Jack Kerouac, one century

Jack Kerouac was born 100 years ago today.  (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969).  Some of his writings made him a great mentor to me as a teen in the 1960s, being very influential in my comprehension and practice of Buddhism, of personal freedom, and of the great outdoors.  He was one of the great influencers in my life. 

Of his books, The Dharma Bums, On The Road, and Desolation Angels were most important to me as a high school seeker. 

His novels are extremely uneven in their projected sense-of-life.  They can occasionally have some very rare “healthy” aspects (which, to me, are his  articulations of the joy of getting out “on the road” to new unexplored places, of seeking out uniquely interesting people, of some of his insights into Buddhism, and, above all, his chronicling of a solitary human slogging through Samsara).  But most of his other novels are extremely depressing and portray his often sick, addicted and sad soul.  Ignore those.  Following below, I will try to winnow out what are, to me, the best aspects of Kerouac’s writing. 

I read his novels in this order:  In high school, my friends and I traded books and ideas.  Mark handed me a copy of Kerouac’s Desolation Angels.  Wow!  I had already been deeply into Buddhism, but this was my first immergence into Zen.  We next found On The Road. 

Then, The Dharma Bums (1958).  This is one of those top few books that have inspired me the most both in my young life and beyond.

Jack partied – hard, as did I – but he also meditated, and he sought out what an honest and authentic human should think and do.  This novel chronicles the mid-1950s Beat Generation renaissance in poetry and freedom on the West Coast.  And much, much more. 

Gary Snyder, the poet, translator and intellectual, is a key figure in The Dharma Bums (his name is disguised as Japhy Ryder).  Snyder introduced Kerouac (and me) to the poetry of Chinese Ch’an/Zen mountain hermit Han Shan and his Cold Mountain Poems.  Snyder later published a small volume of translations of some these Han Shan poems (1959), which I acquired in the late-1960s and still have with me close at hand.   

And mountain climbing!  I had always been fascinated by mountaineering literature and any books and documentaries of great climbs and climbers.  So, Kerouac’s account, in The Dharma Bums, of him and Snyder doing a backpack climb in the High Seirra was right on. 

Jack had earlier gone to a San Franciso surplus store and bought a rucksack, sleeping bag and other gear, outfitting himself for major backpack rambling.  His concept of a “rucksack revolution”, where he envisioned American youth loading up their packs and venturing out into a bold rambling way of life – this hit home, and it easily launched me “on the road” and into the hills. 

Re: my own Buddhist journey.  I had been exploring comparative religions then in my teens, and I liked Buddhism most of all, especially the life-story narratives of Siddhartha Gautama (the Shakyamuni Buddha), with his genuine solitary all-out seeking of moral truths.  The Pali Canon of “southern Buddhism”, i.e., the most ancient Hinayana/ Theravada traditions (despite their unfortunate supernatural interludes) chronicled this, and it seemed more historically accurate than the Mahayana cosmic visions.  But Zen, a Mahayana offshoot, seemed to nail the here-and-now beauty of mountain and forest in its practice – without dogma. 

In this book, Kerouac reinforced a native trait I already had:  bivouacking out alone under the night skies.  He stayed with his sister for a while in North Carolina, and he found a little spot amongst the trees where he could sit and meditate in the frosty winter nights.  I, too, staked out an obscure spot of nature above Chandlers Valley that I called the Zen Grove, where I would sit and meditate.  And, in all the years since, I’ve found special little spots of privacy and quiet, in forests, meadows, or even urban corners, where I can sit.  And see the Moon. 

Zen apprentice motto:  “Haul Water, Chop Wood.”

Barlow corollary:  “Climb high, Watch Moon.” 

I think The Dharma Bums is Kerouac’s finest writing.  It was written in late-1957, just after On The Road was finally published, with Jack’s first  experience of literary recognition and success, so he was full of energy, enthusiasm, and was rather “optimistic” (if that concept could ever be ascribed to Desolation Jack). 

Desolation Angels (published in 1965) was written over time in 1956 and again in 1961  There are two distinct sections:  “Desolation Angels” and “Passing Through”.  (But Kerouac had wanted them published as separate books.)  The first section (written c.1956) was mainly from his journals while he was a lone Firewatch up on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades for the summer of 1956, and it was written before his publishing success.  The second section (c.1961) was a reflection on later experiences, and I found this last section very depressing. 

The greatest impressions on me from that first section on Desolation Peak – as a teenage explorer of Buddhism and my first reading of Kerouac – was his presentation of Zen, its aesthetics, and especially the recognition of the wonderous Full Moon and the night.  Han Shan too! 

On The Road (1957) written in 1951.  This book launched countless numbers of us in my generation to hit the road.  By 1968, I had a rucksack, sleeping bag, and a jungle hammock shelter, and I had “dropped out”.  The day after graduation, (the late) Gary Olson and I hitchhiked across northern Pennsylvania’s Route 6 toward the unknown of New York City.  We went right to Greenwich Village, traditional Beat center, and we drank beer at Gerdy’s Folk City, the bar where Bob Dylan was discovered.  That summer, I hitched all over the northeastern US, on the road, as a Dharma bum with Kerouac as an example.  A satori in the USA. 

By the way, get the best version:  On The Road: the Original Scroll, published not that long ago, which has the original text.  A purist’s delight.  And, there was a good 2012 film version of this Kerouac novel. 

In summation:  Jack, you were a bit sick and self-destructive, but I did especially appreciate your compassion.  Whenever I see hardship and adversity endured by either humans or animals, in my mind I hear you exclaim, like a long-enduring bodhisattva: 

“Poor suffering creatures, everywhere”. 

Caveat:  my scholarship on Kerouac history is not up to date, so I may have to update and correct this post from time to time. 

-Zenwind.  

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Book Review: Ready Player One (2011) by Ernest Cline.

This is primarily a Book Review (and only secondarily a bit of a movie review which appears at the end).  [Spoiler Alert:  The book was much, much better, but the movie was ok and worth watching although, in my opinion, the very best parts of the book were omitted.]  This novel, Ready Player One (2011), by Ernest Cline won the 2012 Prometheus Award for best new libertarian-themed Science Fiction novel from the Libertarian Futurist Society – of which I am a member – and, in my experience, their winners and nominees are usually very good SF reads.  I read this book soon after it was published and found it to be a delight.  

(Steven Spielberg has just produced and directed a feature film of this book, recently released, and the screenplay was co-written by author Cline.  Spielberg said that making this movie was the “most difficult movie I’ve done since Saving Private Ryan.”) 

The book’s story takes place in the future dystopian 2040s, mainly in youth Gamer culture, at a time when Virtual Reality has evolved so far that most people in the entire world are totally wrapped up in it to escape the depressing real world.  It is addictive.  It is Dungeons and Dragons, etc., gone space age wild in 5D. 

An incredibly powerful and realistic virtual reality platform called OASIS (i.e., the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation) had long become the world’s greatest hit by far.  Everybody is hooked into it, and the OASIS currency (i.e., its virtual credits) is the most stable money in the real dystopian earth.  This virtual reality is a universe onto itself. 

The genius creator of OASIS, James Halliday (1972-2040), has recently died and left behind in his will the ultimate Easter Egg hunt.  If you solve all of the puzzle game quests hidden within his vast OASIS simulation, you will inherit his incredibly huge fortune as well as having complete control of the OASIS virtual world.  There are Three Keys to find (the Copper, Jade, and Crystal keys) and also Three Gates to navigate in order to win.  The worldwide competition to solve the puzzle is intense, and sinister corporate powers (the “IOI”) covet this powerful prize and muster enormous financial and technological resources to grab it by hook or crook. 

Some of our young Gamers want to win the quest in order to keep the OASIS free, as Halliday had intended it.  They are called “Gunters”, i.e., egg hunters.  The relentless sinister IOI corporate competitor puppet avatars are called “Sixers” (or, contemptuously, “Sucksers”). 

Halliday, the OASIS creator, had been a big fan of the era that he grew up in around the 1980s – long before our youngest gamers in the story were born – so knowledge of the culture of the 80s and the entire late-20^th century seems to be critical in solving the Easter Egg hunt.  One must become a cultural historian-archaeologist of sorts to succeed. 

