Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 156 of 529 · 20 per page

• From Going Clear (2013)

  He wouldn’t learn the real significance of Snow White for some time. Hubbard had set in motion an operation so daring and dangerous that it threatened to destroy Scientology forever. On April 20, 1973, Hubbard wrote a secret order, “Snow White Program,” in which he noted a dangerous trend in the gradual reduction since 1967 of countries available to Scientology. He put the blame on the American and British governments, which he said were spreading false allegations against the church. He proposed to swamp the countries that had turned against the church in a vast campaign of litigation with the aim of expunging defamatory files and leaving Hubbard and the Apollo “ free to frequent all western ports and nations without threat.” In Hubbard’s absence, Mary Sue exerted increased control over the church’s operations. Hubbard had already appointed her the head of the Guardian’s Office, a special unit with a broad mandate to protect the religion. Among its other duties, the GO functioned as an intelligence agency, gathering information on critics and government agencies around the world, generating lawsuits to intimidate opponents, and waging an unremitting campaign against mental health professionals. It was the GO that Hubbard tasked with Snow White. Under Mary Sue’s direction, the GO infiltrated government offices around the world, looking for damning files on the church. Within the next few years, as many as five thousand Scientologists were covertly placed in 136 government agencies worldwide. Project Grumpy, for instance, covered Germany, where the Guardian’s Office was set up to infiltrate Interpol as well as German police and immigration authorities. In addition, there was a scheme to accuse German critics of the church of committing genocide. Project Sleepy was to clear files in Austria; Happy was for Denmark, Bashful for Belgium, and Dopey for Italy. There were also Projects Mirror, Apple, Reflection, and so on, all drawn from elements of the fairy tale. Projects Witch and Stepmother both targeted the UK, the source of Scientology’s immigration problems. Project Hunter was the United States, where Scientologists penetrated the IRS, the Justice, Treasury, and Labor Departments, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as foreign embassies and consulates; private companies and organizations, such as the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Better Business Bureau; and newspapers—including the St. Petersburg Times ,8 the Clearwater Sun , and the Washington Post —that were critical of the religion. In an evident attempt at blackmail, they stole the Los Angeles IRS intelligence files of celebrities and political figures, including California governor Jerry Brown, Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, and Frank Sinatra. Nothing in American history can compare with the scale of the domestic espionage of Operation Snow White. IN SEPTEMBER 1973, learning that he was not going to be extradited to France after all, Hubbard returned to Lisbon, where the Apollo had been in dry dock. He amused himself by going off on photo expeditions in Portugal, with his Messengers acting as porters.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “Coco! Coco!” she cried. Jeannette reached for her daughter, but Mary Lou wouldn’t let go of Sonny. She pounded his chest despairingly, her blows weak and hopeless. Everyone could hear Coco’s tormented screams. “Coco’s dying!” Mary Lou cried. Sonny found himself saying, “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll get her.” Lola heard this. “Sonny, don’t!” she said. “What are you thinking?” “I gotta at least try,” he said. Lola took Mary Lou in her arms. There was no point trying to stop Sonny. He grabbed a wet gunny sack and covered his face as he ran back into the inferno. No other sounds arose other than Coco’s wails and the crackling of fire as it ate the hay and chewed the walls of the barn, belching out cascades of sparks. Flames had broken through the roof. It wouldn’t be long before the entire structure collapsed into a smoldering mound of ash. Mary Lou cried into Lola’s shoulder, unable to look. The heat was so great that Lola felt like her face was burning. And Sonny was in there. Jeannette took Lola’s hand. —The barn was so bright that Sonny could see through the gunny sack, like looking at the sun through darkened glass. The dampness of the sack preserved his eyes, so they didn’t melt out of their sockets, and his helmet kept his hair from catching fire. The flames didn’t care that he was being the hero. Although he had known mortal fear, Sonny had never experienced anything like this heat. In some suppressed region of his brain, he registered the spectacle of his own probable death and the final seconds of his life. His actions were spastic and confused. He was helpless. He had to turn around. There was still a chance to save himself. Then he glimpsed a huge figure rearing off to the side of him where he wasn’t expecting the horse to be. Coco had found a narrow unburned spot. She didn’t register Sonny’s presence. Weakened by the depleted oxygen in this furnace, she was pawing the air, her nostrils flaring, her eyes yellow in the flames and full of horror. There was no second chance with this animal. Sonny stood directly in front of Coco. He put his hand on her neck, which was ready to burst into flames. “Whoa, whoa, I got you,” Sonny said. Then he threw the gunny sack over her head and held it tight. Coco started to buck, but she recognized that the cool of the gunny sack was her only salvation. She kept turning around, trying to edge away from the heat, but there was no escape now, the fire was everywhere. Sonny kept his eyes closed as much as possible. He was going to have to mount her if they had any chance, but she wouldn’t hold still. Both their lives depended on it. A rafter fell and Coco reared. “Now, now,” Sonny said, “calm down, girl.” The sound of his voice seemed to reach her.