Source:

http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2002/04/03/hubbard/index.html

A NIGHT OF S-METERS AND OPENINGS
April 3, 2002

Imagine my surprise at receiving an invitation to a dead man's birthday party; who knew they even threw those anymore? Birthday boy J.R. "Bob" Dobbs -- "Bob", in SubGenius speak -- would've been 91 if he hadn't been "assassinated the first time" right smack in the middle of a 1984 San Francisco Devival. The SubGenius Foundation wanted me to come help celebrate.

A few days after I RSVP'd, a SubGenius P.R. flack called back to calmly rescind my invitation. Why? I asked. Hadn't he himself invited me to learn more about his Lynch-tainted faith after I savaged the film adaptation of "Bob's" "Sales in Space" in the Philadelphia Weekly? Didn't he relish the opportunity, at last, to represent for "Revelation X"? Actually, no. If I were to write about the Foundation again, he implied, it would be on the Foundation's terms. Though he offered to meet me personally to explain "Bob's" mysterious thrall, he said my attending the birthday bash "would not be appropriate." OK, so I'd have to crash it.

A smiling greeter clad in black-and-white evening attire ushered us into the Ben Franklin-founded Philadelphia Free Library. Inside the white marble great hall, Dobbs's candy-colored volumes sent more sober tomes packing. Posing as a married couple, an accomplice and I claimed a table for four in a basement hallway outside the building's bathrooms. Some 80 eager buffet grazers and a blissed-out guitarist strumming anti-music outside the men's-room door transformed the place into a snake-handling church social circa 1969.

We weren't seated long before a suited man approached as much to check us out as to proselytize. He asked how we'd wound up there. By invitation, of course. He asked if we'd read "The Book of the SubGenius," which true believers and snickering cynics know as the SubGenius's bible.

"Parts," I admitted. Which was true. In fact I have my very own copy, complete with Post-its marking favorite spots.

- "Bob" on constipation: "Do you sometimes feel like 'rear dwarf in the dinosaur suit'? THAT'S JUST WHERE THEY WANT YOU."

- "Bob" on gynecology: "Once you do have Slack, you don't have to worry about sharing it because no matter how much you possess, ten times as much is radiated out. And this can mean INSTANT MONEY -- LUCK AT THE RACES -- AN AVALANCHE OF FRENZIED SEX -- ANYTHING YOU DESIRE!"

- "Bob" on constipation and gynecology: "When those 'popular' creeps are 30 and have drab lives of passion-deadening security and boredom, you'll have gone through all sorts of interesting hell, paid your abnormality dues, and become a cool swinger, getting away with more wild shit than they ever dreamed possible -- because you didn't give up, and kept up the F.I.B. ('Faith In "Bob"')!"

The suited man -- I'll call him Nu -- told us the beauty of "The Book of the SubGenius" is that it's completely literal. He then explained his work with the Foundation, which consists mainly of performing "whiffreadings" on people in a process that has nothing to do with taxes, but instead involves a handy piece of Xist technology called an s-meter. This device, which measures galvanic skin response, is similar to a lie detector. It is supposed to measure the "Slack"

encrustation of the nervous system. After some 150 hours of whiffreading in which senior SubGenii tried to isolate the physical remnants of his False Slack, Nu had been declared ready for his third nostril to be opened (making him "a Doktor," a liberated spirit) and graduated to performing readings himself. Nu showed off the Medic Alert-type bracelet that advertises his status. I asked what exactly happens during a third nostril opening. "At those levels," Nu said, "it's confidential."

Soon another couple joined us at the table. Both born-again Christians, they had been chatted up by Nu, too. But he fed them better stuff: According to "Bob," we learned, all of us were once slackful giants -- Yeti -- thousands of years ago. Over time we became corrupted by everything from the human gene pool and a world-spanning Conspiracy, clear through to Clinton and Bush and all their dirty politics-spouting peers. The story goes on, but alas, the show hadn't even started.

Before the main event, a local "clench" leader, looking like a Martha Stewart stunt double, took the stage for a bit of motivational speaking. In a scene straight out of a Leni Riefenstahl film, she led the crowd in a fist-pumping hip-hip-hooraying of a Dobbshead and a poster-size photo of the smiling man himself standing alongside a lighted birthday cake. In lock-step harmony, the enthusiastic crew enunciated a hearty "yeah" to each canned pep rally question.