Our hero, Wade Watts, is an orphaned high school senior (in a virtual high school within the OASIS simulation) living in real life in poverty in the US mid-west, and he absolutely lives for his “life” within the OASIS virtual reality.  He is a dedicated Gunter.  His avatar is called Parzival (the Arthurian seeker of the Holy Grail), and, because he is so poor, his virtual credits/ props/ tools/ weapons within the game-world of OASIS are extremely modest.  But he does have a cheap beat-up (virtual) spacecraft in the OASIS universe which is a Firefly-class transport vessel modeled after (Joss Whedon’s) ship Serenity.  [Being a huge Firefly fan myself, I love it!]  Wade has mastered most of the cultural references of Halliday’s youth era, e.g., the old classic video games, movies, TV shows, music, etc. that Halliday loved.  And he has a few avatar friends within the OASIS virtual reality that he trusts, while never actually having met them yet in the flesh. 

Caveat:  I am most decidedly NOT, nor have I ever been, a “gamer” of any sort.  Yet I love this book.  I hate games and always have, whether they are card games, video games, parlor games, board games, or so-called “sports” team athletic games (I rather liked boxing or solo climbing instead).  I did like many of the theatrical films referenced in the book as well as a lot of the great music of the era.  I haven’t a clue about many of the other circa 1980s cultural references here, but it does not in any way detract from my enjoyment of the book. 

Even though this book won the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award, political themes are not explicitly emphasized much at all.  It’s more implied.  Libertarian issues in the book would include:  personal privacy, individual self-determination, rejection of regimentation and conformity, and the fight against tyrannical elites. 

Here is one of the book’s few mentions of government by our 2040s protagonist narrator, Wade/Parzival: 

“I didn’t bother with [elections for the US government], because I didn’t see the point.  The once-great country into which I had been born now resembled its former self in name only.  It didn’t matter who was in charge.  Those people were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and everyone knew it.  Besides, now that everyone voted from home, via the OASIS, the only people who could get elected were movie stars, reality TV personalities, or radical televangelists.” [emphasis added]  (This book was published in 2011; does that last sentence not jump out at you today?) 

The villain in this book is not a government, but a huge corporate entity that aspires to the same levels of classic governmental power, corruption, and control by using the timeless monopolistic government strategies of coercion and murder to achieve complete domination.  The corporation is called IOI (Innovative Online Industries), and its villainous CEO is Nolan Sorrento.  A highly rigged system of Indentured Servitude ensnares people into debt and then coerces them to work for IOI to work off the debts, but it is so structured that it only makes them serfs for life.  Gunters desperately want to keep IOI from winning the prize of controlling OASIS. 

Among my favorite cultural references:  We get an important plot item during one of Wade’s early quests that involves details of the 1983 film WarGames with Matthew Broderick, a film I really liked at the time.  Among other film favorites of OASIS creator James Halliday were the great teen films of John Hughes, as well as Blade Runner (1982) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and many others.  (The 2018 film pretty much ignores them.) 

But I especially loved the book’s episode of Wade/Parzival’s quest for the Second Gate, where he drew upon his knowledge of the music and the (Neil Peart) lyrics of one of James Halliday’s all-time favorite Rock albums, the 1976 Rush album 2112.  (This album has also been a nominee for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Special Award).  This is a crucial libertarian connection if you know that album’s background. 

(As an aside:  In those mid-1970s, I was a rambling radio music listener, only hearing random FM radio Rock tunes while driving to and from solo climbing expeditions while toking on the holy herb.  So I never had time to collect any Rock albums in those days or know much of the details about the era’s other great musical groups or their lyrics, but I definitely liked what I was hearing on the radio from Rush.  I often stumbled down from a climbing ordeal out of the mountains to my car at the roadhead, and as I lit up and turned on the car radio I heard glorious Rock and Roll with blazing guitars and heroic lyrics about liberty.  In those days, I had no idea of the extent of Rush lyricist Neal Peart’s libertarian ideas, as I could rarely decipher many of the garbled words I was hearing in Rush songs, but a few phrases and notions that strongly celebrated freedom came through.  And I liked the band’s hard Rock sound.  I was a big fan, albeit not knowing much about them.) 

Peart’s scenario in 2112 has a protagonist who in many important ways is like the hero of the 1938 libertarian SF novella Anthem (a Prometheus winner, in the Hall of Fame category).  The Anthem hero offers his great scientific re-discoveries to humanity only to be rejected and threatened with destruction by an idiotic, conservative, theocratic bureaucracy.  In the Rush album, the hero offers up his own wondrous individualistic discovery of ecstatic soul-renewing music, via his own re-discovery of the electric guitar, to an uncomprehending stupidly dark priesthood.  (This is a very strong libertarian background connection in the Ready Player One novel, but unfortunately all mention of this Rush album and its individualist ideas was left out of Spielberg’s 2018 feature film except for just a too-brief glimpse of a wall poster of 2112 in Halliday’s bedroom.) 

The issue of Personal Privacy is very important in this book, as an individual’s need for their own private space.  Wade’s secret “hideout” deep into the midst of a vast discarded junkyard heap is his one place to interact in OASIS without interference from anyone.  When he discovered it, early on, he realized:  “I’d found something of immeasurable value:  privacy.”  He homesteaded his own private property.  Privacy is crucial for the development, sanity and flourishing of an individual.  Later in the story, after successfully winning important game quests and thus earning vast virtual credits in the OASIS universe, Wade/Parzival buys his own personal (virtual) asteroid and it gives him a precious personal kingdom of privacy.  Secure private property equals safety.  Later, before committing to his most risky revolutionary strategy of probing into the very heart of the tyrannical corporate entity, he first seeks to secure a niche of privacy within which to operate. 

Finally, Ogden “Og” Morrow is a peripheral character in the story (played in the 2018 film by Simon Pegg).   He had co-founded OASIS with James Halliday and was his best friend since youth.  But Og quit the foundation running it in 2022, because he said OASIS had become “a self-imposed prison for humanity.”  The book says that Og’s real-world mansion and grounds in Oregon “looks exactly like Rivendell” (an episode also missing in the film). 

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The movie of Ready Player One (2018) produced and directed by Steven Spielberg

The Spielberg film is very different from the book in many details, but much of the action is still captured.  The plot has been extensively reworked, even though Cline was a co-writer, and most of the cultural references have been changed.  It is a bit less dark than the novel, but it is very much less implicitly libertarian.  I still like it though I regret that many of the best parts of the book are ignored. 

It is well casted.  The villain, Nolan Sorrento (played by actor Ben Mendelsohn) looks exactly like David Miscavige!  Mark Rylance plays James Halliday, and Simon Pegg plays Og.  The CGI is great, as it would have to be to depict the virtual reality universe that is a major location of the story’s action. 

The historical-cultural details referenced in the film are, like the book, so deep and richly layered that I bet I will find much, much more of interest by studying the DVD someday.  E.g., on first viewing, I swear I had an extremely brief glimpse of an incidental OASIS avatar depicting Beetlejuice (1988) in the crowd, etc. 

The film has the potential to be a nerd classic on account of its abundant (and often too-brief) references to past culture in films, books, games, etc.  The more one knows about the culture of the 1970s, 80s, 90s and beyond, the more amazing the experience.  There is much information to be mined.  E.g., the film makes very good reference to the Stanley Kubrick 1980 film adaptation of Steven King’s The Shining. 

In the end, I was most disappointed by the fact that the book’s use of both the music and story of the album 2112 by Rush was left out.  Unforgivable. 

The movie was worth seeing.  Hey, it’s Spielberg!  But do check out the book. 

-Zenwind. 

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Book Review: Lonesome Squirrel (1991) by Steven Fishman

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Wow!  This is one outrageously hilarious parody of the Church of Scientology.  It is in a class by itself as a completely thorough mockery of L. Ron Hubbard’s “religion.”  Very well done and great fun, but it is definitely not for everyone.  (Among other reasons for this, it is a very long document, and it seems to be only available online.) 

Although the book represents itself on the surface as a true autobiographical narrative, it is actually a work of fiction, while still uncannily reflecting the actual documented culture and policies of Scientology, albeit in a most exaggerated manner.  Yet it is not as far from the truth as one might think -- e.g., the very well-documented (from numerous other sources) culture of vicious infighting within Church ranks, etc.  Steve Fishman was actually never as much of a Scientologist as he claims, but he had studied tons of genuine Church books and history closely enough to gain an impressive expertise of its workings.  But he actually figures into the true history of Scientology by infamously causing some of the cult’s most secretly guarded “scriptures” to be publicly released, e.g., the story of galactic overlord Xenu, etc.  More on this below. 

