Phil Among the Scientologists

St. Louis, Missouri

Wednesday 09 May 09

Sometimes i worry that I’m getting fat. It is difficult to fight past the fast food mentality of America. It is difficult to find the bakeries or to reach the supermarkets without a car. That often leaves fast food the only greasy option within my grasp.

In St Louis I was out and looking for a breakfast venue. Even in University City, STL, breakfast is monopolised by the chains. Starbucks Coffee, Kayak Coffee, the St Louis Bread Co. – these are what’s on the menu. Identical coffee in different coloured disposable packaging. You cannot escape the brands here. They occupy pride of place, foremost position in the consciousness. The tip of the tongue.

So maybe it was a body image crisis or a breakfast bloating that caused what follows. Or maybe i have stumbled upon the path to Truth.

At the gates of the University City shopping and franchise strip stand, on grand leafy blocks, the pillars of society; the town hall, an episcopal (?) church, two synagogues, a masonic temple, and the church of Scientology. I was heading to the last of these anyway, but there was little choice in the matter; it was the only one that had its doors open and a welcome sign out the front.

I had come to learn what I could from these guys, to catch a glimpse of what goes on behind the madness and makeup of Scientology’s higher profile adherents. And, of course, i had hoped to do it for free. Freeness extended to the cursory tour of the rather rich furnishings of the building, and there were free brochures on offer, but if you wanted to know the real inside story, you had to pay for some paperback L. Ron Hubbard literature.

There were two other free components. One was the bathroom, replete with extensive reading material and easy ten-step toxicity tests (‘how toxic are you?’), beyond which lay the sauna room for the cleansing-off of said toxins. The other was the personality test. Now, i thought, i was getting somewhere.

How many questions were there? If our country were to go to war, would i feel hostile towards those who conscientiously objected? That’s a paraphrase.

The test done, and my results fed into a computer that created a very easy-to-follow graph of my personality, expressed as ten salient points.

I was relieved to find that I am both stable (as opposed to dispersed) and active – these are my highest scores. I am also certain, aggressive and a correct estimator. My communication level and responsibility score are ok, but could do with addressing.

But then the graph plummets into a sharp -34 trough. And what personality point is so grievously malnourished in me? Happiness.

My happiness is catastrophically low.

Now, to be fair, I had come to St Louis because it was the only way to get further south. And i hadn’t heard from my contact in Arkansas. And i was feeling a little fat. And my breakfast was bland and overpriced and slow to arrive. And i had cheered for the losing team in both baseball games i had managed to catch. And i was tired and it was hot.

But can a kid with the world at his feet, travelling across the states for virtually nothing, staying with friends and writing writing writing really blame watery coffee and rubbery eggs for a negative 34 (the minimum ideal, by the way, would be between positive 7 and 33, which is where my communication rating lies)?

And more to the point, could my happiness really lie 60 points lower than responsibility and 100 points lower than stability? My test supervisor advised that Scientology could help with my happiness rating. and also that happiness is about attaining your goals.

I sat opposite him wondering if he was staring deeper into my soul than i had ever been able to peer myself. Or whether everyone who takes the test gets a negative happiness rating.

I wondered whether I was happy.

The question now stands more lucid than ever; what exactly am i doing in the USofA? And is morbid curiosity and the visiting of friends really enough of a reason to be here? And the investigation of American religion and religiosity? The personality test was the partial satisfaction of that goal, I thought. It told me otherwise.

The test doesn’t need to be true; that is not its function. It sets you thinking. And that is the introductory claim of the church; that they are knowledge seekers. It also sets you doubting.

Or alternatively you can reject the whole thing outright and say that I am happy if I feel happy and the setting and attaining of goals is not the measure of happiness, and that happiness is not quantifiable, nor can it be expressed or determined on paper through a questionnaire, and that for that matter, happiness is not necessarily a personality trait, and that it is in a constant state of flux.

And you can decide to have further tests in other cities to find out just how this happiness thing works.

And regardless of how happy you are not sure you are, you can nod your head with certainty and feel that you have gained an insight in the workings of Scientology. And for less than the price of a boring breakfast.

Cities Divided

St. Louis, Missouri

Monday 07 May 2007

So begins the plummet south, deviating out of my neat east to west course. And almost immediately there is a change, and it feels more southern, whatever that means at this early stage.

The great rivers of America – the Missouri and the Mississippi – skirt the state on either side as they too plummet southwards. The wide river basins have left the land absolutely flat. Flat and fecund and fertile. This is farming land. Everything is green and rich hues of brown. And there is an excess of foliage everywhere. Water is in abundance, and sits stagnant and squandered by the road side. Birds stalk through it. Heaps of rusted machinery and vehicles also sit dishevelled in the fields. Gleaming newer models are at work, or stand at attention ready to plough, irrigate, to produce. It is a land of plenitude and excess.

