Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  “I’ve never even mentioned anything about the evils of capitalism.”

  “Well, just try and be subtle about it.”

  He instructed me to play music immediately after the news instead of commenting on the news. From then on I always played The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” right after the news, and then I would comment on it. One time I played “Garbage Dump” from an album by Charles Manson back to back with “The Ballad of Lieutenant Calley” of My Lai–massacre infamy. Another night I picked out records entirely on the basis of their album covers, and listeners thought it was a great mix. I always opened the show with Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” and ended with his “Madame George.” When the Fillmore Auditorium closed, KSFX broadcast it live, with disc jockeys on the scene, while I anchored the event from the studio.

  One night Dick Gregory announced on my show that, until the war in Vietnam was over, he was going to stop eating solid foods. I in turn announced that, until the war was over, I was going to eat all of Dick Gregory’s meals. Actually, my only real discipline was being silent one day a week. When Holly came out to stay with me that summer, she decided to join me on my silent day. We communicated with handwritten notes. Holly wrote, Does laughter count? Since we were making up the rules as we went along, I answered, Yes, but no tickling. Naturally she tried to make me laugh, but I held it in—and got a rush.

  All the energy that normally gets dissipated into the air with laughter seemed to surge through my body instead. I decided to stop laughing altogether, just to see what would happen. The more I didn’t laugh, the more I found funny. And, paying closer attention to others, I refined my appreciation of laughter as another whole language that could often be more revealing than words. Sometimes I would get a twinge of guilt if I nearly slipped and laughed, and I remembered what I had always known, that children must be taught to be serious. When I mentioned my laugh-fast to Dick Gregory, still on his food-fast, it didn’t sound so far-fetched to him.

  “That’s two things people do out of insecurity,” he said. “Eating and laughing.”

  “Well, what would happen to us if everyone in our audiences realized that?”

  “Brother, we’d go out of business.”

  I almost laughed when he said that, but I had already decided to continue not laughing in order to see what finally would make me laugh out loud again.

  After doing the Rumpleforeskin show for seven months, I got fired by the new station manager. His memo to the staff: “I have become deeply concerned about the inconsistency of being a formatted progressive rock station with an island of free form. The final clincher for me was the realization that we might in the future have to ask Paul to fit his program in more to our overall format—a restriction which I feel would be totally unfair to Paul and an aesthetic disaster. Please tell callers that Paul will be on KSAN Sunday night 6–9 pm for a one-shot and may get a regular series there.”

  At KSAN, I talked about the Attica prison riot, the evolution of Ram Dass, the ads in Rolling Stone, and chimpanzee behavior. Five minutes before I was due to sign off, in walked physician Gene Schoenfeld. Under the byline “Dr. Hip,” he wrote a column syndicated to the underground papers. Now, his “Dr. Hip” advice program would follow my audition at KSAN. He was accompanied by his guest, Margo St. James. I couldn’t help but notice that she was trying to unzip my fly, which was held up by a safety pin, and I realized that she intended to give me head while I was on the air.

  “Be careful,” I said, “the zipper’s broken.” She unpinned and unzipped me, then began to perform fellatio. “Would you please say something so that feminists who are listening will understand the context?” She looked up and said, “I’m doing this of my own volition.” I maintained my composure, and continued talking. The radio audience had no way of knowing for sure what was actually happening.

  I finally said goodbye to my listeners—“It’s been a pleasure being with you”—then gave the proper station identification. “This is KSAN in San Francisco,” I announced, “the station that blows your mind.” Not only didn’t I get a job, but I was temporarily barred from the station.

  The first issue of The Realist that I prepared on the West Coast included a short piece by Tom Miller about “the first fatality of the waterbed fad sweeping nouveau-riche longhairs. He was watching a late-night talk show on his tiny Sony television, which had frayed electrical connecting wires. The set fell into a puddle—the result of his cat clawing at the waterbed—and he was electrocuted. The electrically charged water seeped up and surrounded his body before he could reach safety.” Miller had invented this story, but it was picked up by the San Francisco Examiner and KCBS News. As a result, a California state commission passed a resolution calling for proper industry standards in the manufacture of waterbeds. How gratifying. It was a case of preventive journalism.

