The Invisible Library

NY Times:

ONE of the hottest books in New York appears on no best-seller list.
“Russian Thinkers,” a 1978 collection of essays on 19th-century Russian intellectuals by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, has virtually disappeared from bookstores across the city, including Barnes & Noble, Labyrinth Books and Shakespeare & Company. The Internet is not much help either: the book is sold out on bn.com, and though it can be ordered from Amazon, the order won’t be shipped for two or three weeks.

The culprit behind this Berlin craze turns out to be none other than Tom Stoppard and his epic three-part play, “The Coast of Utopia,” which opened at Lincoln Center on Nov. 27. Tucked deep inside the show’s playbill is a list titled “For Audience Members Interested in Further Reading,” with “Russian Thinkers” at the top.

“If you were intrigued and wanted to know more, this would be a good place to start,” said Anne Cattaneo, the play’s dramaturge, who compiled the seven-book list. “I tried to keep it to a little George Sand, a little Turgenev.”

As a result, Mr. Berlin’s book is not only all but impossible to find in New York, it is also completely out of stock with its publisher, Penguin, which earlier this month quickly ordered two reprintings totaling 3,500 copies, the first time in 12 years the book has been printed, to satisfy more than 2,000 suddenly unfilled orders.

As my wife pointed out, these days, everyone wants a little more information. That extra aside or note or pointer to something related. A tangent for the inquisitive. This list of further reading– what we librarians used to call a bibliography (it’s a term from the late nineteenth century, basically the Victorian equivalent of a hyperlink)– is a clear example of this growing acceptance of the interconnectivity of all knowledge and information. Sure, this sort of thing existed before but it was nerdy stuff, practiced by academics. The internet, that wild and woolly system of tubes, has just democratized the concept and made it mainstream. Hell, it’s even gone Broadway.

Note: due to the sudden uptick in comments for this post, I’ve bumped it up to the top of the page.

At the library yesterday we received a donation of DVDs from Bridge Publications Inc. the publishing arm of the Church of Scientology. We regularly receive unsolicited donations from publishers but as these DVDs were lectures by L. Ron Hubbard on Scientology, I was intrigued.

Now, Tom Cruise and his nutty ass aside, Scientology has got to be the single weirdest pyramid scheme mistaken for a cult, masquerading as a religion out there, and that’s taking into account the Church of Latter Day Saints and their Mormon Underwear.

What’s really fascinating is not just how blatant the Church of Scientology is about being so totally made up but how many people still join, thinking that they will somehow find joy and happiness and completion in the half baked proselytizing of some hack science fiction Author. I guess there are an awful lot of Star Fuckers out there who think that if they have a really good audit and become an Operating Thetan that they’ll get to meet Tom Cruise, his zombie wife and their soon-to-be super fucked up baby.

But that’s not the interesting part. What is fascinating is the hokey Space Opera that plays a large role in the basic scripture of Scientology. Wikipedia gives us a run down of the highlights. My favorite is this part:

The Marcab Confederacy is said to be one of the most powerful galactic civilizations still active. He describes it as:

various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, formed out of the fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 10,000 years they have gone on with a sort of decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships — a civilization which looks almost an exact duplicate but is worse off than the current US civilization.
(”Auditing Comm Cycles”)

The capital of the Confederacy is said to be “one of the tail stars of the Big Dipper“, probably Alkaid, a star 108 light years distant from Earth. The Marcabians used to rule Earth at some point in the past but lost control of it due to “losses in war and other things”.

The Marcabians had an oppressive political system: “if [a person] was considered to be in contempt of court or anything like that, [he was] simply fried since there was a curtain of radioactive material which went clear across the front of the bench anywhere that a witness or anybody would stand, and so on.” (”History and development of processes: question and answer period”) They invented income tax as a means of punishment, with the death penalty imposed for making even the slightest mistake in returns — “one comma wrong and it’s ‘dead forever’.” The Marcabians also appear to have been distinctly socialistic, having “had plan balanced economies” (presumably some form of planned economy). (”E-Meter Actions, Errors in Auditing”)