Once upon a time Missouri was a slave state, and spilled blood for the right to keep its slaves to work the farms.

Kansas City was one of the first places I penned in to my itinerary for this trip. It wasn’t because of the jazz history or the bbq culture, although those intrigued me too. It was the launching pad for the careers and successes of Ernest Hemingway and Walt Disney. Two very distinctive American artists and icons. And yet the only evidence of either of these two in the city is the blue neon words on a building: Kansas City Star. That’s the paper Hemingway used to write for.

There is genius in the city, as usual you can find a hint of it in the free art museums, and in the stylisations of the public places and architecture. KC’s sister city is Sevilla, and there is a strong Andalucian feel to one of the downtown areas. It also boasts of having more fountains than any other city but Rome. And more miles of boulevarde than any city but Paris. To me these claims ring hollow, but the fact that they exist shows something about KC pride.

A pattern has well and truly emerged. All these midwestern cities that had their time as a vitally important crossroad or hub for America. A truly international city. But for whatever reason – the decline of the railroads, the downsizing of the auto industry – that golden age cannot last. KC also is a hollow city with a decayed downtown, that feels eerily quiet at times. The people have expanded out – it is the peculiarity of a country that always felt itself to have too much space, that needed conquering – and the interesting pockets of city life are few and far between. There are buses, but the public transport systems of America are uniformly arcane or archaic or both. There are projects downtown to bring back life. Stadiums, malls, hotels. They fill up like storm shelters. The world outside is avoided. It might be dangerous.

St Louis conforms to the pattern too. A hollow and resounding downtown, even in peak hour. Even as the people are centrifuged out to the burbs, they talk in an almost competitive and proud way about east St Louis having leapfrogged Detroit on the list of most dangerous cities in America. I’ve never heard of such a definite and quantifiable index anywhere else in the world.

Both cities are peculiar for being split by a great and unswimmable river. a river that has long been claimed by commerce and industry. And as they straddle the rivers, the cities straddle two states as well. So KC is mostly Missouri but also Kansas. and St Louis is mostly in Missouri but there is also the dirty criminal alter-ego in Illinois.

In the USofA when you seem to cross state border every few miles, this wouldn’t be so interesting a phenomenon. But when your city has one leg planted in a slave state and one in a free state, things become a little more problematic.

And when the good folk of Kansas decide that creationism and evolution need to be placed side by side in school science textbooks as parallel theories, you have to wander which state and which half of the river has the more cause to be embarrassed. The slave days are over. Kansas is still working on the creationism-as-science thing.

As you approach Kansas neon lights cryptically advertise ‘5% beer’. In Kansas it is illegal to sell beer with an alcohol content greater than 3.5%.

St Louis has a grander tradition than KC, and could be said to have fallen further. Its name, but not its pronunciation in American English, reveals a more authentically European heritage than KC can claim. And there is much talk of historic route 66 passing through here, and of the many other trails west across the country; the Mormon trail, the Lewis and Clark expedition. But none of these matter so much because what STL has that no other city has, and what remains resplendent throughout the long history of decline is the arch. A single gleaming arch, two hundred metres tall, that soars skyward, reaches its zenith, and then plunges elegantly back to the ground below. Plenty of internationally recognised icons are over-rated. The arch itself defies expectation or comprehension completely. An otherworldly thing, surreal and incongruous against the grubby city skyline. A momentous feat of engineering, especially considering you can take a ride up the inside of it to the top. and look out over the city, or down on the void and those two impossible spindley legs that some how keep the whole thing and all its hordes of visitors suspended so high above the ground.

One other thing the two cities share, and it is no way peculiar to Missouri, but it is manifest there; the great and continuing generosity of the locals. In both cities I had places to stay and, quite separately, friends to make and meet. I was an impromptu dinner guest in KC and a 6am wake-up call in STL. And still I was greeted with smiles and good food and food for thought.

I came to KC for the sake of two men no longer there, whose ghosts aren’t even there except perhaps on a postcard somewhere. I came to STL because i needed to meet up with a southbound greyhound bus. And despite those inauspicious motives, another pattern emerges; I hop the bus and leave the city, and feel like there was more to see and things left undone, unsaid, untasted. i feel like i know less about Missouri than any other state I’ve visited, and yet it and Ohio are the only states in which I’ve stayed in and sampled two different cities.

And then the road again, and the green, and the south.

