by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My “feature” last night was the next-to-last episode of Leah
Remini’s series Scientology and Its Aftermath, a rather confused show whose first half told the story of the
Reisdorf family. Gary and Lois Reisdorf were a Scientology Sea Org couple who
left the Sea Org (relatively painlessly, it seems, compared to other stories
we’ve heard on this show) and resettled in their native South Africa, and they
had four sons: Brandon, Gary, Brett and Craig. Alas, at least three of their
kids drifted back into Scientology, and Craig became so committed to it he
“disconnected” from his family when his parents and his brother Brandon turned
against the church and publicly criticized it. Brandon got so worked up against
the Church, especially when he manifested symptoms of bipolar disorder and
instead of allowing him to seek conventional therapy, Scientology subjected him
to their so-called “Introspection Rundown,” which involved isolating the
patient, feeding him vitamins and eventually subjecting him to high-intensity
auditing (the combination of psychotherapy and lie-detector testing that’s the
essence of Scientological practice) which made him worse instead of better.
Apart from the Church and given conventional medications for his condition,
Brandon improved but retained such an intense grudge against the Church that at
one point he went from his home in San Diego to Los Angeles and threw a hammer
through the window of a Church of Scientology building — and the Church
insisted that he be prosecuted as a hate criminal and convicted of a felony.
Remini and her chief consultant, Mike Rinder, pointed out passages in
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s writings that state that anyone who criticizes Scientology or does anything hostile
to the Church is doing so because of their own “crimes” — and it’s not only the
right but the duty of the Church
to hound that person relentlessly until they confess the “crimes” that led them
to attack Scientology. The second half of the show depicted three journalists —
Joe Sweeney, Tony Ortega and Mark Bunker — who’d had to deal with full-barreled
attacks from the Church for doing stories critical of it. The oddest moment on
the program was when Sweeney sat at the table with Remini and Mike Rinder, the
Scientology hit man who had carried out the Church’s attacks on Sweeney (a
veteran reporter for the BBC) when Rinder was still the Church’s designated hit
man before he left — and the
three reminisced about the hostile encounters they’d originally had when Remini
and Rinder were still Scientologists in good standing and Sweeney’s crew filmed
them giving the Church’s hard line against him and his project.
Sweeney said
he’s covered Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, the Kim family who run North
Korea, and Donald Trump, and none
of those people pursued him as relentlessly (to the point where he literally lost sleep over it and had nightmares) as the Church
of Scientology. It’s interesting he should mention Trump because one of the
things that comes through strongly in this program is how Scientology head
David Miscavige and Trump are really brothers under the skin. Their
personalities — particularly their hair-trigger over-reaction to any hint of criticism (displayed recently when Trump, responding
to Meryl Streep’s attack on him at the Golden Globe Awards — though carefully
avoiding using his name, Streep reminded us that Trump had once mocked a
disabled reporter at a rally, and Trump replied that Streep was an “overrated
actress” and her attack on him was just more evidence of how out-of-touch the
Hollywood celebrity culture is with the “real America” that elected him), their
addiction to threats of physical violence against their real or perceived
enemies, and the aura of intimidation and bullying that surround both of them —
are so similar Scientology and Its Aftermath is emerging as yet another bit of pop culture that’s
coming across very differently now than it would have before the election. For
at least the next four years — and probably longer than that as the Republican
Party hardens its domination of American politics and uses its power to make
sure it will never be voted out of power again (by restricting the ability of
its opponents to vote or win office and by dominating the courts so even if it
loses legislative power, it will be able to prevent the Democrats from doing
anything by ruling it all unconstitutional) — we are going to be ruled by bullies, by people whose idea of power is, in
George Orwell’s memorable phrase, “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”
It’s the mentality of the Church of Scientology, of the Trump movement, of
Putin’s and Kim Jong Un’s governments and of the populist-Right parties that
are on the cusp of gaining power in one Western European country after another
— and all of a sudden Scientology is of interest not only as a silly “religion”
cooked up by a science-fiction writer but as a microcosm of what the world is
going to look like with bullies like Trump and Putin ruling all its major
countries.