Caveat:  Again, this is definitely not a book for everyone.  It is grossly blasphemous, vulgar, extremely offensive, misogynous, and way sick – which is part of its warped appeal – but it is funnier than Hell on Fire.  (E.g., as Fishman sings praises of the Church: “Even my bowel movements were clean and crisp, and it was all due to Scientology.”)  There is something in this book to offend almost everyone.  If you don’t have much informational background on Scientology and on its insane culture and criminal history, then you will not understand much of Lonesome Squirrel, but if you have been following the Hubbard cult closely then this book will blow your mind by its spot-on satire. 

Another Caveat:  Steve Fishman is a convicted criminal and a well-documented liar who is now in prison for the second time.  His first conviction (1990) was for mail fraud and obstruction of justice – which according to his fictional account in this book was in the service of the Church of Scientology – and he was sentenced to five years.  After serving some of that time and getting out on probation, Fishman got into another fraud scheme, and this time he is serving a 20-year sentence.  He can be a piece of shit, but he’s got a great sense of humor. 

Briefly, the story of how Steve Fishman publicly released top-secret Scientology scriptures.  On 6 May 1991, TIME magazine published a phenomenal cover story, “Scientology:  The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power”, and the Church of Scientology immediately sued the magazine for libel.  (The magazine won the case, but only after spending over $7,000,000 in the legal fight; this expensive “victory” quelled other journalists’ temptation to anger the Church for years to come.)  Apparently, the magazine’s cover story writer had believed Fishman’s wild account of his fictional career in Scientology and recounted some of Fishman’s most outrageous lies; and these were some of the things the Church held to be libelous. 

So the Church also sued Fishman, who represented himself in court.  In his massive personal library of Scientology lore he had somehow acquired authentic copies of the secret upper OT levels.  These “Operating Thetan” levels, OT 1-8, are as high as you can go in the Church, and you must pay hundreds of thousands of dollars before the uppermost secrets are revealed to you.  Fishman entered these OT level secrets as exhibits in open court files, and from there they were posted by others onto the Internet (famously known ever since as the Fishman Affidavit, aka, the Fishman Papers).  The Church then retreated from suing Fishman and tried, unsuccessfully, to stop online dissemination of the OT levels.  The most famous of these levels is OT-3, the “Wall of Fire” level where the story of Xenu was revealed.  (See South Park’s famous parody of Scientology in their episode “Trapped in the Closet”.)  That these Fishman Papers are actually authentic is proved by the fact that the Church tried to shut down Internet dissemination of the OT levels by arguing that their "copyrights" were being violated, thus admitting that these were their actual documents. 

At the very end of Chapter 18 of Lonesome Squirrel, Fishman claims that he personally “introduced Russell Means to the Libertarian Party” in 1984.  This being a Fishman claim, I am skeptical enough to call it total bullshit. 

Only a die-hard Scientology Watcher will appreciate this book and get its in-jokes, so I recommend it only to those twisted few. 

-Zenwind.

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Book Review: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) by Lawrence Wright

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For the Church of Scientology, the shit has hit the fan. If you can only read one book about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, this is the one. I have had a perverse hobby of researching this cult for many years, and I’ve read most of the important exposes of the cult. They are all informative and most often riveting, but this book is the gem of Scientology critiques because of its journalistic rigor and completeness. It is very well written.

(There has been a recent HBO documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015), directed by Oscar-winning documentary maker, Alex Gibney, which is based on Wright’s book and which includes interviews with Wright. I saw the documentary, and I love it.)

Although I have read many books about Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (L. Ron Hubbard, or “LRH,” 1911-1986), this book by Lawrence Wright provided a lot of additional information about him and his religion. Wright dug deep and interviewed many “apostates” who left Scientology but who were witnesses during its important years, and he mastered the vast literature of the multitude of ex-Scientologists.

He also acknowledged some of the reasons that make Scientologists so loyal to their group. He sees LRH as not only a liar and a fraud but as a charismatic fabulist that fascinated many people and made them believe him on faith. He notes that LRH, while still successful at grabbing money for power, spent much of his time alone with his E-meter developing his “spiritual technology.” LRH worked obsessively on working out a route to higher levels in his church doctrine. Wright asks: “If it was all a con, why would he bother?” He apparently believed his own bullshit. LRH was astoundingly complex, and Wright appreciates this while not sparing him radical criticism.

Lawrence Wright is an eminent American journalist on the staff of The New Yorker, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, in which he accurately nailed the relevant terrorist ideology, origins, and activities.

He wrote this book on Scientology in a measured style, honest and reality-oriented – brutally honest – yet also showing sincere compassion for true believers who were positively affected by Scientology. E.g., Scientology has netted some celebrities as high-profile icons/recruiters; and actress Ann Archer (Patriot Games, Fatal Attraction) and her husband agreed to be interviewed by Wright – and I really respect them for such openness and forthrightness – and Wright is respectful of their deep devotion to Scientology.

Scientology is very much a Hollywood style religion of the late 20th century, but it has its perverse dark sides and the well-documented extreme horror stories of totalistic confinement, mind control, families ripped apart through forced “disconnection,” and ruthless revenge against anyone who is considered to be a critical “enemy” of the church. The Hollywood celebrities are shielded from such controversies.

Academy Award winner Hollywood screenwriter and director Paul Haggis is a big part of this story because Wright wrote a long 2011 article on Haggis’s journey in and out of Scientology in The New Yorker called “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology.” Chapter 1 of Going Clear is “The Convert,” an account of Haggis as a young man pursuing the allure of Scientology in the early 1970s. The book will tell, near its end, of Haggis investigating and re-thinking Scientology after 35 years in it, and Haggis is very honest and courageous in his criticisms.

Chapter 2, “The Source,” focuses on LRH (Hubbard), the “source” of all cult doctrine. He was such a bullshitter! His lies about his wartime service and intellectual accomplishments are covered in other of my posts here in the Post Index Category, "Scientology".

Chapter 3, “Going Overboard,” covers LRH’s exile when running from governments in the 1960s and 70s. One very interesting item is about when he wrote the “theological” level Operating Thetan Three (OT-III), the secret knowledge of Galactic overlord Xenu 75 million years ago and how Xenu caused the mindfuck that continues on planet Teegeeack (aka, Earth). In the late 60s LRH was in Tangiers “researching” OT-III, the “Wall of Fire” level, and he wrote to his wife in England that he was “drinking lots of rum” and downing drugs, “pinks and grays,” while researching. He sounds inspired. The reaction of Paul Haggis when he finally earned the right to read this secret story about Xenu – which is now all over the internet – is one of my favorite parts of the book.

Hubbard moves his base of operations to Clearwater, Florida in the early 1970s, while personally hiding out elsewhere. This is the time of his aggressive campaign to “destroy” Paulette Cooper, a journalist who wrote The Scandal of Scientology (1971), and he almost did destroy her. (Her story is the subject of another great recent book by Tony Ortega, The Unbreakable Miss Lovely, which I hope to review here someday.) The Church of Scientology is infamous for its litigious practices, suing opponents into the ground. Hubbard’s doctrine was to viciously attack and to completely destroy perceived enemies. The church’s dirty tricks were often criminal.

At this time Hubbard also declared war on the US government, and other world governments, in his “Snow White Program,” which I have described before. It is called the biggest domestic infiltration of the US government in history. The FBI raided the church in 1977, and 11 high-level church officials, including Hubbard’s wife, ended up going to prison.

Chapter 4 is “The Faith Factory.” Borrowing from Jon Atack’s research, Wright applies the work of Robert Jay Lifton on “ideological totalism.” Lifton studied Maoist “thought reform” (which the CIA called “brainwashing”), especially the techniques of public confession and then re-education. Numerous Scientology defectors describe these exact techniques as a principal tool of control in the Sea Org (SO), the core “clergy” unit of the church. The horror stories are consistent from many different informants.

Meanwhile, the cult cultivates celebrities, especially Hollywood ones. John Travolta was one of the first big names. Tom Cruise is now the biggest name. LRH always emphasized going after famous people as icons and recruiters, and Hollywood was his main target. Celebrities are insulated from the harsh realities of rank and file church members.

LRH died in 1986 – or rather his mythology says that he “dropped his meat body” in order to do research amongst the galaxies and he will reincarnate someday here on Earth. He had still been an exile living in secret locations, hiding from his enemies.