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Titmus was sent to RPF and denounced as an infiltrator. Suzette was told to divorce him, which she did; soon after that, she was transferred to Gold Base to work in the Household Unit, cleaning rooms and doing the laundry—for David Miscavige, among others. IN 1985, with Hubbard in seclusion, the church faced two of its most difficult court challenges. In Los Angeles, a former Sea Org member, Lawrence Wollersheim, sought $25 million for emotional distress caused by “brainwashing” and emotional abuse. He said he had been forced to disconnect from his family and locked for eighteen hours a day in the hold of a ship docked in Long Beach, California, deprived of sleep, and fed only once a day. After attaining OT III status, Wollersheim said, his “core sense of identity” had been shattered. “At OT III, you find out you’re really thousands of individual beings struggling for control of your body. Aliens left over from space wars that are giving you cancer or making you crazy or making you impotent,” he later recalled. “I went psychotic on OT III. I lost a sense of who I was.” In order to substantiate the charges, Wollersheim’s attorney introduced Scientology’s most confidential materials—including the OT III secrets—as evidence. At this point, those materials were still unknown to the general public. The loss of Scientology’s chest of secrets was not just a violation of the sanctity of its esoteric doctrines; from the church’s perspective, open examination of these materials represented a copyright infringement and a potential business catastrophe. Those who were traveling up the Bridge would now know their destination. The fog of mystery would be dissipated. The Wollersheim suit had been filed in 1980, but Scientology lawyers had been frantically dragging it out with writs and motions. An undercover campaign was launched to discredit or blackmail Wollersheim’s lawyer, Charles O’Reilly. His house was bugged and his office was infiltrated by a Scientology operative. There was an attempt to trap him or his bodyguards in a compromising situation with women. The church also harassed the judge in the case, Ronald Swearinger. “I was followed,” the judge later said. “My car tires were slashed. My collie drowned in my pool.” A former Scientology executive, Vicki Aznaran, later testified that there was an effort to compromise the judge by setting up his son, who they heard was gay, with a minor boy. When the case finally came to trial, the church stacked the courtroom with OT VIIs. “They thought OT VIIs could move mountains,” Tory Christman, a former Sea Org member, said. Although she was only an OT III at the time, she persuaded church officials to let her into the room. The Scientologists directed their intentions toward the judge and the jury, hoping to influence their decisions telepathically. On a Friday afternoon, the judge announced that the OT III documents would be made public at nine a.m. the following Monday, on a first- come, first-serve basis.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Lightning danced all around, landing like mortar shells, reminding Sonny of Iraq, but he couldn’t think about that now. He had learned that much from war, you set some thoughts aside to be pondered when you were alone and safe. Or maybe you never revisited those thoughts at all, you just put them in a casket and buried them, along with friends now gone. The job was to live. He motioned Frank to follow, directing him toward the front of the blaze. It had crept within a hundred yards of the house. You could watch it move from clump to clump through the yellow grass and then suddenly jump ten feet in the air. George Miller was standing by the house, stupefied by the scope of the disaster that was ripping his life apart. “Is your family safe?” Sonny asked. “Jeannette’s getting the kids in the truck,” George said robotically. He was carrying a television. The older Miller boy was loading the back of a Suburban with silverware and photographs and whatever else the family could manage to save. “We’re gonna lose it all,” George said. “The whole damn thing.” His family had been on this land for a century. “No we’re not,” Sonny said. “We’re ahead of this. Just take care of your folks and we’ll take care of the fire.” Fear was the main problem here, Sonny figured. People couldn’t think straight, even those who’d been trained and done this before. The volunteers were making feckless random attempts to quell the sparks with the gunny sacks. “Francisco!” Sonny called out to his assistant chief. “Make a line!” Francisco Saenz knew what he was supposed to do, all right, and he suddenly snapped to and organized the others in formation, delegating one of them to refresh the dampened gunny sacks. The air was hot and painful to breathe, the grass as dry as newspaper. Sonny barely registered the bolt of lightning that struck the barn, but he did notice that a television news truck had shown up. One of the stations in Midland kept a roving truck in Marfa, and some-how it had gotten notified of the fire and was already here. Why the actual fire department couldn’t send one of those pump and roll engines in the same amount of time was a mystery. The marauding fire leapt onto a grove of dead cedar and rose up in an immense red wall. Some of the volunteers froze in awe. “Don’t look!” Sonny shouted. “Keep your head down! Do your job!” The task was to starve the fire quickly, before the blaze outflanked them. With the beaters and the pump truck now in front of the flames, Sonny organized the remaining volunteers to make a fire break with shovels and hoes, scraping away everything but the dirt.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The leaders of the First Crusade, which left Europe in the autumn of 1096, also had mixed motives for joining the expedition. Bohemund, count of Taranto in southern Italy, had a very small fief and made no secret of his worldly ambitions: he left the Crusade at the first opportunity to become Prince of Antioch. His nephew Tancred, however, found in the Crusade the answer to a spiritual dilemma. He had “burned with anxiety” because he could not reconcile his profession of fighting with the gospel and had even considered the monastic life. But as soon as he heard Pope Urban’s summons, “his eyes opened, his courage was born.”52 Godfrey of Bouillon, meanwhile, was inspired by the Cluniac ideal that saw fighting the Church’s enemies as a spiritual vocation, but his brother Baldwin merely wanted fame, fortune, and an estate in the East. The terrifying experience of Crusading soon changed their views and expectations.53 Many of the Crusaders had never left their villages; now they were thousands of miles from home, shut off from everything they had known, and surrounded by fearsome enemies in alarming terrain. When they arrived at the Ante-Taurus range, many were paralyzed by terror, gazing at these precipitous mountains “in a great state of gloom, wringing their hands because they were so frightened and miserable.”54 The Turks operated a scorched-earth policy, so there was no food, and the poorer noncombatants and soldiers died like flies. Chroniclers report that during the siege of Antioch: The starving people devoured the stalks of beans still growing in the fields, many kinds of herbs unseasoned with salt, and even thistles which because of the lack of firewood were not well cooked and therefore irritated the tongues of those eating them. They also ate horses, camels, dogs, and even rats. The poorer people even ate the hides of animals and the seeds of grain found in manure.55 The Crusaders soon realized that they were badly led and inadequately provisioned. They also knew that they were massively outnumbered. “Where we have a count, the enemy has forty kings; where we have a regiment, the enemy has a legion,” wrote the bishops who accompanied the expedition in their joint letter home; “where we have a castle, they have a kingdom.”56