They were also keen on motor racing and every once in a while Scientologists undergoing auditing “will run into [memories of] race tracks and race-track drivers”. Hubbard described this in some detail in a 1960 lecture:

They had turbine-generated cars that went about 275 miles an hour (443 km/h). They ran with a high whine. I notice they’ve just now invented the motor again. And they had tracks that were booby-trapped with atom bombs, and they had side bypasses. The tracks were mined, and the grandstands were leaded-paned.
(”Create and Confront”)

The tracks were deliberately designed to be as dangerous as possible, with “a mountain that you went up to the top of and fell off”, and death was commonplace. This, however, was not a problem, as Marcabian medicine was so good that nobody ever died permanently. According to author Russell Miller, Hubbard liked to reminisce to his followers about “how he was a race-car driver in the Marcab civilization”. One of the people who accompanied him aboard his private fleet in the late 1960s described Hubbard’s stories of life with the Marcabians:

LRH said he was a race driver called the Green Dragon who set a speed record before he was killed in an accident. He came back in another lifetime as the Red Devil and beat his own record, then came back and did it again as the Blue Streak. Finally he realized all he was doing was breaking his own records and it was no game any more.
(Miller, p.280)

Hubbard describes exactly this in his lecture “Create and Confront”, telling how he went through multiple lives as a Marcabian racing driver with names like The Green Rocket, The Red Comet, The Silver Streak, The Gold Bomb, and so on.

Hubbard stated that the Marcab Confederacy was now using Earth as a “prison planet”. When a person dies or “drops the body”, as Scientologists put it, his thetan is pulled into a Marcab-established “implant station” or “report station”. The idea that Earth is a “prison planet”, maintained by “entheta beings” or Targs who dumped their enemies on Earth, was first put forward in a 1952 lecture, “Electropsychometric Scouting: Battle of the Universes”. A steady flow of flying saucers is said to be still dropping off more entheta beings.

The report area for most has been Mars. Some women report to stations elsewhere in the Solar System. There are occasional incidents about Earth report stations. The report stations are protected by screens. The last report station on Earth was established in the Pyrenees.
(Scientology: A History of Man)

The thetans are brainwashed and sent back to Earth, where they find a new body to inhabit. Only Scientologists who have reached the level of “Operating Thetan” are said to be able to avoid this fate.

[…] Hubbard mentions a number of other alien civilizations in his writings, though he does not go into any detail about them. These include the “Three-and-a-half Invaders, … the Psi Galaxy, Galaxy 82.” (”The Story of a Static”) According to the official Church of Scientology notes accompanying the lectures in which he alluded to them, these were “made up” (presumably for humorous effect), contrasting with the supposedly real invader forces and civilizations cited above.

I love that last part. He just made up some shit to throw people off. Ya think?

But there are some very telling details to this elaborate story. Most notable (beyond the ridiculous time scales—Xenu apparently ruled this quadrant of the Galaxy for 2 Trillion Years) is how this advanced civilization that had beat death, liked racing cars and setting off random nukes, was just like the US in the 1950’s, only they were all evil Socialists who killed the inherently good natured and capitalistic Thetans for sport and their technology was just like ours (down to even flying through space in Douglas DC-8s).

What’s telling about all this is that it emphasizes just what an unimaginative hack Hubbard was as a sci-fi author. He couldn’t conceive of a 200,000 year old space faring civilization that was any more advanced than the US at the height of the Cold War. Did they speak English and watch Leave it to Beaver as well? Take two hour long, four Martinni lunches? Chase their secretaries around the office making lascivious faces? Enjoy a tight crew cut?

Maybe back in the fifties and sixties when Hubbard made this stuff up it sounded sci-fi and futuristic but fifty years on, it creeks like a badly made B-movie, complete with rubber aliens, technobabble and cardboard flying saucers.

It would be amusing if it weren’t for the thousands of people all over the world who fall prey to this nonsense. Bellow the silly Space Opera and gibberish about Thetans is an organization that takes in millions of dollars from people who are just looking for answers in a weird and confusing world, exploiting them and encouraging cult-like behavior, just to make a buck.