New to me were some of the further historical details about Scientology’s present supreme leader, David Miscavige (DM). DM took over the church after the death of LRH, and he continues the ruthless policies of the Founder. With a vengeance.

DM micromanages every detail of the church’s activities, including the extremely cruel traditional LRH revenge and dirty tricks actions. Miscavige’s violent physical and mental assaults on his staff are very well documented elsewhere, but Wright’s documentation of DM’s history of violence shows us that he was abnormally violent while a young teenager. I can only conclude that Miscavige is a psychopath, by most accounts a dangerously angry bully who delights in crushing anyone he dislikes. And he has over a billion dollars in a slush fund which he uses to litigate or hire private detectives to harass his enemies.

Most of the recent Scientologists who have “blown,” i.e., who have managed to escape this religion that ruthlessly tracks you down and harasses and intimidates you to stay within the cult, have already told their stories elsewhere and the stories are very, very consistent.

Most of Hubbard’s own children have blown. Quentin Hubbard, LRH’s heir apparent, blew in 1976. Quentin was gay in a religion that considered this extremely perverse. He was found in Las Vegas, comatose in a car with the engine running and a hose from the exhaust to the window, and he died later. When Hubbard got the note about Quentin’s suicide, his reaction was: “That little shit has done it to me again!” (!!!)

Hubbard’s daughter Suzette blew in 1988. As did his youngest son Arthur that same year. The only remaining child of his third marriage, Diana, lives as a recluse on the California desert base.

In 1993 the Church of Scientology won a long-fought victory against the IRS, gaining tax-exemptions as a recognized religion. They won by wearing the IRS down through over 2,000 lawsuits against its district offices and individual employees. The IRS lawyers were completely overwhelmed, and the director made it all go away by simply surrendering to the cult’s demands. Now Miscavige has accumulated billions in cash and real estate.

“Google: ‘Lisa McPherson’.” In 1995 Lisa was given the church recognition of having achieved the state of “Clear,” meaning being perfectly healthy and on her way to higher Scientology levels. Yet she was psychotic. Who was the church auditing case supervisor who declared her to be “Clear”? It was David Miscavige. DM himself (although the church now denies it). When Lisa was soon hospitalized in a psych ward for running naked in the streets, the church moved her to their own hotel and “treated” her with LRH’s wacky theories. In 17 days she was dead. Miscavige micro-managed her entire treatment. The church only resolved the embarrassing situation in their favor after declaring a long war on the medical examiner and forcing her to reverse her judgment and retire in shattered health. Bastards.

You won’t believe some of the nutty accounts in Chapter 8, about David Miscavige in the Church headquarters out in the California desert near Hemet. But the witnesses are too many and too consistent. Give a madman like him money and unlimited power, and the incredible cruelty follows when no one will speak up at the time. Meanwhile TC (Tom Cruise) and DM are best buddies, and the abuses just cruise over Tom’s head.

The Sea Org (SO) members work endlessly for measly pay and are “thought reformed” into submission. All their (rare) phone calls are monitored, their mail opened, their bank records watched – like under the Stasi. Meanwhile, DM lives a lavish lifestyle with the best of everything.

Defections from the cult are multiplying, and they include high officials. Mark “Marty” Rathbun was second only to DM in the cult, as the Inspector General. With decades in the church, Marty was trusted to “audit” (i.e., counsel, mentor) Tom Cruise on the E-meter when Tom returned to an active role in the church. Rathbun blew in 2004, stayed silent for five years and then started a blog critical of DM’s dictatorship. He has been harassed unmercifully under DM’s micro-managed revenge machine. His inside knowledge of the church is priceless.

Marc Headley blew in 2005, and this also reflected badly on Tom Cruise. When Tom was in earlier church training he had to in turn audit someone else. Marc Headley was a SO employee who never had time to do his own advancement in Scientology levels, so DM had Tom audit Marc. The point is that if Marc blew, his auditor (Tom) is supposed to share a lot of the blame. Not that it will happen. Marc’s wife, Claire Headley, blew after Marc did, and she was the overall case supervisor of Tom Cruise’s auditing process. Embarrassing, no? Marc’s fine book, Blown for Good was reviewed earlier here.

In 2010 John Brousseau blew, and this shook things up because he had intimate knowledge of DM’s behavior and of the work SO laborers did for Tom Cruise for slave wages.

In 2007 Mike Rinder blew. Mike was a top official, the church’s spokesman for many years and executive director of the Office of Special Affairs (OSA), the cult’s spy org that replaced the old Guardians Office. With uncommon inside knowledge of the cult, he knows “where the bodies are stashed.”

As far as Hollywood celebrities blowing, Jason Beghe, an actor who takes no BS from nobody, left the cult loudly and unafraid. Paul Haggis was concerned about the hypocrisy he saw in church leadership, and he did (forbidden) research on the internet to have his eyes opened to church abuses. Haggis wrote a long detailed letter of resignation from the Church of Scientology and he shared it with a few people. The letter found its way to Marty Rathbun, who asked Haggis for permission to reprint it on his blog. Haggis said sure. What surprised Haggis was that Rathbun’s blog post with his letter had 55,000 hits that very afternoon! Scientology is being watched by multitudes of folk who don’t like what they see.

There is much, much more interesting material in this masterful work. Lawrence Wright had a legion of fact-checkers and an army of lawyers doing their homework before publication, because the cult is notorious at suing critics into the ground. Their work was so well done that the cult can only squawk.

In his Epilogue, Wright puts the Church of Scientology into historical perspective. He compares them with the early Mormons. Joseph Smith was a pathological liar, a habitual fraud and con man, and a sexual exploiter, but he was charismatic enough to have a following of thousands in his short life, and today the Mormons are a flourishing almost-mainstream sect. They even had a Mormon run for president. (Although Mitt said his favorite novel was Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard! Give me a break!) Wright points out that the Christian Scientists oppose mainstream medicine even more than Scientologists, yet they have been accepted in American life for the most part (even though they are diminishing in numbers these days). And as far as Scientology’s policy of “disconnection”, the Amish do the same thing, calling it “shunning,” and the Amish have settled into their niche as an accepted, marginal, sect. Scientology won’t die soon, despite the shit hitting the big fan right now. What will it evolve into?

Wright is harsh when he has to be and compassionate when that is called for. But he is adamant that the Church of Scientology has to be confronted for its egregious abuses. He calls on the celebrity members, naming Tom Cruise and John Travolta, he maintains that they cannot be blind to these abuses, and he challenges them to take responsibility and renounce or try to change the cult’s present practices under David Miscavige.

In sum, this is a great book. I enjoyed reading it, even though many (not all) of the facts were already known to me – mainly through reading the daily blogs on Scientology by the indefatigable journalist Tony Ortega for many years now; Ortega has been covering Scientology for 20 years and is a clearing house of info, and he is also interviewed in Gibney's documentary Going Clear.

Wright is able to combine impeccable documentation with wonderful storytelling. This is a book I will be reading again someday, as a timeless account of the cult.

-Zenwind.

Book Review: This Perfect Day (1970) by Ira Levin

This excellent novel is one of the few by Ira Levin that was never made into a movie. (Not quite anyway; see below.) It was called to my attention from one of my favorite sources of book recommendations: the Libertarian Futurist Society, which gave This Perfect Day a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. By the time I finished reading it, I found that there are some very interesting libertarian connections with artistic influences and intellectual debts.

The world of this novel is a future Earth dystopia of conformity and perfect equality which is run by a master computer called “Uni” (short for “Uni-Comp”), and everyone is strictly required to take a monthly dose of “treatment” (meds) to deaden their desires and individuality. Thus medicated, people dread being “different”, a sense of that being sin. The idea of “choosing” seems odd and heretical to them. The very idea of choosing a job instead of Uni assigning it to you, of “deciding” and “picking” anything – these are all “manifestations of selfishness” and are outlawed in this future world. The only historical knowledge people have is vaguely that of the “pre-Uni chaos”, and they never really study it.

Part Two is “Coming Alive.” Our protagonist falls in with some non-conformists, proto-individualists who are able to reduce their treatment dosages without getting caught, and they tell him about what these new experiences are like. They introduce him to new concepts, such as “consent”, which they explain means “your body is yours, not Uni’s”, and he doesn’t have to take the treatments.

The reduced treatments wake him up for the first time in his life. He and his new friends start furtively going through old pre-Uni books in museums and find that these ancients indeed had some bad experiences but also happy ones: e.g., going wherever they chose, “earning” things, “owning” things, and always choosing; the ancients were more alive.