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “Hush,” he says. “It’s just saline. I need to clear away the dead tissue … irrigate the wound.” “And then…?” “Set the bone. It’s been too long already … the risk of infection … your soft tissue…” He’s mumbling things. Words I don’t hold the meaning to: debridement … osteomyelitis. He reaches up and wipes his forehead with his shirtsleeve. I’m going to have to set your bone. I’m not an orthopedic surgeon, Senna. We don’t have the equipment…” I stare at him as he leans back on his haunches. He has a face full of scruff, and a head of hair that is standing every which way. He looks so different from the doctor that operated on me last time. The cuts around his mouth deepen as he stares into my wound. He’s more scared than I am, I think. This is his job, his profession—saving lives. He is an expert at saving lives. Yet, this is out of his area of expertise. There is no one to consult with. Isaac Asterholder is positioned at a keyboard instead of the drums, and he doesn’t quite know where to put his hands. “It’s okay.” I sound peculiarly calm. Detached. “Do what you can.” He reaches for the flashlight, holds it right above the gash. “The tissue is red, that’s good,” he says. I nod though I don’t know what he’s talking about. The room has started to spin and I just want him to get on with it. “It’s going to hurt like hell, Senna.” “Fuck you,” I say. “Just do it.” I sob on the last word. Such a tough guy. Isaac gets to work. He washes his hands in the bucket using an amber colored soap. Then he douses his hands and arms in alcohol. He pulls on a pair of gloves. He must have found them down the well with the other supplies. So the zookeeper left us gloves. For what? Surgery? For when we decided to spring clean? Maybe we were supposed to fill them with air and draw faces on them with markers. Our captor though of everything. Except morphine, of course. Somehow I know that one was on purpose. No pain, no gain. This guy likes us to suffer. Isaac does it. Without warning. While I’m thinking about the zookeeper. This time I don’t scream. I pass out.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  From the superintendent's hands he took the list of girls who had misbehaved, then, addressing himself to me again, he caused me to shudder; each gesture, each movement which seemed to oblige me to submit myself to these libertines was for me as a sentence of death. Antonin commanded me to sit on the edge of a bed and when I was in this posture he bade the superintendent uncover my breast and raise my skirt to above my waist; he himself spread my legs as far apart as possible, he seats himself before this prospect, one of my companions comes and takes up the same pose on top of me in such a way that it is the altar of generation instead of my visage which is offered to Antonin; with these charms raised to the level of his mouth he readies himself for pleasure. A third girl, kneeling before him, begins to excite him with her hands, and a fourth, completely naked, with her fingers indicates where he must strike my body. Gradually, this girl begins to arouse me and what she does to me Antonin does as well, with both his hands, to two other girls on his left and right. One cannot imagine the language, the obscene speeches by which that debauchee stimulates himself; at last he is in the state he desires, he is led to me, but everyone follows him, moves with him, endeavors to inflame him yet further while he takes his pleasure; his naked hind parts are exposed, Omphale takes possession of them and neglects nothing in order to irritate him: rubbings, kisses, pollutions, she employs them all; completely afire, Antonin leaps toward me.... "I wish to stuff her this time," he says, beside himself.... These moral deviations determine the physical. Antonin, who has the habit of uttering terrible cries during the final instants of drunkenness, emits dreadful ones; everyone surrounds, everyone serves him, everyone labors to enrich his ecstasy, and the libertine attains it in the midst of the most bizarre episodes of luxury and depravation. These groupings were frequent; for when a monk indulged in whatever form of pleasure, all the girls regularly surrounded him in order to fire all his parts' sensations, that voluptuousness might, if one may be forgiven the expression, more surely penetrate into him through every pore. Antonin left, breakfast was brought in; my companions forced me to eat, I did so to please them. We had not quite finished when the superior entered: seeing us still at table, he dispensed us from ceremonies which were to have been identical with those we had just executed for Antonin. "We must give a thought to dressing her," said he, looking at me; and then he opened a wardrobe and threw upon my bed several garments of the color appropriate to my class, and several bundles of linen as well.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I wrestle with the pain for a minute … two, before I discard it. I broke my body and there is no way to fix it. I don’t care. I need to find Isaac. And that’s when I think it: Oh God. What if the zookeeper came while I was passed out and did something to him? I roll slightly onto my side until I have some leverage, and try to drag myself up using my good leg. That’s when I see my leg. The lower half of my pants has been cut away. The place where the bone was sticking out has been wrapped in thin gauze. I feel liquid running down to my foot as I move. I hold my hand over my mouth and breathe through my nose. Who was here? Who did this? The fire is burning. The fire I built would have given up the ghost by now. Someone had built it back up, fed it new logs. I wobble where I’m standing. I need light. I need to— “Sit down.” I start, jarred by the voice. I twist my neck around as far as it can go. “Isaac,” I cry out. I start to teeter, but he darts over and catches me. Darts is a strong word, I think. For a minute it looks like he is going to fall with me. I lift