  Still, what I really wanted to do was publish something that would top “The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book.”

  I had observed a disturbing element being imposed upon the counterculture—various groups all trying to rip off the search for consciousness—and I felt challenged to write a satirical piece about this phenomenon. Scientology was one of the scariest of these organizations, if only because its recruiters were such aggressive zombies. The stares of Scientology practitioners seemed to be tactical, their smiles unfelt. The goal of Scientology was to become a Clear—that is, a complete zombie—moving up to higher and higher levels by means of auditing sessions with an E-Meter, essentially a lie detector.

  In confronting their guilt and fears through the medium of a machine, they had become machine-like themselves and they responded like automatons. Carrying their behavior to its logical conclusion, they could become programmed assassins. I chose Sirhan Sirhan as a credible allegory, since he was already known to have an interest in mysticism and self-improvement, from the Rosicrucians to Theosophy. In a list of upcoming features, I included “The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy.”

  Then I began to do my research. I was, after all, an investigative satirist.

  Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s book Dianetics became a bestseller with the aid of an employee at The New York Times who leaked the names of those bookstores around the country which provide the basis for the Times’ bestseller list. Hubbard’s thesis was that traumatic shock occurs not only during early childhood, but also during the prenatal stage. In Neurotica magazine, G. Legman took off on that concept with his own cult, called Epizootics, “demonstrating the basic cause of all neurosis in father’s tight-fitting jockstrap.”

  Not to be outdone by parody, Hubbard in 1952 turned Dianetics into Scientology, which traced trauma back to previous lives, not necessarily incarnations that were spent on this planet. In fact, Scientologists were forbidden to see the movie 2001 in order to avoid “heavy and unnecessary restimulation.” By what? When Hal the Computer says “unclear”?

  In 1955, Hubbard incorporated Scientology as a religion. This would enable its ministers to gain entry into hospitals and prisons, not to mention getting tax exemption. He issued the Professional Auditors Bulletin, a handbook for luring prospects into the Scientology fold. One example was the “illness research” method, taking out a newspaper ad, such as: “Polio victims—a charitable organization investigating polio desires to examine several victims of the after-effects of this illness. Phone so-and-so.”

  Hubbard explained, “The interesting hooker in this ad is that anyone suffering from a lasting illness is suffering from it so as to attract attention and bring about an examination of it. These people will go on being examined endlessly.” Another example, under the subhead “Exploiting,” was the “casualty contact” method, “requiring little capital and being highly ambulatory.” All it needed was “good filing and a good personal appearance.” Hubbard elaborated:Every day in the daily papers, one discovers people who have been victimized one way or the other by life. One takes every daily paper he can get his hands on and cuts from
it every story whereby he might have a preclear. As speedily as possible, he makes a personal call on the bereaved or injured person. He should represent himself to the person or the person’s family as a minister whose compassion was compelled by the newspaper story concerning the person. The goal is to move the customer from group processing to individual attention at a fee.

  In 1962, Hubbard wrote to John F. Kennedy, claiming that his letter was as important as the one Albert Einstein had sent to Franklin D. Roosevelt about the atomic bomb. He insisted that “Scientology is very easy for the government to put into effect,” and that “Scientology could decide the space race or the next war in the hands of America.”

  He offered to “train astronauts” for a fee of $25 an hour. “Don’t think me a crackpot,” he requested. Kennedy didn’t respond, but the White House issued a memo to the Secret Service titled “Final Disposition,” identifying Hubbard as a potential serious threat to the president’s life.