By reading to this point in my review, you might see a parallel between this 1970 novel and a certain 2002 movie. The Introduction to my Kindle edition of This Perfect Day is by Jonathan Trigell, and he mentions the close similarity between this novel and Kurt Wimmer’s film, Equilibrium (2002), one of my favorite movies which I had earlier reviewed here. This film had originally been recommended to me on a neo-Objectivist-libertarian e-list over ten years ago.

This novel also reminds one of Ayn Rand’s 1938 novella, Anthem, e.g., a person cannot choose his or her profession but is rather assigned it. And there is an even more interesting Rand connection.

Jeff Riggenbach writes (in Mises Daily, 3 December 2010) that Levin had read Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and that he studied a bit at Objectivism’s original educational enterprise, the Nathaniel Branden Institute, in the late 50s and early 60s, and – quoting Barbara Branden (1986) – Levin “began to enter the circle of Ayn’s friends.” Riggenbach’s review of the novel is very good (but he does give away a few spoilers), and he points out that the book’s primary weakness is in economics. Still, he calls This Perfect Day “one of the top half-dozen libertarian novels ever published in our language.” Coming from Jeff, that is high praise.

-Zenwind.

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Book Review: Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (2009) by Marc Headley

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Blown for Good is an autobiographical narrative but it reads like a thriller. In Scientology’s esoteric babble, to be “blown” is to have escaped from the Sea Org (SO), the cult’s dedicated hard core of workers and executives, each of whom have signed up for a “billion year contract.” And one must really achieve an all-out desperate escape, because they send out a massive manhunt of security people and SO staffers to drag you back in; they scour bus stations, airports, and any other place you might try to get away. Scientology has elsewhere been very accurately called the “prison of belief.” I knew that Marc Headley “blew” several years ago, and I knew the eventual outcome, but his story had me enthralled with its suspense to the very last page. I couldn’t put it down. His depiction of the cult as an “Iron Curtain” is perfect. Think of the people risking all to escape East Germany from 1945 to 1989.

Marc Headley grew up in Scientology with his mother and sister, and at age 16 he signed the “billion year contract” to join the Sea Org. Long hours, hard work, little sleep, poor food, pathetic “pay,” insane policies, and brutal harassment were the norm in the paranoid and crazy International Base in the California desert. This is Scientology’s headquarters, run by the Chairman of the Board (COB) of the Religious Technology Center (RTC), David Miscavige, who is the indisputable dictator of the entire worldwide cult and a certifiable asshole. Headley gives proof and describes Miscavige as being “evil” and delighting in the suffering of others – a fact confirmed by countless others who have experienced his cruelty and have escaped from the cult.

One of the things preventing anyone from “blowing” from Scientology is that if you do you will be “declared” as a “Suppressive Person” (SP), a kind of apostate heretic, and your family members still locked into the cult must “disconnect” from you and never communicate with you ever again. It is an absolute church law for all (unless you are a special rich celebrity like Tom Cruise). Marc and his wife Claire have been disconnected by almost all of their families, who refuse to communicate with them per church commands. The church denies having this policy, but it has been church doctrine starting with the founder L. Ron Hubbard, and it still goes on.

After 15 years of loyal, productive, and hard work at Scientology’s headquarters, taking an increasing amount of abuse in an increasingly crazy organizational atmosphere, Marc decides to blow. His story is fascinating.

Scientology has a special language of acronyms and slang that is hard to get through. But Headley has provided a Glossary for acronyms to help you maneuver through it.

I have read many books on Scientology, but this is one of the best because it describes individual life on the inside the cult so well.

-Zenwind.

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Book Review: Mao: the Unknown Story (2005) by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

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This huge biography of Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) is very well researched – 12 years in the making, interviewing scores of people who were on the scene in Mao’s circle as well as people connected with him from around the world, and consulting numerous archives.  Author Jung Chang was a teenage Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution (aka, the Great Purge), and her parents were both longtime cadres of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  Her husband Jon Halliday is an Irish historian. 

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Mao Tse-tung comes out as an even more twisted mass murderer of civilians than I had thought.  In terms of sheer body count, he was worse than Stalin and Hitler -- combined -- and is without a doubt the top killer of all time.  Their evidence in this book caused R.J. Rummel – the renowned authority on “death by government,” i.e., the murder of civilians by their own government – to upgrade (to actually double) Mao’s murder count to well over 70 million Chinese citizens deliberately killed by his policies.  These were not war casualties; they were deaths of civilians by calculated government actions (such as deliberate famine, labor camps and torture as well as executions) with Mao in command.  It is a horror story, made worse because of its reality. 

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If Machiavelli had lived during the mid-20^th century, he would have presented Mao as his prime example of power-by-all-devious-means, rather than Cesare Borgia.  Mao had an evil genius for power plays combined with a total lack of humaneness enabling him to follow through. 

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I heartily recommend this book, with one important caveat:  It does not mention the gross atrocities of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist (KMT) enemy of Mao (and an ally of the USA) who retreated to Taiwan in 1949.  According to R.J. Rummel’s research program into civilian “death by government,” Chiang ranks number four among the all-time mass murders by government leaders, behind Mao (with over 70 million deaths), Stalin (with around 40 million), and Hitler (with around 20 million).  Rummel estimates Chiang’s number of killings to be 10 million Chinese civilians.  That is hard to ignore or sweep under the rug, but our authors do it. 

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Major myths surrounding Mao are exploded in this book.  E.g.: during the Long March, Mao didn’t march; he was actually carried on a litter, a sedan chair, by others for most of the march.  Mao was ignorant of most military strategy, and the way he wasted tens of thousands of his own Red Army soldiers was appalling.  He would frequently waste the lives of enormous numbers of troops solely to jockey himself into a better position of power over his rivals in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  He routinely instituted terror for population control.  He was a monster who never thought twice about killing huge numbers of humans. 

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Red China (the PRC) and the CCP were creations of the USSR, and the documentation is here.  Soviet military intelligence (GRU) consistently aided the CCP with organizational guidance, with important intel, with technology, and arms.  Moscow consistently backed Mao, amongst all the other CCP leaders whom they had trained, because of Mao’s willingness to use extreme brutality, unspeakable tortures and killings.  Mao always looked to Moscow, because he knew the source for guns and money. 

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Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT allowed the Reds to go on their Long March when he could have crushed them at the time.  Chiang wanted the Red Army invasion of the Southwest provinces in order to scare the independent warlords into an alliance with him.  Also, Chiang had to appease the Soviets, who had his son hostage.  He “herded” the Red Army west. 

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From 1942, in Mao’s settled base at Yenan, Mao’s style of governance was apparent.  Humor was banned.  (!)  Everyone was required to write endless “thought examinations.”  A cult of personality was developing, terror as a means of control was increasing, and he quickly destroyed the local economy with absurd taxation and hyper-inflation policies.  And Mao would never learn from his mistakes, ever. 

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In the later post-WWII civil war with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (KMT), Chiang’s army completely out-classed the Red Army and took over the industrial heartland of China in Manchuria.  The Red Army could very well have been finished off except for the good old USA.  General George Marshall brokered a truce, which gave the CCP and Red Army breathing space and the chance to be re-armed and trained by the USSR (with captured Japanese arms and pilot instructors).  Gen. Marshall had served in China in the 1920s and was “ill-disposed towards Chiang, mainly because of the corruption of Chiang’s relatives.”  (Or perhaps he witnessed Chiang’s own murderous history.) 

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By 1949 Chiang and the Nationalists folded and retreated to Taiwan, leaving Mao and company in charge of Mainland China as the People’s Republic of China (PRC).  Mao is so dependent on the USSR for arms that he begins what will be a long-term policy of exporting food to pay for arms, while Chinese people starve to death. 

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Mao’s terror amongst the peasants was from the same playbook as Lenin and Stalin:  he set quotas.  He decreed that 10% of the peasants were “land-owners” (“kulaks” in Russian parlance), and they were rounded up for expropriation of property, abuse and/or death. 

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Once the Reds were in charge, nationalization of larger private industrial property was postponed a bit at first, so business and agriculture started to recover from the chaos of war.  But censorship was total.  Public execution spectacles were designed to terrorize and brutalize the people.  Around 27 million people were executed or died in prisons or labor camps under Mao’s rule. 