my hand up, touch his face. He looks terrible. But he’s alive and walking. He lowers me gently to the ground. “Are you okay?” He shakes his head. “Alive’s not enough for you?” “You shouldn’t be,” I hiss. “I thought you were going to die.” He doesn’t acknowledge me. Instead he walks over to a pile of something I can’t see in the dark. “Look who’s talking,” he says, softly. “Isaac,” I say again. “The table…” All of a sudden I’m feeling hot … weak. The adrenaline, which carried me up the well, up the stairs, up the ladder, has run out. He walks over to me, his arms full. “I know,” he says, dryly. “I saw.” He’s looking at my leg as he sets things down next to me. He’s lining them up, double-checking everything. But every few seconds he looks at my leg again like he doesn’t know how to fix it. “Is that how this happened?” “I jumped down the table,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking. The asthma—” The corners of his mouth pull tight. “You had an asthma attack? While this happened?” I nod. I can only see his face with the dim light of the fire, but it looks as if it’s paled. “Your tibia is fractured. Your leg must have bent at just the right angle when you fell to cause the break.” “When I jumped,” I said. “When you fell.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Upon observing that, he binds them behind my back; nothing remains with which to implore his mercy but my countenance and my tears, for he has harshly ordered me to be silent. I strive to melt him... but in vain, he strikes out savagely at my now unprotected bosom; terrible bruises are immediately writ out in black and blue; blood appears as his battering continues, my suffering wrings tears from me, they fall upon the vestiges left by the monster's rage, and render them, says he, yet a thousand times more interesting... he kisses those marks, he devours them and now and again returns to my mouth, to my eyes whose tears he licks up with lewd delight. Armande takes her place, her hands are tied, she presents breasts of alabaster and the most beautiful roundness; Clement pretends to kiss them, but to bite them is what he wishes.... And then he lays on and that lovely flesh, so white, so plump, is soon nothing more in its butcher's eyes but lacerations and bleeding. stripes. "Wait one moment," says the berserk monk, "I want to flog simultaneously the most beautiful of behinds and the softest of breasts." He leaves me on my knees and, bringing Armande toward me, makes her stand facing me with her legs spread, in such a way that my mouth touches her womb and my breasts are exposed between her thighs and below her behind; by this means the monk has what he wants before him: Armande's buttocks and my titties in close proximity: furiously he beats them both, but my companion, in order to spare me blows which are becoming far more dangerous for me than for her, has the goodness to lower herself and thus shield me by receiving upon her own person the lashes that would inevitably have wounded me. Clement detects the trick and separates us: "She'll gain nothing by that," he fumes, "and if today I have the graciousness to spare that part of her, 'twill only be so as to molest some other at least as delicate." As I rose I saw that all those infamies had not been in vain: the debauchee was in the most brilliant state; and it made him only the more furious; he changes weapons Ä opens a cabinet where several martinets are to be found and draws out one armed with iron tips. I fall to trembling. "There, Therese," says he showing me the martinet, "you'll see how delicious it is to be whipped with this... you'll feel it, you'll feel it, my rascal, but for the instant I prefer to use this other one..." It was composed of small knotted cords, twelve in all; at the end of each was a knot somewhat larger than the others, about the size of a plum pit. "Come there!

• From Between Us

  493). 66 parental aggression: “Based on field studies and the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), parental punishment appears to increase aggressiveness in children, whereas parental warmth and permissiveness appear to reduce it. . . . In addition, harsh and aggressive initiation rites are assumed to instigate a retaliation motive . . . in cultures in which one believes in ‘malevolent’ gods, children are attacked and hurt in their early socialization and they become more aggressive” (Gisela Trommsdorff and Hans-Joachim Kornadt, “Parent-Child Relations in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Handbook of Dynamics in Parent-Child Relations, ed. Leon Kuczynski [London: Sage, 2003], 295). 67 “in defense of hierarchy and religious orthodoxy”: Quote from P. N. Stearns, American Cool, 62. 67 “[T]he whippings the child constantly received”: David Hunt, 1970, quoted in Carol Z. Stearns, “ ‘Lord Help Me Walk Humbly’: Anger and Sadness in England and America, 1570–1750,” in Emotion and Social Change: Toward a New Psychohistory, ed. Carol Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 49. 67 “As the God-fearing qualities”: Stearns, American Cool, 22. 67 “loving” in the first place: Several historical developments may have laid at the root of this changed emphasis on mother love. Historians attribute this change in family relations to a starkly decreased child mortality, to a reduction in family size, and to industrialization (the latter having the effect of refocusing the nuclear family on itself). 68 a reverend wrote in an 1839 issue of The Mother’s Magazine: Quote from Stearns, American Cool, 20; next quote, “Children of a loving mother cannot but desire to conform themselves to such models,” from Stearns, American Cool, 35. 68 Love . . . has arguably not ceded its place since: Love, as we will see in chapter 4, grants a child some autonomy, but it can also be seen as the social glue in a society with declining cohesion and embedding, where families are separated during their daily activities. These speculations, while inspired by Stearns, American Cool, were not articulated by him. 68 Japanese and German mothers responding to their disobedient five-year-olds: Hans-Joachim Kornadt and Yoshiharu Tachibana, “Early Child-Rearing and Social Motives after Nine Years: A Cross-Cultural Longitudinal Study,” in Merging Past, Present, and Future in Cross-Cultural Psychology, ed. Walter J. Lonner et al. (London: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1999), 429–41; Trommsdorff and Kornadt, “Parent-Child Relations in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” 2003; quote in this paragraph appears on Trommsdorff and Kornadt, p. 296. 