead celebrity, the
Hubbard's mission of veneration is complicated by an agenda of
salesmanship. Where you might expect to find a bronze plaque listing
museum founders, there is a wall of testimonial quotations celebrating
Scientology, including statements from Tom Cruise, John Travolta and
Sonny Bono. Books with fiery covers, filling several racks, promote
Hubbard's achievements as sci-fi author and Scientology founder. While
waiting for my tour guide, I am subjected to a video display
advertising the museum I'm already in.
On entering the life Exhibition Hall, my first impression is of a
brightly colorful children's museum, an impression further reinforced
by a pair of painted model airplanes (one-fourth actual size) that fly
above an exhibit chronicling Hubbard's feats as an aviator. My fears
of being run through a thinly disguised brain laundry are put to rest
by the first display, an innocent-looking collection of artifacts from
Hubbard's boyhood. A Boy Scout sash with merit badges, a bugle and
photos of Blackfoot Indians, who allegedly made the 6-year-old Hubbard
an honorary tribal member, forge a model of an ideal Western
childhood.
This relatively uncommercial interlude is abruptly shattered as my
guide, who throughout the hour-and-a-half tour steadfastly maintains
the rictus grin of a hardened stewardess, waves her remote control
unit at a horizontal screen, triggering an audio-visual onslaught with
all the bombast of a Desert Storm promo. Its objective is to repackage
Hubbard as a multicultural wise man. Juggling pictures of different
cultures visited by the young seafaring "Ron" (as the guide refers to
him, because that's the kind of casual cult icon he was), it includes
a memorable sequence in which a stone Buddha is repeatedly juxtaposed
with a photo of a whitehaired Hubbard appearing as sagelike as possi-
ble for someone who looks like the president of a repo-man
association.
Most of the exhibits at the Hubbard strain to create a picture of the
Scientology founder as a larger-than-life action/adventure hero, a
daredevl pilot and courageous sea captain arid, above all, an author
whose diarrhetic output 'suggests either an inspired demiurge or a one
man literary sweatshop.
At its best, the Hubbard offers a portrait of the dead cult icon as a
writer. The '40s manual typewriter on which Hubbard gushed out the
sacred text of Dianetics is presented as a holy relic. A recurring
photograph shows the author clutching a quill pen at his desk,
apparently ready to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Elsewhere a full-scale Depression-era newsstand, replete with a
cigar-chomping vendor, features endless rows of period pulp magazines
that published Hubbard's fiction; their lurid covers featuring buxom
space-suited blondes and robots ejaculating lethal beams from their
eyeballs -provide one of the museum's artistic highlights.
Disappointingly, the exhibition doesn't include a lovingly detailed
re-creation of El Ron's office - perhaps because three of them already
exist at the nearby Scientology headquarters where tours are also
offered.
Hubbard's greatest innovation was not a strictly literary one,
however, but the fabrication of a low-grade lie detector called the
E-meter, which is used in Scientology counseling sessions. A large
vitrine contains about two dozen models, ranging from the earliest
'50s black box to the latest high-tech design, which resembles
a bathroom floor scale for pets. Nearby, the "See a Thought" exhibit
affords the visitor a handson trial. After suggesting I relive a
painful memory to prompt the E-meter's needle, the guide
decided to help things along by pinching me. A few seconds later, the
needle swung off the scale. "Now try to remember what the pinch felt
like," she instructed. I didn't have to remember, I could still feel
it. About 20 seconds went by and the needle abruptly jerked again -
sure proof that the machine could measure my thoughts.
THE FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTIC OF KITSCH
is that it tries to link its airbrushed pseudo-mythology to a
classical version of the real thing, The E-meter qualifies
by being packaged as a "religious artifact," though it also represents
an example of kitsch technology and marketing. In all of these
modes, it plays to a cultural fear of the unconscious as something
uncontrollable, hence evil, which the E-meter tames through a system
of "rational" measurements. It's an appealing fantasy because it
obviates the hard work required for genuine insight - and as any,
advertising executive will tell you, emotional short cuts, no
matter how laughably false, are always seductive. That is part of the
lure of kitsch - it avoids any suggestion of conflict or difficulty.
By promising to synthesize the once-irreconcilable truths of science,
religion and psychoanalysis, Hubbard's device stacks up pretty well
against rosary beads.
Ultimately, though, the device seems more like an offshoot of
Hubbard's science fiction especially when the exhibit's text describes
it as "a thousand times more sensitive than existing Earth
technology." More straightforward sci-fi achievements are chronicled
in a number of other displays, among them a pair of space-epic
dioramas that bring the Life Exhibition Hall to its camp climax. In
one, a giant gas-masked alien towers over what could easily be
mistaken for a Hollywood Boulevard street character -a bearded
longhair dressed in leopard skin and a fur cape. When the guide flicks
her remote control, they exchange some painful dialogue and
the longhair's chest starts heaving as if he's been sexually aroused.
Unfortunately, no one rushes over with an E-meter.