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At the end of the Korean War, around 21,000 Chinese Red Army troops were POWs of the US and allies, and of these fully 2/3 of them refused to return to Red China, most of them going to Taiwan.  Mao’s drive to industrialize, militarize, and especially to get an A-bomb, meant that even more food was taken from the peasants and exported.  This was resisted by the Politburo (and by Chou En-lai, who was otherwise loyal to Mao), so Mao relaxed it a bit, making 1956 and 1957 relatively better.  But not for long. 

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In 1957 Mao laid a trap for intellectuals and dissidents, called “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.”  People who wanted democracy and the rule of law were encouraged to express themselves in public.  Then Mao closed the trap, calling it the “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” rounding them up.  He again set quotas for arrest, just as Stalin had done. 

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In 1958, in his Great Leap Forward, Mao knowingly caused the worst famine in human history, from 1958 to 1961.  Huge amounts of food were taken from the peasants and exported.  He exported food to Russia in return for massive military assistance, including the means to produce atomic weapons, while nearly 38 million Chinese died from starvation and/or overwork.  In 1960 alone, 22 million died in this famine. Mao’s Number 2, President Liu Shao-chi, admitted to the Soviet ambassador that at least 30 million had died before the famine was over. 

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Then the president of the PRC, Liu Shao-chi, politically ambushed Mao at a huge CCP conference in 1962, damning the obvious carnage of Mao’s policies.  The Party cadres overwhelmingly agreed with Liu, and Mao had to back off, thus ending the worst of the famine.  Mao salvaged much of his power by being backed by the defense minister, Lin Biao, as well as Chou En-lai.  Mao would strike back with revenge later. 

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Meanwhile, the “Big Destruction” in Tibet was Mao’s drive to annihilate the Buddhist culture there after the 1959 invasion.  Monasteries were destroyed, monks and nuns were killed.  In 1963 in China proper, all art forms in all of the PRC were denounced.  It was declared that “people read too much.” (!)

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In 1966 Mao launched his Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution.  His main allies who helped him pull it off were the defense chief Lin Biao and the loyal Chou En-lai.  Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) spearheaded the “kill the culture” campaign’s beginning.  Students, the Red Guards, were given food and then encouraged to turn on their teachers.  They invaded homes, burning books and destroying paintings, musical instruments, etc.  To me, this defines barbarity. 

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(The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia adopted this Maoist philosophy, rhetoric, and policies in the late-1970s, and their murder rate, as a percentage of the population murdered, out-did Mao.) 

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Mao then turned the momentum of terror against Party members who had opposed him earlier.  Off to labor camps (often a death sentence) went artists, writers, scholars, actors, journalists, etc.  Education basically stopped.  Leisure time vanished, replaced by mandatory group study sessions on Mao’s “thoughts,” and group denunciations of members.  Sounds like Hell on Earth to me. 

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The Red Guards purged CCP president Liu Shao-chi and his wife as “capitalist roaders,” along with Deng Xiao-ping.  Liu died in 1969.  However, Deng will be a survivor. 

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In 1967 the Red Army commander at Wuhan opposed the Cultural Revolution.  Mao went there himself to reestablish control, but the up-surge of popular anger there was so overwhelming it threatened him to the point he had to flee for his very life via a very close-call airplane escape. 

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By the late 1960s, Mao’s worldwide revolutionary authority had waned.  US president Nixon visited and fed Mao’s superpower dreams, but later with Watergate and Nixon’s fall, these dreams ended. 

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The loyal Chou En-lai had cancer, and early treatment would have helped him, but Mao delayed Chou’s treatment.  For one, Chou was the smoothest diplomatic personality he had and was needed for the Nixon negotiations.  And Mao didn’t want Chou to outlive him.  Nice reward for a comrade for a lifetime of loyalty! 

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Mention must be made of Madame Mao, Jiang Qing, who was ascendant during Mao’s last years.  She was nuts.  A completely paranoid evil bitch.  She was active in the early Cultural Revolution, pushing all Chinese to ever more austerity while she lived an extravagant personal lifestyle.  Her special private train would often stop at her whim, completely clogging all regional railroad traffic; and she justified it thusly:  “In order for me to have a good rest, and a good time, it is worth sacrificing some other people’s interests.” (p.730)  (Oh, yeah! We's da rulers, and yous' da low-life scum!)

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Deng Xiao-ping, who had been purged earlier, had to be rehabilitated by Mao because Chou was so ill, but Mao countered him with the “Gang of Four” (which included Madame Mao).  Mao was failing physically.  He had lost control of the Red Army, but he stubbornly advocated the Cultural Revolution to the very end of his days.  Mao faded out to extinction, yet Deng survived and the Gang of Four were tried and executed.  Deng later started the process by which the economy of China was freed of its most insane restrictions, thus leading to the phenomenal unleashing of Chinese economic genius. 

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How shall I summarize Mao?  Since he personally loved scatological language, how about this:  “He was a sadistic, psychopathic, sack of shit.” 

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-Zenwind.

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Book Review: The Darkship Series by Sarah Hoyt

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Sarah Hoyt has written a series of three very fine SF novels which are recognized by the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS) as either a winner or nominee for Best Novel.  Darkship Thieves (2010) won the LFS’ 2011 Prometheus Award, and its sequels, Darkship Renegades (2012) and A Few Good Men (2013) were nominee finalists more recently.  The love of freedom goes through all of these books.  Hoyt’s characters are always well-drawn, there are heroes and heroines aplenty, and her descriptions of family dynamics are always interesting.  Bio-engineering is a big controversy in this future world, as are the age-old arguments on Liberty vs. Power. 

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The first book, Darkship Thieves – which is dedicated to Robert A. Heinlein – introduces us to a far future where Earth is governed feudally by an oligarchy of 50 “Good Men.”  Our protagonist, the Patrician Athena Hera Sinistra is a heroic young woman with a lot of fight in her.  There is action and mystery right off the bat on her father’s spaceship out beyond Earth.  Athena must escape this ship because she is attacked by the bodyguard goons serving her father, the Patrician “Good Man” Sinistra.  (Everyone in her family lineage is left-handed.) 

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In her flight she runs into a Darkship Thief named Kat, who is from a society of refugees who had fled Earth centuries ago and who now inhabit an obscure asteroid named Eden.  It is a society without government, yet with traditions of justice.  Athena settles in on Eden but must go back to Earth for an emergency, and the tyranny on Earth puts her and Kat in grave danger.  [“Is there any other kind?”]  There is a ghastly family secret about her father and the other Good Men ruling Earth. 

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Darkship Renegades continues the story of Athena, Kat and his family, and it explores the political nature of Eden.  A tyranny is developing in Eden, although there is no legal system.  It is a tyranny of the Energy Board.  What makes the Board so powerful is that it is a traditionally inherited family monopoly of the directors’ positions of what is traditionally a collective-ownership of energy resources.  With no actual private property in energy, and no tradition of competition within the energy sector, the Board uses their monopoly directorship’s control of vital energy to threaten and control everyone in Eden.  And it’s getting grim and violent.  To break the monopoly by putting energy technology into private hands, Athena and friends must return to Earth to get long-lost info on energy tech – with troubles confronting them again on that planet of tyrants. 

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A Few Good Men is in the same world and timeline as the first two novels, but it shifts its focus onto different characters more this time.  All the action takes place on Earth, and there is revolution in the air against the Good Men’s oligarchy.  We have heroic characters again, and their basic principle is the individual’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  It is an excellent story.  The debates about freedom are believable – because they parallel in many ways the real historical debates among the American Founders.  Hoyt has one character give a very brief but vital distinction between the principles of the historical American and French Revolutions, and the results that followed from each. 

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Highly recommended.  I hope she adds more to the series in the future.  Read the novels in their proper order.  I could not find paper copies here, so I got them on Kindle. 

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-Zenwind.

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Review: Book and Movie: The Eiger Sanction

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One doesn’t have to be a climber and/or a mountaineering literature enthusiast to appreciate The Eiger Sanction, either the 1972 book by Trevanian or the 1975 movie.  The story is a spy-spoof thriller with a fine dose of extreme alpine climbing.  The 1975 film, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, has been in my top ten favorite movies list for decades.  I’ve watched it to death, and it is by far my favorite of Clint’s films.  I only just now have read the original 1972 novel by Trevanian, and I was not disappointed. 