68 Japanese children were more empathetic: This conclusion is based on Hans-Joachim Kornadt and Yoshiharu Tachibana, “Early Child-Rearing and Social Motives after Nine Years,” 1999 (reprinted as “Early Child-Rearing and Social Motives after Nine Years: A Cross-Cultural Longitudinal Study,” Merging Past, Present, and Future in Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2020, 429– 41), who used helping scenarios to elicit different components of “behavior motivation.” The details of this method are only sparsely documented in the article. 68 amae: T. Doi, “Amae: A Key Concept for Understanding Japanese Personality Structure,” in Japanese Culture: Its Development and Characteristics, ed. R.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  They apparently had hoped to time their deaths in order to ascend to a spacecraft that they believed was following Comet Hale-Bopp. Marshall Applewhite, their leader, a former choirmaster, represented himself as a reincarnated Jesus who was receiving guidance from the television show Star Trek. Although Scientology has persecuted its critics and defectors, it has never engaged in mass murder or suicides; however, the public anxiety surrounding these sensational events added to the rancor and fear that welled up in Germany. Could Scientology also turn violent? There were elements mixed into these various groups that resembled some features of Scientology—magical beliefs and science fiction being the most obvious. Past lives were a common theme. Like Aum Shinrikyo, Scientology has ties to Buddhist notions of enlightenment and Hindu beliefs in karma and reincarnation. Structurally, Aum Shinrikyo was the most similar to Scientology, having both a public membership and a cloistered clergy, like the Sea Org, called renunciates, who carried out directives that the larger organization knew little or nothing about. When the attacks on the subway took place, Aum’s membership in Japan was estimated to be about 10,000, with an additional 30,000 in Russia, and some scattered pockets worldwide, with resources close to $1 billion —figures that compare with some estimates of Scientology today. What separated these groups from Scientology was their orientation toward apocalypse and their yearning for the end-time. That has never been a feature of Scientology. Clearly, however, the lure of totalistic religious movements defies easy categorization. Such groups can arise anywhere and spread like viruses, and it is impossible to know which ones will turn lethal, or why. Both the German government and the Scientologists viewed their struggle through the prism of Germany’s Nazi past. Ursula Caberta, the head of the Hamburg anti-Scientology task force, compared Hubbard’s Introduction to Scientology Ethics to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Hitler was thinking that the Aryans were going to rule the world, the untermenschen. The philosophy of L. Ron Hubbard is the same.” In response to such statements, in January 1997 a group of Hollywood celebrities, agents, lawyers, and movie executives published a full-page open letter to Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the International Herald Tribune. “Hitler made religious intolerance official government policy,” the letter stated. “In the 1930s it was the Jews. Today it is the Scientologists.” The letter compared the boycotts of Cruise, Travolta, and Corea to Nazi book-burnings. The letter was written and paid for by Bertram Fields, then the most powerful lawyer in Hollywood, whose clients included Travolta and Cruise. None of the thirty-four signatories of the document were Scientologists, but many were Jews. Most of them—such as Oliver Stone, Dustin Hoffman, and Goldie Hawn—had worked with the two stars or were friends or clients of Fields. Entertainment Tonight sent the actress Anne Archer, a well-known Scientologist, to Germany on a “fact-finding mission.”

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  [image file=image39.jpg] I lie beside Isaac, still as stone. I can hear the wind whipping the snow around outside. There is no window in Isaac’s room. It’s on the side of the house that faces the cliff and the generator shed that the zookeeper didn’t want us to see. But across the hall is the carousel room, and the noise filters in from there. It sounds like a blizzard. I’m unconcerned. I’m already cold. I’m already hungry. I’m already hopeless. I’m stuck in reverse; always trying not to die. I lift my head and check his breathing. Shallow. He needs fluids. I hold a cup of melted snow to his lips, but it just runs out of his mouth when I try to make him drink. I read the highlighted portion in the book and I do everything it tells me. Though there isn’t much. Cool cloth to the forehead—we are in the arctic. Keep room at cool temperature—we are in the arctic. Cover him with a light blanket, doesn’t matter if it’s made of fur—we are in the arctic. Fluids. That’s the most important thing, and I can’t get him to swallow anything. There is nothing I can do. He starts to mumble, his eyelids flickering from the turbulence of his dream. They are just words that drop off before he can finish them. Tormented moans and gasps intermingling with the chattering of his teeth. I lean my ear close to his lips and try to make out what he’s saying, but as soon as I do, he stops. I am scared. I am really fucking scared. He’s probably calling for his wife. And all he has is me. “Hush,” I tell him. “Save your pluck.” Though I get the feeling I’m really telling me. I fall asleep for a bit. When I wake up my body is pressed against Isaac’s. I went looking for his heat while I slept. I’m too afraid to move. If he’s hot, he’s still alive. He makes a noise in the back of his throat. Relief floods. I get up and light a fire. I try to gather its heat in my palms as I wiggle my fingers toward the flames. Every few minutes I look over my shoulder to check on the rising and falling of his chest. It’s barely a rise and fall. It’s more of a little flutter.