L. Ron Speaks
"Affection could no more spoil a child than the sun could be put out by a bucket of gasoline."
L. A. Weekly, November 26, 1999
By Thomas C. Tobin
Don't go looking for this maxim in your Bartlett's Familiar Quotations - but you just might find it in your local newspaper, courtesy of Scientology. The IRS-designated religion - ministry to the stars (John Travolta, Jenna Elfman, Tom Cruise), owner of vast worldwide holdings and co-sponsor of this year's Hollywood Christmas Parade - has been mailing out this and other pearls from the lips of founder L. Ron Hubbard to newspaper "Quote of the Week" sections.
The Hubbardisms address Morals ("The criminal accuses others of things which he himself is doing"), Problems ("Any problem, to be a problem, must contain a lie") and, in a masterpiece of mixed metaphor, Marriage ("Communication is the root of marital success from which a strong union can grow, and noncommunication is the rock on which the ship will bash out her keel"). They run above the tagline "L. Ron Hubbard, one of the most acclaimed and widely read authors of all time." (Hubbard was a science-fiction writer.) Hubbard public-relations director Kaye Conley says the quotes have appeared in 80 publications, including the Orchard News (Nebraska), Clayton Today (Oklahoma), and the Stratford Star, Iraan News, and Talihina American (all of Texas). "I'm not saying they're big, huge papers," Conley says. "They don't have to be to be popular."
Iraan News editor Clara Greer says her paper (circulation 900) printed "everything that I got" during the two-month-old Scientology P.R. campaign. "One of our customers didn't appreciate reading them. She seemed to know a lot more about Hubbard than I did," Greer explained during a phone interview.
Ann Driver, editor of the weekly Talihina American (part of a three-paper chain of Texas weeklies, combined circulation 4,500) also confesses to knowing little about Hubbard or Scientology. "I've heard of it, but I don't know anything about it," she says.
It's no secret that Scientology aggressively courts good publicity - and the group could use some good news. A French judge this month sentenced a former Scientology leader to six months in prison on fraud charges. (The church denounced the trial as an "inquisition.") Authorities in Moscow and Switzerland also shut down Scientology-associated operations. The Hubbard P.R. machine has been busy. An article on the P.R. News Wire this month spoke of some "interesting new insights" into the subject of memory found in the Hubbard bestseller Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. (The Scientology text was published on May 9, 1950; it's not clear how or when the "new" insights sneaked into the pages, particularly as Hubbard died in 1986.)
"Never has our society been hit with so much devastation...We're trying to do something about it," Conley says.
"We just use the quotes as filler to fill our little holes," shrugs newspaper editor Driver.