Would they like to hear about how the local clench grew this past year? "Yeah!" How 'bout the hours of whiffreading performed? "Yeah!"

And would they like to know how much money the international for-profit raised? You betcha they would! Happily for them, they would soon know all these things and more. But before the international fundraising tally arrived via simulcast from SubGenius "Headquarters"

in Dallas, Tx., there was the matter of honoring local donors, each of whom had made several-thousand-dollar contributions to the local clench to fund expansion of their offices. All but one of the honorees were introduced as doktors.

The night's main event began with the Birthday Game, which pitted SubGenius clenches from each inhabited continent on Earth against each other in a fundraising race in the name of "religion tech." (Someday, once the entire planet has been "fried," a video voice-over said, other planets will be involved, too.)

Next came highlights from the previous year: When race riots in Cincinnati last year left 87 people dead, said the simulcast's emcee, SubGenius volunteer ministers ("Bobbies") were among the first on the scene to quell the violence (never mind that not a single person actually died in the riots). While race-fueled shootings continued across the city, in Cincinnati's "ghetto," where Bobbies distributed the Foundation's "Pamphlet #1", not a single act of violence was committed. And on a local radio show not much later, "a leading government official" presented "her vision of how to bring tolerance to her city." That vision, of course, was "The Road to Slack."

At no other time in SubGenius history, gushed the emcee -- an early Don Knotts type -- has J.R. "Bob" Dobbs's message been so potent.

"Just since September, the 'Bob' way to a world of decency has been placed in the hands of 1.7 million people planetwide."

Response to the Foundation's latest TV and radio appeals for volunteer ministers has been phenomenal. As of that night, the emcee added, more than 60,000 people had called their crisis hotline -- an average of more than 6,000 a week.

Then there's NarcoPlus, the Foundation's drug treatment arm. While few media outlets relish surrendering valuable airtime to unpaid public service announcements, the emcee said NarcoPlus's PSAs have been so popular CNN is demanding more. In keeping with "Bob's" anti-politics message, Narconon goes deeper than your average drug treatment program by encouraging not only the expected 'frop and marijuana scourges, but also our society's addiction to prescription meds.

In time, the Foundation plans to expose "the big lie that happiness can be worthwhile without Slack," intoned the Don Knotts doppelganger.

In San Diego they went so far as to place ads on the sides of ballot boxes urging the bovine masses to dial up the Church hotline -- all through the narcotic appeal of their slogan, "There's no Prob, with 'Bob'!"

"We can't make people stop voting," the emcee conceded, "but we can let people know the real answer."

Then there was last year's big SubGenius coup: the "wake-up call" in New York. Some of us may forever recall it as 9/11, but to SubGenius minds it was just another reminder that the whole world could use a hefty dose of s-meter auditing. The simulcast then took followers back in time to the Foundation's previous contributions to world politics -- namely their efforts in bringing down Prohibition and ending the Vietnam War.

Four and a half hours into the high-tech birthday fete, my companion and I tried to sneak out during one of the incessant standing O's. But the church leaders gathered outside by the bathrooms intercepted us, eager for our impressions of the evening. Too long, we concluded, half-apologizing for ducking out early. They nodded sympathetically, half-apologizing for the evening's seeming endurance record. But it wasn't over yet.

Asked to submit to an exit interview, we deflected their probing questions with a few of our own about the s-meter that had suddenly appeared on a nearby table. The thing was adorned with knobs and two silver cans attached by small cables, suggesting a childhood phone game.

I tried it first, grasping the canisters in my hands and bracing for the shock that would brand me a heretic. The s-meter's operator told me to conjure the day's most slackless moment (I didn't have to reach far for that) and the machine's needle jumped abruptly rightward. Of course the needle seemed to jump whenever anyone grabbed the canisters. Pressed to explain how the device worked, the woman said it measured the False Slack accretion's resistance to current passing between the canisters. Impossible, countered my companion, a neuroscientist by profession, adding that 50 years of neuroscience research says that can't be measured.

Oh, but see, she explained, the s-meter's not about the brain. It's about Slack. Of course, Slack! we thought. Must've lost that when we walked in the door.

Go Back