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “Is your family safe?” Sonny asked. “Jeannette’s getting the kids in the truck,” George said robotically. He was carrying a television. The older Miller boy was loading the back of a Suburban with silverware and photographs and whatever else the family could manage to save. “We’re gonna lose it all,” George said. “The whole damn thing.” His family had been on this land for a century. “No we’re not,” Sonny said. “We’re ahead of this. Just take care of your folks and we’ll take care of the fire.” Fear was the main problem here, Sonny figured. People couldn’t think straight, even those who’d been trained and done this before. The volunteers were making feckless random attempts to quell the sparks with the gunny sacks. “Francisco!” Sonny called out to his assistant chief. “Make a line!” Francisco Saenz knew what he was supposed to do, all right, and he suddenly snapped to and organized the others in formation, delegating one of them to refresh the dampened gunny sacks. The air was hot and painful to breathe, the grass as dry as newspaper. Sonny barely registered the bolt of lightning that struck the barn, but he did notice that a television news truck had shown up. One of the stations in Midland kept a roving truck in Marfa, and some-how it had gotten notified of the fire and was already here. Why the actual fire department couldn’t send one of those pump and roll engines in the same amount of time was a mystery. The marauding fire leapt onto a grove of dead cedar and rose up in an immense red wall. Some of the volunteers froze in awe. “Don’t look!” Sonny shouted. “Keep your head down! Do your job!” The task was to starve the fire quickly, before the blaze outflanked them. With the beaters and the pump truck now in front of the flames, Sonny organized the remaining volunteers to make a fire break with shovels and hoes, scraping away everything but the dirt. Sparks flew up like rockets. The firefighters could easily be surrounded and trapped by the blaze; it had happened before in this country, a dozen killed at a time. There was no one else who could help them now. Lola was in charge of the bucket brigade. There was practically no pressure in the hose, so they fetched water from the stock tank, in buckets; but the water was no match for the wind, which had lost direction and had begun to whirl, the heat having created its own atmosphere. Everyone was moving fast but the fire was faster, vaulting over the heads of the beaters, who had to re-form and stamp out the fresh blazes before they gained some measure of control. Lola could hear excited voices rising in volume, but she was so intent on filling the buckets that it wasn’t until the scream that she turned around. The barn was ablaze. Flames gushed from the eaves.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The hijackers themselves certainly regarded the 9/11 atrocities as a religious act but one that bore very little resemblance to normative Islam. A document found in Ata’s suitcase outlined a program of prayer and reflection to help them through the ordeal.62 If psychosis is “an inability to see relationships,” this is a deeply psychotic document. The principal imperative of Islamic spirituality is tawhid (“making one”): Muslims truly understand the unity of God only if they integrate all their activities and thoughts. But this document atomizes the mission, dividing it into segments—the “last night,” the journey to the airport, boarding the planes, etc.—so that the unbearable whole is never considered. The terrorists were told to look forward to paradise and back to the time of the Prophet—in fact, to contemplate anything but the atrocity they were committing in the present.63 Living from one moment to another, their minds were to be diverted from the appalling finale. The prayers themselves are jarring. Like all Muslim discourse, the document begins with the bismallah—“In the Name of God, the most Merciful and most Compassionate”—but it initiates an action devoid of either mercy or compassion. It then segues to a remark that most Muslims, I suspect, would find idolatrous: “In the name of God, of myself, and my family.”64 The hijacker is told to cut off any feelings of pity for his fellow passengers or fear for his own life and exert an immense effort to put himself into this abnormal mind-set. He must “resist” these impulses, “tame,” “purify,” and “convince” his soul, “incite” it, and “make it understand.”65 The imitation of Muhammad is central to Islamic piety; by imitating his external behavior, Muslims hope to acquire his interior attitude of total surrender to God. But Ata’s document determinedly steers the terrorists away from their inner world by an almost perverse emphasis on the external. As a result, the devotions seem primitive and superstitious. While packing, they were to whisper Quranic verses into their hands and rub this holiness onto their luggage, box cutters, knives, ID, and passports. Their clothes must fit snugly, like the garments of the Prophet and his companions. When they begin to fight the passengers and crew, as a sign of resolution, each one must “clench his teeth just as the pious forefathers did prior to entering into battle” and “strike in the manner of champions who are not desirous of returning to this world, and shout Allahu akbar! For this shout causes fear in the hearts of the unbelievers.” They must not “become gloomy” but recite Quranic verses while they are fighting, “just as the pious ancestors would compose poetry in the midst of battles to calm their brothers and to cause tranquillity and joy to enter their souls.”66 To imagine that a possibility of serenity and joy would be possible in such circumstances indicates a truly psychotic inability to relate their faith with the reality of what they were about to do.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The rebels, he concluded, were in thrall to the devil, and killing them was an act of mercy, because it would rescue them from this satanic bondage. Because this rebellion threatened the entire social structure, the state suppressed it savagely: as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have died. The crisis was an ominous sign of the instability of early modern states at a time when traditional ideas were being widely questioned. The reformers had called for reliance on scripture alone but would find that the Bible could be a dangerous weapon if it got into the wrong hands. Once people began reading their Bibles for themselves, they soon saw glaring discrepancies between Jesus’s teachings and current ecclesiastical and political practice. The Anabaptists (“Re-baptizers”) were especially disruptive because their literal reading of the gospel led them to condemn such institutions as the Holy Roman Empire, the city council, and the trade guild.42 When some Dutch Anabaptists managed to seize control of Münster in northwestern Germany in 1534, instituting polygamy and banning private property, Catholics and Protestants—for once in firm agreement—saw this as a political threat that could easily be emulated by other towns.43 The following year, the Anabaptists of Münster were massacred by joint Catholic and Protestant forces.44 [image file=image_rsrcDZA.jpg] The Münster catastrophe and the Peasants’ War both affected the way other rulers dealt with religious dissidents. In western Europe, “heresy” had always been a political rather than a