Watch the decline from a hazy distance

How The West Was Won And Where It Got Us – R.E.M.

(from the strangely underrated New Adventures in Hi-Fi, which is probably my second-favorite R.E.M. album)

Okay, so I’ll admit I got bored and stopped partway through, but this New Yorker piece on Scientology left me pretty underwhelmed.  I’ve seen a lot of people linking to it as if it were the definitive piece proving the craziness of Scientology.

I don’t see it.

I mean, sure, they’re crazy.  But they don’t seem all that far beyond the run-of-the-mill craziness of religion in general.  You have to accept a bunch of thing that seem irrational, but having faith is kind of the name of the game.  And they definitely have a bit of the feel of an insular group, unaware of social trends and set in their retrograde ways.  What else is new?

Paul Haggis got a lot out of them, and they got a lot of out him.  He changed his mind and became an apostate. So it goes:

The story is a sad one, told many times.
The story of my life in trying times.
Just add water, stir in lime.
How the west was won and where it got us.

And frankly, Haggis was at least able to create Due South while being a Scientologist, so it can’t be all bad.

Due South Theme