On Baseball 2

Kansas City, Missouri

Saturday 05 May 2007

Fifth innings bases loaded. The Kansas City Royals are down by four and really need to lift their performance. Two enormous screens urge the fans to cheer louder and louder. Hokey organ music reverberates through the stadium, trying to build some excitement. The fresh pitcher tosses up ball after ball, walks one man home. Then he walks another home. The crowd are getting restless, this innings can’t end soon enough. A tactical meeting is held on the pitchers mound.

And I have a moment in which to contemplate the bizarre chain of events that brought me here.

My first month in Madrid, back when I was living in a hermit’s cave; I spent as much time as possible outdoors, despite the cold, because it was better than my lightless, grubby little bedroom. And usually, when the cold got the better of me, there was cheap internet in a locutorio (not a wifi-soaked coffee house anywhere).

Enter Michelle; spending her sophomore year studying in London, on her first sally forth onto the continent. And unable to find her friends because, believe it or not, the train station is very very big. and worse still; she can’t find the @ function on these damned spanish keyboards. And without that there will be no email to her friends, and not reunion, and she will be stuck in frosty Madrid.

I happen to be the person she asks for help. I show her how to find @. Then I leave. Then I come back. If she is stuck and has nothing to do, would she like me to take her round for the day, show her the sights? The Prado, the Retiro, Gran Via and Puerta del Sol. We walk madrid in a day. She leaves. She returns in a few days with her friends. She leaves.

I leave Madrid, return to Oz. I leave Oz and head to the US. I stay with Michelle in Lincoln Nebraska. She has family in Kansas City. We leave Lincoln for KC. We stay with her uncle and aunt. Would we like to see a Royals baseball match? yes we would. we are warned; they will probably lose.

So then, back to the fifth innings, and I suspect I have just about finished another huge mound of cheese-from-a-tap nachos. And Michelle’s dad is there too. And he absolutely refuses to let me pay for anything,\; because i looked after her in Spain, he is looking after me. I tentatively point out that taking her to a free art gallery and walking her around town isn’t actually helping her out. She found her friends. I just raved about Goya. He won’t hear it. And he won’t stop paying.

The crowd is still restless. A few half-hearted mexican waves get up, but they disperse fast. The stadium behind the outfield is all coloured fountains and billboards, and cars that, if they get hit by a homer, will be given away (needless to say they are undented and intact). This is a different world to Wrigley Field and the Cubs. Every new innings is marked with a giveaway of some kind. The kiss cam is roving the crowds, shaming couples or at least people sitting side by side into kissing. The dance cam is doing the same thing but with dancing and hopeless individuals. Out come the promotions girls and the mascot, and they are carrying bazookas. The first time it is t-shirts they fire into the crowd. Later on its aluminium-wrapped hotdogs. Meanwhile three people in giant hotdog suits are racing around the field. It is a carnival atmosphere, plenty of gloss and kitsch, to keep the fans in their seats and drinking beer. It works of course. When the Royals claw back three runs in the 8th the fans rouse, but by now everyone is pretty much sticking around for the fireworks show that will reverberate throughout the stadium afterwards.

The stalwart Cubs fans at Wrigley in Chicago could argue, quite reasonably, that this is baseball without its dignity. A huge stadium built in the middle of nowhere, a massive car park that merges with the adjacent football car park, and a pro store that stocks every possible baseball hat. KC Royals are blue and white, but if you prefer your hat in fluorescent urban camouflage orange, that can be done. People scrabbling over each other to catch hotdogs being lobbed into the top level of the grandstand – is this dignity? It is entertainment. you laugh at the concept, you laugh at the people, you laugh with the crowd, you laugh at yourself. But you do laugh.

The Royals lose, of course they do. But we and everyone else knew that when we arrived, or at least from the first innings when they went behind. But everyone has had a good time, they have forgotten themselves and danced terribly to get on camera or kissed awkwardly or fallen over seats to catch souvenir ball, shirt or dog. It’s here again; that ability to suspend disbelief and cynicism, and be immersed in the moment. American earnestness, nine innings worth of laughter, plus a free fireworks display.

And I am again gobsmacked by how good my luck is, how continually i fall on my feet and end up in these fortuitous situations. Because in Madrid i was as glad for the company as Michelle was. And i have to wonder for how much longer the universe will allow me to spend on credit in the manner. But while I am afforded this fortune I’ll continue to wring it for all its worth. And i don’t mean nachos, but i do mean American hospitality, which the land seems to overflow with, and which really there is no alternative but to accept. It’s not optional, it just is. So sit back and watch the fireworks, eat your nachos and enjoy it.