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The story is a spoof because it satirizes the insanity of government agencies, especially the national “intelligence” agencies that are supposed to protect our lives and liberties with integrity and virtue, and it features classic conspiracy theorist paranoia about government assassins and shadow planners.  The plot is convoluted and beyond credibility, but it is excellent theater.  Our protagonist is Dr. Jonathan Hemlock (Eastwood), a military veteran, experienced alpinist, art expert, and professor of art; but he has also been an assassin for the US government.  An assassination plot is a main part of the story. 

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The mountain climbing aspects of the story are excellent.  The North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland is considered one of the most dangerous climbs in the Alps.  The history of climbing and death on this Nordwand (north wall) is fascinating, and this story taps into the entire mystique and into many of the actual historical details.  The more one knows about the Eiger’s climbing history, the more the story shines. 

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Movie (1975):  It is very faithful to the book, including dialogue, although some plot changes have been made.  Clint’s ability to deliver classic one-liners with sarcasm adds spice.  The camera work is fantastic, capturing the awesome grandeur of big climbs.  It has a John Williams score, and it is my favorite of George Kennedy’s roles as supporting actor. 

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Clint Eastwood did most of his own stunt work, including most of his climbing scenes, including some leads.  He often has an extra line attached.  During the desert climb, you can see that Clint is top-roped on the chimney climb (contradicting the storyline which has him leading it, but still nice climbing shots); but when you see his back at a distance with no rope above him, that is usually his climbing stunt double.  The double has longer hair, and he doubles on rappel scenes in both the desert and the Eiger as well as at the top of the early building climb scene in Zurich. 

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They filmed the climatic scenes on the Eiger itself, although off to the side of the main face.  A camera crew member was killed by a falling rock, in a spot where Eastwood was standing just before.  To me, one of the best shots of Clint actually climbing is his long pendulum swing on the north face. 

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Clint wears an unusual helmet in the Eiger scenes, one with a small visor like on a construction safety helmet, and I assume this was to protect his million-dollar face from being smashed by rockfall.  I’ve never seen a climber wear such a helmet. 

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More authentic film props are pieces of gear identical to what I used then, in my pioneer climbing days.  Woolen Dachstein mittens are dense, windproof, and will insulate even when frozen; one must break them in like a good pair of boots.  The crampons worn are just like my own first pair.  The climbing boots, both the rock and the ice climbing ones, are typical of the era.  (My own beloved pair of Galibier Super-Guide ice boots were all-leather and non-insulated, and it took me three years to break them in, but they are my dancing slippers of choice on steep ice.) 

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The movie’s mountaineering advisors were all top rank.  Foremost was Dougal Haston.  He was a Scots climber who headed an international climbing school based in Switzerland.  His climbing resume was impressive:   He did new routes on Ben Nevis in winter Scotland.  In 1966 he joined German climbers for the first ascent of the direttissima (“most direct route”) on the Eiger’s north face (the Harlin Route).  First ascent of the south face of Annapurna in 1970, and the first ascent of Everest’s south-west face in 1975.  

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Also advising for the film were:  Norman Dyhernfurth, who led the first American team to summit Mt. Everest in 1963; and Hamish MacInnes, the legendary Scots climber and pioneer in mountain rescue techniques. 

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The South Tyrolean mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, is perhaps the greatest mountain climber in history, and while Eastwood was filming in the summer of 1974, Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler climbed the Eiger north face in 10 hours.  (There is a photo in Messner’s book, The Big Walls, with them and the film’s stars.)  Messner and Habeler were the first to climb Mount Everest without bottled supplemental oxygen in 1978.  Messner came back in 1980 and did another first:  He climbed Everest solo from base camp to top and back, and of course without oxygen. 

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Book:  1972 by Trevanian (aka, Rodney William Whitaker)

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Although additional history of Eiger north face climbing is given in the novel, there is no mention of Toni Kurz during the fatal 1936 attempt on the north face.  Kurz was the last surviving member of his rope team and was trying to rappel down to the very railroad tunnel “window” on the face that our story’s Hemlock tries for.  (So the “window” rescue scenario has historical background.)  Kurz is dying of exposure with a frozen arm, but he cannot work the knot that joined two rappel ropes through his rappel rig because his weight is on it.  He is jammed and dies of exposure hanging from his rope, just meters from rescuers. 

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Trevanian calls the Eiger north face’s first ascent team of 1938 a “German team” – but it was a combined effort of two teams:  two Germans and two Austrians.  The Germans were Anderl Heckmair (the strongest climber, who led) and Ludwig Vorg (aka, the “Bivouac King,” so called because of his knack for making a cold bivouac, where you put on a jacket and put your feet into your pack for warmth and shiver the night, more endurable, e.g., he pulled out a little alcohol spirit burner to melt snow for tea, and he put on his own wool fleece slippers!).  The Austrians were Fritz Kasparek and Heinrich Harrer (his book, The White Spider 1959, remains the classic Eiger north face book; Harrer is also known for his autobiographical Seven Years in Tibet 1952).

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Errors in the movie:  (Yeah, I know, I’m nit-picking):

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Hemlock’s friend, Ben, limps with a bad knee because of “frostbite” from an earlier climb (identified in the novel as Mt. Aconcagua).  But frostbite of the toes, even including toe amputation, should not cause stiff knees for the rest of your life; and it should not hamper future ice and snow climbing, although loss of toes does affect rock climbing.  (Messner lost over half his toes in 1970, before his greatest high climbs.) 

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The Tyrolean Traverse in the desert climb makes no sense in the plot.  So why is it included?  Well, because it is so dramatically picturesque, of course.  Most classic climbing flicks show it although it is rarely used. 

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Belay technique:  The hip belay was still used at that time.  But the climbers while on early rock pitches of the Eiger are all using poor technique.  E.g., they don’t use anchors at the top of pitches – although in fast alpine climbing one might forgo them.  But then why stand up?  Sitting down, in a braced position, is much more stable with a lower center of gravity.  Also, they are using their inside hand, the hand closest to the cliff face, for their braking hand.  One should always use the outside hand, the one farthest away from the wall, as a brake.  This is because if a fall loads and pulls you, your inside hand may slam against the wall and make you lose your braking grip.  A climber must be ambidextrous and able to brake with either hand; it doesn’t take that much force to brake a top-roped fall.  The actors were all right-handed and instinctively braked with the wrong (i.e., inside) hand.  Also, they don’t use a carabiner on their waist harness opposite from their brake hands to keep the rope around their waists and to prevent it from slipping down under their butt, legs and feet. 

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Best lines: 

1. Hemlock to Meyer during a desperate situation:  “We’ll make it.”  Meyer to Hemlock:  “I don’t think so, but we shall continue with style!” 

2. Eastwood, shouting with echoing effect:  “[Fill in name], you asshole!!!!!!!!” 

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Best film shots: 

1. Hemlock and Ben on top of the Totem Pole in the desert, drinking beer. 

2. Clint’s pendulum swing on the north face.

3. Clint cutting the rope. 

4. Immediate transition from the desert scene when Hemlock leaves Miles standing alone, directly to a full face shot of the Eiger’s north face, an evil 6,000 foot face of ice and crumbling rock.  Whoa! 

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-Zenwind.

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Book Reviews: A Piece of Blue Sky (1990/2013) by Jon Atack; and Bare-Faced Messiah (1987) by Russell Miller

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I have always had a morbid fascination reading about weird cults, religions, philosophies, and infamous celebrities.  I’ve been reading extensively about Scientology for several years now, and I recently read two fine (unauthorized) biographies of L. Ron Hubbard. 

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I just finished Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky, and it is one of the best historical accounts I’ve seen yet on L. Ron Hubbard (LRH) and his creation, the Dianetics movement and the Church of Scientology.  A new edition of Atack’s book has recently been published, and I got it on Kindle.  His title came from a remark Hubbard was said to have made around 1950 about creating a religion and making a lot of money from it: “Let’s sell these people a piece of blue sky.”  Atack shows us how Hubbard got rich while leaving a lot of damaged people in his wake.  The ruthless nature of Scientology as a mind-controlling, money-grubbing cult is well documented, in both the Hubbard and post-Hubbard eras. 

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Russell Miller’s 1987 Bare-Faced Messiah:  The true story of L. Ron Hubbard is also excellent reading.  Miller traces Hubbard’s life history with special attention to the fables surrounding his early personal life.  Hubbard (LRH) was a pathological liar.  He lied about everything, about his childhood, his adventures, his explorations, and his military career.  (Did he also lie about the alien overlord, Xenu, and the Galactic Confederacy of 75 million years ago?  Or did he believe it?)  Such habitual liars never expect to be called out on their stories.  