  The E-Meter had been presented as a panacea that could cure such “psychosomatic” problems as arthritis, cancer, polio, ulcers, the common cold, and atomic radiation burns. In October 1962, the FDA was investigating Scientology, so Hubbard wrote that the E-Meter is “a valid religious instrument, used in Confessionals, and is in no way diagnostic and does not treat.”

  Nevertheless, in January 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the FDA to raid Scientology headquarters. More than three tons of equipment, papers, and books were seized, including a hundred E-Meters. Scientology claimed that this violated their freedom of religion, and Hubbard wrote to President Kennedy again. He wanted to meet with him so that they could “come to some amicable answer on religious matters.”

  Then he wrote to Robert Kennedy, “even though you are of a different faith,” asking for protection of the Scientology religion. Like his brother, Bobby didn’t respond. Well, there it was—my satirical angle—Hubbard’s motivation for programming Sirhan to kill Robert Kennedy would be revenge. Hmmmmm. Had I accidentally stumbled into a real conspiracy when I thought I was merely making one up?

  In Scientology, Kennedy could have been declared an Enemy, subject to Fair Game, a penalty described in a Hubbard Policy Letter whereby an Enemy “may be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist. May be tricked, sue, or lied to or destroyed.” In October 1968, four months after Bobby Kennedy was killed, Fair Game was “repealed,” due to adverse publicity. “The practice of declaring people Fair Game will cease,” Hubbard stated in a Policy Letter. “Fair Game may not appear on any Ethics Order. It causes bad public relations.”

  When Sirhan found himself awaiting trial, he was given several psychological tests. In one of these, he couldn’t provide a simple yes or no response to only two specific statements: “At one or more times in my life, I felt that someone was making me do things by hypnotizing me.” And, “Someone has been trying to influence my mind.” During the trial psychiatrist Bernard Diamond used post-hypnotic suggestion to program Sirhan into climbing the bars of his cell. There were two different accounts of that experiment. In Psychology Today magazine, Dr. Diamond wrote:He went over toward the guards and climbed the bars like a monkey. I asked him why. He answered in that cool way he affected, “I am getting exercise.” Then I played the tape to prove to him that he had been under hypnosis to do just that. But he denied it and complained that I was bugging him.

  However, in the book RFK Must Die (a title borrowed from the phrase Sirhan had scribbled over and over and over in a notebook), author Robert Kaiser, who was present at that post-hypnotic experiment, wrote:Sirhan had no idea what he was doing up on the top of the bars. When he finally discovered that climbing was not his own idea, but Dr. Diamond’s, he was struck with the plausibility of the idea that perhaps he had been programmed by someone else, in like manner, to kill Kennedy.

  When Scientology was kicked out of Australia, the official inquiry concluded:It is only in name that there is any difference between authoritative hypnosis and most of the techniques of Scientology. Many Scientology techniques are in fact hypnosis techniques, and Hubbard has not changed their nature by changing their names.

  Even Hubbard admitted the need for a “canceller,” which was a contract with a patient that whatever the auditor said would not become literally interpreted by the patient or used in any way. So, immediately before patients were permitted to open their eyes at the end of a session, they were supposed to be told:In the future, when I utter the word Cancelled, everything which I have said to you while you are in a therapy session will be cancelled and will have no force with you. Any suggestion I have made to you will be without force when I say the word Cancelled. Do you understand?

  When the word was used, it was not further amplified. Just that single word, Cancelled. Hubbard warned, “The canceller is vital. It prevents accidental positive suggestion. The patient may be suggestible or even in a permanent light hypnotic trance.” In William Burroughs’ book, The Job, he stated that “Hubbard has refused to publish his advanced discoveries. There is every indication that the discoveries of Scientology are being used by the CIA and other official agencies.”

  Ironically, Scientology obtained secret CIA documents through the Freedom of Information Act, proposing mind control experiments where hypnotized subjects would have an uncontrollable impulse to “commit a nuisance” on Groundhog Day on the steps of City Hall, in order to find out whether an unwilling subject could be quickly hypnotized, then made to undergo amnesia by “durable and useful post-hypnotic suggestion.” The CIA also collaborated with the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Division in bacteriological and chemical “open air tests” in the streets and subway tunnels of New York City.

