3:AM Magazine

By Max Dunbar.

Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology, Marc Headley, BFG 2009

During the rush hour of November 18, 1995, a woman named Lisa McPherson crashed her Jeep Cherokee into a boat trailer. McPherson got out of her Jeep, accosted the other driver and shouted: ‘Where’s the people?’ By the time the emergency services arrived, McPherson was walking naked along Belleview. She was taken to hospital. Doctors considered sectioning her. There was one problem. McPherson was a Scientologist. Friends from the church came to the hospital. She signed herself out against medical advice.

Church staff took McPherson to the Scientology-owned Fort Harrison hotel. There she was subjected to a form of counselling called ‘Introspection Rundown’; a technique defined by Marc Headley as ‘regularly used to handle someone who has had a psychotic break or some sort of mental breakdown… a person is often isolated and not allowed to talk to others’. McPherson’s ‘rundown’ lasted seventeen days.

From a special report by the St Petersburg Times:

They gave her chloral hydrate, a mild sedative. A staff dentist, unlicensed in Florida, mixed aspirin, Benadryl and orange juice in a syringe and squirted it down her throat.

The staffers kept logs of what they did. Trying to calm McPherson, a staffer tried to force three Valerian root caplets down her throat, but McPherson spit them out. ‘My idea of closing her nose so she has to swallow so she can breathe through her mouth is only marginally successful,’ the staffer wrote.

McPherson slapped and screamed at her caretakers. She babbled, she vomited her food. She destroyed the ceiling lamp and broke glass in the bathroom. She jumped off the bed, fell on the floor, ran around the room.

She pondered a light bulb, saying, ‘You have to follow the light, as light is life.’

The ideology behind the Scientologist hatred of medical psychiatry is not something Marc Headley explores. The belief system is pretty much out there anyway; L Ron Hubbard’s bizarre creation myth has even been dramatised in an episode of South Park, with a flashing caption reading: ‘THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE’. In an interview with Paul Sims of the New Humanist, Headley explains: ‘I wanted to make this a book a Scientologist could read, to give them more information on what happens behind the scenes… if you attack the philosophy, the Scientologist will immediately reject the information. But if you talk about the organisation, then they might listen.’

The popular perception is that people are drawn into cults because the cult can fill a void in the person’s life - although only with a different kind of void. I’m sure this is true, but most of the Scientologists we encounter in Blown for Good get into the Church for the same reason kids in rough areas get into coke running: because it saturates the culture. Headley’s parents moved to Los Angeles from Kansas City in 1979. It appears that the family were introduced to Scientology through a friend of Headley’s father’s. Headley was transferred into a Scientology-run school - called a ‘Delphi School’ - and by his late teens was working full time at the International Base, located at Gilman Hot Springs in the California desert. It doesn’t feel like a big step.

Headley wants us to see the organisation from the perspective of a Scientology worker drone. And he succeeds, unequivocally. Imagine working in a corporation without legal restraint - no minimum wage, health and safety regulations, union recognition. Better yet, imagine the space-age slave system of some impossible year. Headley signed a billion-year contract. He estimates that in his fifteen years at the base, he never slept more than five or six hours a night. Food, sleep, showers, time off and other essentials were treated as privileges that could be revoked for the most marginal deviation. Complain about the hundred-hour weeks and you could be sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force - a punishment detail that could last up to a decade. Life on the RPF involved scrubbing floors with toothbrushes for seventeen hours a day. Even on the regular work routine, abasement and humiliation was rarely far away. Headley recalls having to clean out an aeration pond filled with solid waste that had dried to choking dustclouds in the California sun.

All this was overseen by Dave Miscavige, the Stalin to L Ron Hubbard’s Lenin. The chief executive comes off as a petty, pampered, bullying blowhard. Headley recalls being physically attacked by Miscavige in a meeting. Headley was backed up against a desk, so kept his feet. When the blows had stopped, Headley was still standing and advanced on the Chairman of the Board. Miscavige immediately crumbled, blustering apologies, before having Headley removed from the room by security guards.

All the time you’re thinking: how can they put up with this? Why not just walk away? People ‘blow’ all the time, of course, but most stay. As I’ve said, most Scientologists join in their teens (including Dave Miscavige and Lisa McPherson) and know nothing else; no education, no work experience, often no family outside the church. Where can they go? And then there’s the human impulse to waste more time and effort in the hope that the time and effort already wasted will some day be justified. We prefer a miserable present to an uncertain future.

But the greatest obstacle is also the most obvious: physically, it is very difficult to leave. Headley: ’They have motorised gates controlled by the guards. The entire perimeter of the property is covered by what is called ultra-barrier razor wire. If you climbed over, you could very possibly die from wounds. Secondly, if you do get out, you’re going to get hunted down like an animal. If you leave, they will bring you back. Period.’

Headley’s escape from the compound is so gripping and moving that I won’t spoil his story by relating it here. But thousands of others remain. Recent years have seen a high-profile protest movement in the UK. Anonymous is a web campaign group that has spilled onto the streets. The same interviewer who spoke to Headley interviewed demonstrators outside a Scientology building in Central London.

Scientology is a marginal issue in the UK, Sims told them. Weren’t there more pressing causes? A masked demonstrator answered him: ‘In this country we have more of an opportunity to nip it in the bud. Even if there are only 1,800 of them in the UK, that’s still 1,800 people who aren’t necessarily in a cult they want to be in.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Max Dunbar was born in London in 1981. He recently finished a full-length novel and his short fiction has appeared in various print and web journals including Open Wide, Straight from the Fridge and Lamport Court. He also writes articles on politics and religion for Butterflies and Wheels. He is Manchester’s regional editor of Succour magazine, a journal of new fiction and poetry. He is reviews editor of 3:AM and blogs here.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Thursday, February 25th, 2010.