Inspired by my sister’s boyfriend Brian and his documentary club, I devoted Sunday afternoon to watching whatever documentaries I could watch for free on youtube. First I watched a doc about “The Amen Break”.
Then I watched part of a documentary of the tinfoil hat variety regarding the illuminati.
From there I watched “Sean”,
which is essentially a 15 minute interview with a 4 and half year old San Francisco boy from 1970. Finally, as I now write this I have a documentary about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology playing in a separate window.
This reminded me of something I have had on my mind for a while which I will now share: Back in 1994, before I had ever heard of Scientology or Dianetics, I used to frequent the Orangeville public library.
I was attracted to the adult fiction section, and even though I didn’t feel ambitious enough to tackle some of the larger volumes I enjoyed looking at the covers. Some of the most memorable covers were from L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth” series, A ten volume series, or dekalogy as he called it. I was most intimidated by the first volume, The Invader’s Plan.
It was 600 pages and I was only in grade 5, but at length I withdrew it and finished it in a month. I enjoyed it well enough I suppose but was more stoked to crush, what was at the time, the longest book I had ever read. Never got through the rest of the series though.
Fast forward to autumn 2008. While serving in Kandahar, Afghanistan I happened to find the same volume in the Camp Nathan Smith library. I set about reading it a second time and enjoyed it more this time due to the fact that I understood more of what was going on.
What I found most interesting this second time around however was the introduction written by the author sometime in the 1980s. As he explained it, the series marked his return to writing fiction after a prolonged hiatus (presumably administering his new-found religion). He thanked his loyal readership and proceeded to explain his thoughts about satire and why it was an important genre to him.
Although I didn’t think much of it at the time, these words came back to me sometime after during a conversation about religion. It became clear to me what L. Ron Hubbard had been up to the whole time.
Write-Errantry 