  My ultimate fictional connection between Sirhan and Scientology was inadvertently suggested by Burroughs in Evergreen magazine:Take a black militant and put him on the E-Meter. Tell him to mock up a nigger-killing Southern sheriff chuckling over the notches in his gun. The needle falls off the dial. He mocks up the sheriff again. The needle falls off the dial. Again, again, again, for two hours if need be. No matter how long it takes, the time will come when he mocks up the sheriff and there is no read on the E-Meter. He is looking at this creature calmly with slow heartbeat and normal blood pressure and seeing it for what it is.

  He has as-ised Big Jim Clark. As-ising does not mean acceptance, submission, or resignation. On the contrary, when he can look at Big Jim with no reaction, he is infinitely better equipped to deal with the external manifestation, as a calm man fights better than an angry one. If you can’t bring yourself to see the target you can’t hit it. When the needle reads off, you are off target.

  I had developed a source inside Scientology. I also had a friend who’d been on the crew of Hubbard’s Sea Organization, a paramilitary fleet of ships. Crew members wore uniforms and had to sign an unusual contract:I do hereby agree to enter into employment with the Sea Organization and, being of sound mind, do fully realize and agree to abide by its purpose, which is to get Ethics in on this Planet and the Universe and, fully and without reservation, subscribe to the discipline, mores and conditions of this group and pledge to abide by them. Therefore, I contract myself to the Sea Organization for the next billion years.

  Give or take a few centuries, of course. I began to work on “The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy.” But then, in the course of my research, a strange thing happened. I learned of the actual involvement of Charles Manson with Scientology. In fact, there had been an E-Meter at the Spahn Ranch where his “family” stayed. Suddenly I no longer had a reason to use Sirhan as my protagonist. Reality will transcend allegory every time.

  Manson had been abandoned by his mother and lived in various institutions since he was eight years old. He learned early how to survive in captivity. When he was fourteen, he got arrested for stealing bread and was jailed. He was supposed to go to reform school, but instead went to Boys Town, ran away, got arrested again, and began his lifelong career as a prison inmate.
He was introduced to Scientology by fellow prisoners, and Charlie’s ability to psych people out was intensified so that he could zero in on their weaknesses and fears immediately.

  When he was released from prison in 1967, he went to the Scientology Center in San Francisco. The individual who accompanied him there told me, “Charlie said to them, ‘I’m Clear—what do I do now?’” But they expected him to sweep the floor—shit, he had done that in jail. However, in Los Angeles, he went to the Scientology Celebrity Center. Now this was more like it—here he could mingle with the elite. I was able to obtain a copy of the original log entry: “7/31/68, new name, Charlie Manson, Devt. No address. In for processing = Ethics = Type III.” The receptionist—who, by Type III, meant “psychotic”—sent him to the Ethics office but he never showed up.

  At the Spahn Ranch, Manson combined his version of Scientology auditing with post-hypnotic techniques he had learned in prison, with geographical isolation and subliminal motivation, with sing-along sessions and encounter games, with LSD and mescaline, with transactional analysis and brainwashing rituals, with verbal probing and sexual longevity that he had practiced upon himself for all those years in the privacy of his cell.

  Ultimately, in August 1969, he sent his well-programmed family off to slay actress Sharon Tate, some friends, and her unborn baby. Tate’s husband, film director Roman Polanski, was in London at the time.

  And, yes, Charles Manson was Rosemary’s baby. A few months later, when the family members were captured and charged with the homicides, Manson was portrayed by the media as a hippie cult leader, and the counterculture became a dangerous enemy. Hitchhikers were shunned. Communes were raided. In the public’s mind, flower children had grown poisonous thorns. But Manson was never really a hippie.