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For instance, Hubbard’s military claims were checked by researching his US Navy records.  He claimed to have fought in “all five theaters” of WW2; to have been the “first US returned casualty from the Far East” (machine-gunned on Java); to have commanded a “corvette squadron” in action in the Atlantic; and to have finished the war in hospital crippled and blind (injuries which he claimed to have self-cured by his Dianetics-Scientology mystic insight). 

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In actuality, he never saw combat action.  At the beginning of the war, he was to be posted to the Philippines, but he was sent back stateside after only arriving in Australia, the reason being that he was “not satisfactory for independent duty assignment,” and he “will require close supervision.”  Stateside, he was relieved of the only two naval boat commands he ever had – one on the US east coast, before even sailing (“not temperamentally fitted for independent command”), and one on the west coast where he exhibited gross incompetence and poor judgment during his two short instances of commanding a small naval ship at sail along the North American coast. 

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His Navy fitness report after this rated him as “below average,” and continued:  “Consider this officer lacking in the essential qualities of judgment, leadership and cooperation.  He acts without forethought as to probable results. … Not considered qualified for command or promotion at this time.  Recommend duty on a large vessel where he can be properly supervised.”  LRH finished the war hospitalized stateside for an ulcer, not “crippled and blind.”  LRH was, as we used to say in the Marines, a “lying sack of shit.” 

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LRH claimed that he was a “nuclear physicist.”  He never finished college, and he failed the only class he ever took in nuclear physics.  The scale of his life-long trail of lies and fabrications is stunning.  However, early in his pre-Dianetics career he was a prolific writer of pulp science fiction, churning out volume after volume. 

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Both Jon Atack and Russell Miller – who collaborated a bit – owed a lot to the historical work of Gerry Armstrong, a dedicated Scientologist who found a treasure trove of early Hubbard letters and documents in an attic.  Armstrong started archiving and researching – with the blessing of LRH – for biographical purposes.  But Armstrong quickly found that the documentation was proving LRH to be lying about almost everything, and he eventually soured on the cult and left it.  The cult harassed him almost to death, but he got the documentation out to the world. 

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Legal harassment and incredibly nasty dirty tricks campaigns (called the “Fair Game” policy) were a common recommendation of LRH, in his written policy letters, against perceived “enemies” of the Church.  Scientology’s leadership still uses these methods to this very day, as Atack and Miller can tell you.  Both have had horrendous personal experiences of endless Church attacks, and they document numerous cases of attacks on many other people.  They both document that this culture of nastiness originated with LRH himself and is his lasting institutional legacy. 

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Miller’s 1987 book was published in the UK and Europe, but US publishers gave up after two years of legal battles with the Church, and it was never available in America.  The Church has such immense wealth that it can easily overwhelm its enemies in endless legal suits, as LRH taught them to do.  But, finally, this year Bare-Faced Messiah has been published in the USA, and it is now on Kindle also. 

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One fact that might be unknown to many who have only passing knowledge of Scientology is that in the mid-1970s Scientologists, under the ever-paranoid direction of LRH and the cult puppets he created, infiltrated the US government to a degree unprecedented in history, copying reams of documents, thousands upon thousands of pages.  LRH called it the “Snow White Program,” and the reality of the extent of its spying is documented in Church of Scientology documents later taken by the FBI in its 1977 raid on the Church. 

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The cult’s Guardian Office (GO), now re-named the Office of Special Affairs, infiltrated not only Interpol, but the US IRS, the DEA, the US Coast Guard, and the Department of Justice.  The GO agents burgled numerous offices of US government officials, including the US Courthouse in Washington and the office of the Deputy Attorney General, as well as the Federal Trade Commission, the Treasury, and US Customs.  They also burgled offices of attorneys for the American Medical Association and of a critical newspaper.  One must admit that, while all of this was stupid and had to eventually fail, it was ballsy. 

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The 1977 FBI raid on the GO found all the paper documentation proving that Scientology had conspired and infiltrated the US government.  Eleven top Scientologists were sent to prison, including the number two in the hierarchy, Mary Sue Hubbard, LRH’s wife.  LRH was insulated from the GO directives, but he was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” and went into hiding for the rest of his life.  He threw his wife under the bus and ran.  It was his life-long style. 

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The bottom line lesson from these two fine biographies (and from many, many concurring witnesses) is that L. Ron Hubbard, while sometimes appearing charismatic, was a vicious fraud, a liar, and a con man – albeit on a grand scale.  Rather than being a “Commodore” in command of himself and others, he was often panicky, childish, and one who threw horrendous tantrums when he couldn’t get his way.  But he was one hell of a storyteller. 

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-Zenwind.

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Review: Cato: a Tragedy (1713) by Joseph Addison

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I had a delightful surprise when I finally got to read Addison’s Cato:  a Tragedy in Five Acts on my Kindle recently.  It was much better than I’d hoped.  This short drama was first staged in 1713 in London and was a big hit in the 18^th Century.  Said to be the favorite play of George Washington, he had it staged by his officers during the bitter winter bivouac at Valley Forge.  Now I can see why. 

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Cato is a concise but immensely powerful classic of the struggle between liberty (represented by Cato the Younger) versus tyranny (that of Julius Caesar).  I had always heard of the fame and influence of the classical-liberal (i.e., libertarian), radical Whig pamphlet series, Cato’s Letters (1720-23), by the Englishman John Trenchard and the Scotsman Thomas Gordon, but only now do I appreciate exactly why they chose the pseudonym of “Cato” for their revolutionary publications:  in those days every reader knew that the name stood solidly for individual freedom against authoritarian power.  This latter pamphlet series was said to be the most widely read of political writings in the American Colonies in the decades running up to the Revolution.  And, of course, today’s libertarian think tank, Cato Institute, famously takes its name from the Trenchard-Gordon series. 

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One thing that jumped right out at me as I read Cato was that a couple of the most famous quotations from the American Revolutionary era must surely have been proclaimed while knowing that the contemporary audience also was well-versed in Addison’s play.  I’m thinking of Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale. 

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Another thing that struck me fully was how much, in Addison’s era, the name of Julius Caesar was tied to villainous tyranny.  Caesar’s ambition for power led to the destabilization and end of the great Roman Republic, a republic with a rule of law, strong checks on government power, and strong institutions protecting the freedom of its citizens.  Cato and the Republic represented liberty, while Caesar brought in the age of empire, rule by conquering generals, endless war, the end of liberty, and the establishment of absolute power in one man. 

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The history of Caesar’s ambition for power was blasted by 18^th Century thinkers.  Addison was born in 1672 and witnessed England’s “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, a milestone in human history so far as chaining down government power.  This revolution in political thinking was articulated best by John Locke and Algernon Sidney, and was furthered by Addison, Trenchard and Gordon, and on through the American Founders.  Remember Henry’s other famous speech:  “Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First had his Cromwell; and George the Third may profit by their example.  If this be treason, make the most of it!” 

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My point:  the very idea of ambitious power-lusting tyrants such as Caesar was abhorred, on both sides of the Atlantic, in the 18^th Century Enlightenment (except for odd collectivists like Rousseau).  But, tragically, Anglo-American thinkers started to worship the memory of the dictator Julius Caesar by the latter half of the 19^th Century, at the same time when libertarians like Thomas Jefferson were no longer admired as much as before.  This was the time when Statism, i.e., the conceit that state power can be “good” and that “great men” should be allowed great power, was becoming the new political god.  To objectify the predictable result from this new surge in statist ideology, witness:  the 20^th Century, with its bloody totalitarian dictatorships and gruesome total wars; Caesar triumphant!  Cato forgotten. 

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Is there hope for the true freedom of individuals in the modern world?  Probably not in my lifetime, as the rot of slavish worship of government power as a cure-all is still rampant.  Yet, there is always future hope in education.  There are the timeless libraries of liberty.  E.g., after being unavailable for more than a century, Cato’s Letters is now back in print as well as online here. And Addison’s Cato:  a Tragedy in Five Acts is available online here. 

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Cato the Younger was famous for his love of liberty, his integrity, his refusal of any bribes, and his opposition to Julius Caesar.  One reason Caesar had so many allies is that he gave out the goodies, the spoils of war and power, to both his cronies and the populace, making the corruption surrounding him remind us in Thailand of today’s (exiled) big boss of ambition.

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-Zenwind.

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