Old Father Hubbard
YOU join us at the haberdashery counter at a major London department store where followers of the Kabbalah movement are demanding their money back.
Clutching their red string and demanding a full cash refund, they move on to the store’s cravat section.
Scientology has arrived in London in a big way and very soon thousands of Britain’s leading celebrities will be sporting cravats in the manner of L Ron, Hubbard, the Church of Scientology’s No. 1 guy.
As the Times reports, the former home of the British and Foreign Bible Society in central London has been converted into the new headquarters of Scientology.
And yesterday the venue opened. Sadly, many of the movement’s leading lights did not attend. Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes and John Travolta, to name but three believers, were otherwise engaged.
But star spotters who gathered in the rain to see the centre open did get a glimpse of Hollywood actress Anne Archer, who played Michael Douglas’s wife in Fatal Attraction. As the Independent says with much knowing, Anne “was raised a Christian Scientist but joined the Church of Scientology in 1976.” The Guardian spots Golden Globe nominee Jenna Elfman.
As the Guardian says, “For two hours yesterday Hollywood glitz supplanted British mundanity on the streets of London as the most senior figures within the movement joined 5,000 members from all over the world for the opening of their £24m ‘church’ in the heart of the Square Mile.”
The paper see Hollywood tans mingle with pallid British flesh. And gawps at the five-storey building’s stuccoed pillars and gold lettering. The Scientologists are here. And they have money and good teeth.
And her comes David Miscavige, chairman of the Board of Religious Technology Centre, the senior ecclesiastical structure which runs the religion.
The Guardian hears him vow that Scientology could “improve the grades of schoolchildren across the education system in one term, completely reverse 80-90% recidivist crime rates and cut drug addiction by 10-20% within a generation”.
He goes on: “This day will go down in history. Of all the foreign lands where LRH lived and worked, he called England home. This is the city wherein he first defined the human spirit as an immortal being possessed of capabilities beyond anything predicted and so arrived at the axiomatic truths on which the whole of Scientology is founded."
Amen to that.
It’s the return of L Ron Hubbard. And the return of the cravat…
Posted: 23rd, October 2006 | In: Uncategorized Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