purely theological matter and had been suppressed violently because it threatened public order. Very few of the elite, therefore, considered it wrong to prosecute and execute “heretics,” who were killed not so much for what they believed as for what they did or failed to do. The Reformation, however, had introduced an entirely new emphasis on “belief.” Hitherto the Middle English beleven (like the Greek pistis and the Latin credo) had been a practically expressed “commitment” or “loyalty”; now it would increasingly come to mean an intellectual acceptance of a set of doctrinal opinions.45 As the Reformation progressed, it became important to explain the differences between the new and the old religion, as well as between the different Protestant sects—hence the lists of obligatory “beliefs” in the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Lambeth Articles, and the Westminster Confession.46 Catholics would do likewise in their own reformation, formulated by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which created a catechism of propositional, standardized opinions.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Brown’s return, they came thundering up stairs, and seeing me pale, my face bloody, and all the marks of the most thorough dejection, they employed themselves more to comfort and re-inspirit me than in making me the reproaches I was weak enough to fear, I who had so many juster and stronger to retort upon them. Mrs. Brown withdrawn, Phœbe came presently to bed to me, and what with the answers she drew from me, what with her own method of palpably satisfying herself, she soon discovered that I had been more frightened than hurt; upon which I suppose, being herself seized with sleep, and reserving her lectures and instructions till the next morning, she left me, properly speaking, to my unrest; for, later tossing and turning the greatest part of the night, and tormenting myself with the falsest notions and apprehensions of things, I fell, through mere fatigue into a kind of delirious doze, out of which I waked late in the morning, in a violent fever: a circumstance which was extremely critical to reprieve me, at least for a time, from the attacks of a wretch, infinitely more terrible to me than death itself. The interested care that was taken of me during my illness, in order to restore me to a condition of making good the bawd’s engagements, or of enduring further trials, had, however, such an effect on my grateful disposition that I even thought myself obliged to my un-doers for their attention to promote my recovery; and, above all, for the keeping out of my sight of that brutal ravisher, the author of my disorder, on their finding I was too strongly moved at the bare mention of his name. Youth is soon raised, and a few days were sufficient to conquer the fury of my fever: but, what contributed most to my perfect recovery and to my reconciliation with life, was the timely news that Mr. Crofts, who was a merchant of considerable dealings, was arrested at the King’s suit, for nearly forty thousand pounds, on account of his driving a certain contraband trade, and that his affairs were so desperate, that even were it in his inclination, it would not be in his power to renew his designs upon me: for he was instantly thrown into a prison, which it was not likely he would get out of in haste. Mrs. Brown, who had touched his fifty guineas, advanced to so little purpose, and lost all hopes of the remaining hundred, began to look upon my treatment of him with a more favourable eye; and as they had observed my temper to be perfectly tractable and conformable to their views, all the girls that composed her flock were suffered to visit me, and had their cue to dispose me, by their conversation, to a perfect resignation of myself to Mrs.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Were these alternatives not so clear, were they not so few, I would ask for your response; but in your present situation we can dispense with questions and answers. I have you, Therese, and hence you must obey me.... Let us go to my wife's apartment." Having nothing to object to a discourse as precise as this, I followed my master: we traversed a long gallery, as dark, as solitary as the rest of the chateau; a door opens, we enter an antechamber where I recognize the two elderly women who waited upon me during my coma and recovery. They got up and introduced us into a superb apartment where we found the unlucky Countess doing tambour brocade as she reclined upon a chaise longue; she rose when she saw her husband. "Be seated," the Count said to her, "I permit you to listen to me thus. Here at last we have a maid for you, Madame," he continued, "and I trust you will remember what has befallen the others Ä and that you will not try to plunge this one into an identical misfortune." "It would be useless," I said, full eager to be of help to this poor woman and wishing to disguise my designs, "yes, Madame, I dare certify in your presence that it would be to no purpose, you will not speak one word to me I shall not report immediately to his Lordship, and I shall certainly not jeopardize my life in order to serve you." "I will undertake nothing, Mademoiselle, which might force you into that position," said this poor woman who did not yet grasp my motives for speaking in this wise; "rest assured: I solicit nothing but your care." "It will be entirely yours, Madame," I answered, "but beyond that, nothing." And the Count, enchanted with me, squeezed my hand as he whispered: "Nicely done, Therese, your prosperity is guaranteed if you conduct yourself as you say you will." The Count then showed me to my room which adjoined the Countess' and he showed me as well that the entirety of this apartment, closed by stout doors and double grilled at every window, left no hope of escape.