Operation Clambake is an organization dedicated to exposing this fraud. Drop on by and let them know they aren’t alone, that Tom Cruise and the crazy science Fiction writer he worships aren’t going to win. A few trillion years form now, people will ask what was Scientology all about and will be able to snicker and laugh, they way w do now about other religions that have fallen out of fashion, like the cult of Mithra or Christianity.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (vol. 1) tops the ALA’s list of the ten best Graphic Novels for teens. Warren Ellis is baffled as well.

David, a regular reader, sent me this link to an R.U. Sirius article asking, “Is it fascism yet?” I agree with some of the writers, not with others but they are all worth reading, simply because it’s one of those questions that is interesting and much needed, if a really loaded one.

As several of the commentators point out, there’s a strong habit of using the label of fascism a little too often and in the wrong context, which does nothing but sap it of it’s real threat value. And, as also pointed out, while the Bush admin and their Neocon vassals have seriously limited a variety of freedoms and instituted policies that are dictatorial in nature, we clearly are not in a Fascist state yet, for the simple reason that here we are, debating it on this here series of tubes. If this were a fascist country, the Republicans would have simply unplugged the servers and let the Internet die (at least the American hemisphere, anyway).

But as I’ve long contended, what the Republicans, especially under Cheney and Bush, seek to create is not a fascist dictatorship but an oligarchy of elites, who exercise absolute power and answer to no one but their own shriveled, an in Cheney’s case, cybernetic, hearts. What they want is a good old fashioned Divine Right of the Sun King style Monarchy. You can see it on W’s face whenever some reporter summons the impertinence to ask a question with bit of bit to it or won’t take some shuffling, predigested patter as a final answer. Here is a group of men accustomed to the perks and trappings of power. The may not prance around in fancy capes or demand that their underlings kiss their rings but just short of that is where we are. And they could care less about the prattling of surfs on the Internet or in the press. They have power and know how to keep it, even if it means doing something as undemocratic as vote fraud. As long as power is kept in the hands of those who can be trusted ( i.e., rich, white and male) than what’s a little treason among friends?

And to be sure, some of the habits of a Monarchy have the same unsavory smell of Fascism, complete with gulags and wars for glory and God. But that’s simply the result of a shared heritage. The cultured White Man’s Empire is what every despot aspires to, weather they are named August Pinochet, Idi Amin or Henry Tudor. Or George W. Bush. Though, in all honesty, I suspect Georgie Boy would be happier as Prince of Texas, where he could just lay about his countrified castle, huntin’ and clearin’ brush while his friends in the great Palace on the Potomac engage in petty court rivalries and the jealous intrigues that royals throughout history have been so fond of. He really doesn’t have the head for being King, but as eldest son, it was his duty to take over after his father abdicated the throne. What’s a reluctant King to do but abdicate real power and responsibility to his trusted coterie of barons, lords and dukes. And that is what really has George 41 giving Junior the silent treatment. His son isn’t half the Lord of the land he was raised to be.

Ever wonder what drives otherwise decent folk into the arms of religion? Sure you do! Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America did too and went looking to see what he could find out. Turns out, it’s the same thing that drives a lot of dirt poor people all over the world into all manner of fanaticism– despair:

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast food restaurants and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pot-hole streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.

[…] There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us “an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.

They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.

The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.

Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.

Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to “secular humanists,” to “nominal Christians,” to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.

The Fear gets you ever time. The moment you fear something, it has control over you. And God fearing Christians (or Muslims or Hindus, etc.) are the most easily controlled, as with a silent God who makes no demands but through those who claim to work in his name (for a price and a pat and sometimes always an awful lot more) there is no way to protest or offer a counter argument. It’s do as your told by whatever authority figure promises the best fairy tales and uses (or abuses) you the least, or else suffer the consequences (enumerated in gory detail all throughout the Holy scripture). That is how republics fall, not through outside corruption but because their citizens were too timid, afraid or cowed by superstition to demand dignity. Once you believe in a supreme Caesar who controls everything, you’ll believe anything else that reinforces that, especially if it’s sold to you at the local Wal Mart or wrapped in the noble crusade of saving unborn babies. That it keeps you tired, poor and hungry for something else is not a side effect of sin, it is the result of salvation.