In a gallery strangely done up as a plastic (lower garden, oil
paintings of key moments in Hubbard's life hang under miniature
awnings. They look strangely out of place in such a high
tech funhouse, yet their antiquarian aura-enhanced by the timeless
quality endemic to bad painting - lends itself to the task of
mythicizing. Young Hubbard is shown hobnobbing with Mongolian bandits
and Tibetan monks and curing fellow patients at a naval hospital -
scenes that may or may not have occurred - but rather than the
subject, what is compelling is the contrast between the idealized
daydreamlike image and the inadvertently awkward and imperfect
rendering. As in the religious art of Mormon temples, the impression
conveyed is not of humanity aspiring for the heaven's so much as
everyday banality gussied up in celestial drag.
To create a mythic figure, the logic runs, one must first destroy the
factual subject. Like the White House or any similar kitsch
institution, the Hubbard, with its fantasy-park ethos, subsumes all
earthly traces of its symbolic occupant. El Ron himself is curiously
absent from the film and video clips; in audio presentations, except
for the last display, his speeches are read by others. More
remarkably, there is no mention of his family life, or the fact that
he was married, (Predictably, there's no mention that his
wife was imprisoned in the early'80s for obstructing private and
government agencies investigating the church he founded.) Heavily
downplayed is L. Ron's 1986 "departure from his body"-
the absence of any memorial exhibit is a conspicuous one.
As the guide ushers me out under a garlanded archway announcing "The
Way to Happiness," unanswered questions continue to nag. As in the
Nixon library, the barrage of biographical trivia at the Hubbard
doesn't instill 'a sense of intimacy but of distance.
The exhibition left me feeling no closer to understanding Hubbard as
an individual; the displays had simply deified him, with a violence
alienating to a non-believer. l hadn't even learned what the "L." in
L. Ron stands for.
Though it's tempting simply to dismiss the Hubbard as the shrine of a
crack-pot pseudo-religion, we shouldn't. At a formal level, after all,
its vocabulary derives from the heart of American media - the TV
commercial, the educational museum and the sales expo. And in its
counterfeit commingling of faith and art, the Hubbard reminds us that
the words "cult" and 'culture" come from the same root, which means
"worship." Take the wall of celebrity faces that stare out from
every newsstand, the Hubbard is a testament to the fact that we have
yet to build a culture that is distinguishable from a cult. The result
is that, as in this peculiar mausoleum, the remote control remains
in the hands of salespeople.
-END
--------------------------------------
Arnaldo Lerma
Lermanet.com Exposing the CON
I'd prefer to die speaking my mind than live fearing to speake
If the Borg were to breed with the Ferengi you'd get Scientology!
29 November 1995 - Memorandum Opinion Judge Leonie Brinkema
"the Court is now convinced that the primary motivation of RTC in suing Lerma, DGS and The Post is to stifle criticism of Scientology in general and to harass its critics. "
The internet is the Liberty Tree
http://theunfunnytruth.ytmnd.com
http://www.lermanet.com/idacamburn/cultsandkids.htm
http://www.lermanet.com/faqs.html#psychiatry
http://www.lermanet.com/exit/hubbard-the-hypnotist4.htm
http://www.lermanet.com/scientology-and-occult/
http://theunfunnytruth.ytmnd.com/
both with IMAGES!!
"Scientologists believe that most human problems
can be traced to lingering spirits of an extraterrestrial
people massacred by their ruler, Xenu, over 75 million
years ago. These spirits attach themselves by "clusters"
to individuals in the contemporary world, causing
spiritual harm and negatively influencing the lives
of their hosts"
[Judge Leonie Brinkema 4 Oct 96 Memorandum Opinion]
What do we get from getting people out of scientology?
We create an individual who has become a Houdini of
all mind traps.. folks who won't be fooled again.
People who can DE-program, People who can spring mental
traps..
We create, by freeing someone of scientology, a being
who has the ability to break the strongest slave chains
of all.
Those forged of lies. (c) Arnaldo Lerma
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
nexi...@yahoo.co.in
capable of writing things like "Wordlessly presiding over the defense
of the lobby is a bust of Hubbard himself, his open, toothless mouth
"saved" ....
~{}{}{}];)
nexibello
barbz
--
"I'm for the separation of church and hate."
Barb
Chaplain, ARSCC(wdne)
xenu...@netscape.net
vinny
...
> MAY 24-MAY 30 1991 LA WEEKLY
>
> "The L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition"
> By RALPH RUGOFF
>
> Welcome to the jungle.
> ARMED FOR MY APPOINTMENT AT THE L. RON Hubbard Life Exhibition Hall a
> few minutes early. Unlike in other commemorative mausoleums, such as
> the Nixon Library and Birthplace, you're not allowed to walk around
> the Hubbard by yourself. Instead, you must sign up for an
> hour-and-a-half guided tour. Possibly they don't trust the unassisted
> viewer to fully reap the museum's rewards, though it might also be a
> matter of security.
This is typical of the style that arnaldo likes and tries to imatate
himself. Always pushing for an imagined clever phrase, with a
willingness to torture a sentence just to impress one with
unilluminated prowess.
Well, it's all he has, so we may as well applaud him.
Way to go arnie! You found someone who writes as poorly as you do,
though not quite as boring.
Vinny
Zinj
@d34g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>, vincent...@hotmail.com
says...
<snip>
> though not quite as boring.
>
> Vinny
'boring'(ly)
What's your excuse?
Zinj
--
You Can Lead a Clam to Reason; but You Can't Make Him Think