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The detectives followed him everywhere, but there was no clue as to where the secret OT levels might be hidden. Miscavige still worried that Broeker was holding vital material back. A few months later, he and church attorneys went to the ranch to persuade the Broekers to hand over whatever confidential materials they might have to the church for safekeeping. While this was going on, a gang of a dozen powerful men assembled by Rathbun surrounded the ranch quarters and hid in the bushes. Inside the ranch house, Miscavige and the lawyers argued that Scientology would never get its tax exemption if the church did not have in its possession its most important documents. Miscavige also threatened Broeker with the prospect of criminal prosecution. Rathbun had discovered that there was $1.8 million of Hubbard’s funds that Broeker couldn’t account for. Broeker appeared to cave in. He let Rathbun load the file cabinets in the ranch house into a truck. Had Broeker not agreed, Rathbun was prepared to signal his goon squad to storm the place and seize everything. It took months to sort through the voluminous files, only to find that there was really nothing there— certainly, nothing that resembled new OT levels. In November 1987, the IRS notified the church that its criminal investigation had concluded. No charges were filed, but that also reduced the leverage Miscavige had over Broeker. A few months later, Miscavige decided that a final operation to retrieve the missing OT levels was in order. This time there would be no subterfuge, no subtle argument. Rathbun brought along a team of armed private investigators and off-duty LA cops as muscle, along with several other church executives. One of them found fifty thousand dollars stashed under the kitchen sink. Miscavige concentrated his attention on Annie. He took her to a separate room and interrogated her as a detective barred the door, preventing her husband from seeing her. Eventually, Annie admitted that Pat kept a storage locker in nearby Paso Robles, and she coughed up the key. Rathbun’s team found more files, but not what they wanted. Rathbun eventually came to the conclusion that there were no further OT levels—no OT IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV—it was all a bluff on Broeker’s part, a lie that the church would have to live with, since the levels had been so publicly announced. 8 In April 1988, Miscavige formally canceled Hubbard’s final directive, Flag Order 3879, that had named the Broekers Loyal Officers. Miscavige declared that Pat Broeker had fabricated the order, although he produced no evidence to substantiate his charge.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  She glanced over her shoulder. Septum Piercing was a few dozen yards behind them, arms pumping, face red. The rest were still spilling down the ravine and into the stream or struggling to reload. Fran stumbled, nearly ate shit, and recovered with a lurching hop she was certain had looked incredibly stupid from behind. Her grazed leg smarted with every step. Her dad’s easy smile. His hand ruffling her hair. Looks rough, bud. You want me to kiss it and make it all infected? She pushed herself harder, eyes on the rocks ahead. She’d been a runner in high school and then in college, before she’d come out. Not a good one, not like Beth had been, but she’d worked hard. It felt like three years of surviving as a prey animal in the ashes of civilization should have made her better at it, but it was hot in the jagged line of light that fell through the gap in the canopy over the stream and the stones of the riverbed turned and shifted under her feet. Her breath rasped in her lungs. The splash-splash-splash of Septum Piercing’s boots in the stream was closer now, catching up to them relentlessly. You know what they do to trannies you stupid bitch. You’ve heard the stories and seen the Polaroids and unless you feel like posing for the mutilated faggot of the month inspirational calendar you’d better dig deep NOW. They flew across a shallow stretch where murky water swirled over waterlogged pine needles. Dust and pollen hung in the hot golden light. Tadpoles fled their oncoming shadows. Fran tried to focus on Beth’s sweat-soaked back, on the taller woman’s easy stride. Her legs felt like melting Popsicles. Her heart thundered in her chest. A single step misplaced. Stones sliding beneath her. She fell sprawling in the stream in the shadows of the overhanging ferns, skinning a hand and a forearm in a doomed attempt to catch herself. Her jaw hit a rock with a sharp, final click that sent a lance of sour pain jabbing upward through her cheek. She tasted blood. “Stay down,” said Beth. Fran, pushing herself up onto her hands and knees, fell still. Beth had her bow out and an arrow nocked. Fran followed the line of the tip to Septum Piercing, who stood frozen ten or fifteen yards upstream with her crossbow half-raised. The other TERFs were out of sight around one of the stream’s bends and behind the branches overhanging the ravine, though Fran could hear the splash of their footsteps. “Drop it,” Beth called out. Septum Piercing dropped her crossbow. She stood there as the current tugged it a few inches from her feet to catch by one arm on some hidden snag. She was breathing hard, fists clenched white-knuckled at her sides. For a second Fran thought Beth might loose.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The UCLA emergency room was alive with residents, interns, and medical students; it was also, rather strangely, very much alive with illness and death. People were moving quickly, with the kind of brisk self-assurance that high intelligence, good training, and demanding circumstances tend to breed; and, despite the unfortunate reason for my having been called down to the ER—one of my patients had been admitted acutely psychotic—I found myself unavoidably caught up in the exhilarating pace and chaotic rhythm. Then came an absolutely blood-curdling scream from one of the examining rooms—a scream of terror and undeniable madness—and I ran down the corridor: past the nurses, past a medical resident dictating notes for a patient’s chart, and past a surgical resident poring over the PDR with a cup of coffee in one hand, a hemostat clamped and dangling from the short sleeve of his green scrub suit, and a stethoscope draped around his neck. I opened the door to the room where the screams had begun, and my heart sank. The first person I saw was the psychiatry resident on call, whom I knew; he smiled sympathetically. Then I saw my patient, strapped down on a gurney, in four-point leather restraints. He was lying spread-eagle on his back, each wrist and ankle bound in a leather cuff, with an additional leather restraining strap across his chest. I felt sick to my stomach. Despite the restraints, I also felt scared. A year before this same patient had held a knife to my throat during a psychotherapy session in my office. I had called the police at that time, and he had been involuntarily committed to one of the locked wards at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. Seventy-two hours later, in the impressively blind wisdom of the American justice system, he had been released back into the community. And to my care. I noted with some irony that the three police officers who were standing by the gurney, two of whom had their hands resting on their guns, evidently thought he represented a “threat to himself or others” even if the judge hadn’t.