Link via Bookslut.

There’s considerable debate (among thos eprone to debate such things) about who will be revealed as a Cylon during the second half of season 3 (which starts in less than an hour and a half!). But, I think we can logic this out to just a few real possibilities:

People Who Cannot be Cylons

1. Col. Tigh. He fought during the Cylon war, before they looked human. QED.
2. Admiral Adama likewise is a veteran of that war and had two sons, one of which is still alive. If he were a Cylon than, Lee would be the Cylon Jesus.
3. Lee Adama. See above.
4. Kara Thrace. Simon would have figured this out while he had her on the funny farm back during her brief stay on Caprica and Leoben would have confirmed it while he had her in the Stepford House during the occupation of New Caprica, which would have opened up a whole new can of cybernetic worms, given that we’ve discovered that the seven Cylons we do know never talk about the other Five we haven’t met yet. Apparently there was some big falling out, the Five didn’t pitch in for the keg at the Let’s Kill-all-Humans discussion Clambake. or something. But either way, big plot hole if it’s her and the writers have managed to avoid most of those so far.
5. Laura Rosalin had cancer and as we all know, Cylons are cancer proof.
6. Cally and Chief have a baby, Nic. If either of them were Cylons than Nic would be just as important as Hera. Or even more so, given the mysterious condition about They Who Must Not Be Gossiped About. This again would be sloppy writing. “Oh look, we suddenly discover that Chief’s baby has super powers! We’re saved!”
7. Baltar could be a Cylon, but since they’ve been teasing us with that possibility for the last five episodes, it’s unlikely. it would also give him far too easy an out. Like Magic powers. “I can’t be blamed for my actions, I’m just a robot!” that’s why he wants to be a Cylon so badly, as it would tie his personality flaws up in a neat little bow. Baltar is far too human to be a Cylon.
8. None of the surviving pilots are important enough to be a Cylon. Besides, they’d just be Boomer clones, which is uninteresting.

That leaves Dee or Gaeta as the Cylon.
Gaeta, like Baltar, is much more interesting as a human. He’s flawed but his flaws are that he’s too idealistic and trusting. He’s the anti-Baltar, which is why it’s so cute that he totally has a crush on him.

My money’s on Dee. She’s drawn to men in power (remember, she was all over the president’s aide. Billy, before she married Lee). Not a lot has been revealed about her and once lee breaks up with her, she won’t have much to do. That means she’s either a Cylon or a walking corpse.

I guess soon, we’ll see.

Update: OK, no reveal yet. But D’anna’s reaction implies that it will be someone big, so maybe I haven’t got this thing figured out yet…

Reason Magazine has a nice obituary for Robert Anton Wilson:

Given his enormous influence on pop culture, from Lost to Laura Croft, you might have expected Wilson’s death to get more attention in the mainstream press. But while there were a few more notices in the newspapers — a detailed story in the London Telegraph, a short UPI dispatch that was basically cribbed from the Times — none I’ve seen has suggested that his work had an impact beyond the fans of the fringe, and only John Clute’s account in The Independent displayed any appreciation of Wilson’s oeuvre. Instead, the best tributes to the writer have appeared in the medium that most resembled the beautiful cacophony of his books: the Internet. On LiveJournals, e-mail lists, and blog comment threads, Wilson received the praise he was due.

He was honored on the bigger sites too. At The Huffington Post Paul Krassner, who started publishing Wilson’s articles in The Realist back in 1959, quoted one of my favorite things that Wilson wrote in the last year of his life: a haiku sent to his email list a day after he announced what looked like his pending death.

Well what do you know?
Another day has passed
and I’m still not not.

There were respectful memorials in places you’d expect, such as bOING bOING and 10 Zen Monkeys, and in places you wouldn’t expect, such as Wonkette. Even the conservative forum Free Republic got in on the act, with a thread that included the remarkable statement, “The modern right was greatly influenced by Wilson.” While you’re digesting that, I’ll note that elsewhere on the same site another reader greeted the news with the phrase “one less leftist nut.”

Link via Boing Boing.