Ah, California's beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. Visitors think of it as a great vacation spot, the home of free speech, and the "gay mecca" of the world. But, if you live here, it's also the home of cults, sham artists, con men, troubled minds, trouble-makers, and many other kinds of cultural obsessives - mostly people, living in the most idyllic spot in America, who just can't leave well enough - or even something close to perfection - alone. 
Take the story of a man with the very un-powerful name of George Davis - please. Oh - wait - somebody already did: At the age of 62, George Davis was living in Napa Valley's beautiful wine country, teaching the youngsters "witchcraft", and having them sign forms declaring he actually had power over their lives. One young man, Alex Taylor, 26 (seen above) for whatever reason, didn't exactly like this arrangement and shot Davis in the head a couple of times, which now has Taylor on trial for murder. All around, a sad state of affairs.
But shouldn't "a sad state of affairs" be the name given to California, as a whole, these days? The mayors of it's two largest cities have been busted for adultery - one with his best friend's wife. Hollywood openly boasts cults, like Scientology, and tons of followers of Kabbalah and other foolishness, while San Francisco also encourages cultism, allowing for every sort of mystic mayhem to be found on the left coast. ("Mystic Mayhem" - that's mine, kids.) 
So I'm asking - for, like, the billionth time - when is California's media (or anybody's media for that matter) going to stop acting like any of this is normal American behavior? When are the stories on these cases going to stop reading like these are merely "lifestyle choices", like no one is actually being hurt, and start reflecting the deeply disturbed mentalities of the people spreading this stuff in the United States? How many more have to die, how many more lives have to be ruined - especially of those poor souls merely associated with the affected, the "collateral damage" - before journalists start taking this problem seriously, like that journalist who did a recent expose' on the Moonies, or the recent (but scant) coverage of Your Black Muslim Bakery? It's waaay beyond time for a change. No - scratch that - let me rephrase: it's never too late for our credibility-starved mainstream media to get it's mojo back. And Left Coast cultism is a story that's ripe for the honor. You can't make this stuff up. No - scratch that - let me rephrase once more: Yes, someone obviously can.
You may be missing the point - the US was founded by whacked-out new age religious nut jobs - the social ills you describe in california are nothing new.
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In the early 17th century, a fanatical group of extremists sought to transform England into a theocracy governed by a strict interpretation of scripture. These were the Protestant Christians remembered as the Pilgrim Fathers.
Their story begins in the village of Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, the birthplace of William Brewster, the leader of the small band that eventually sailed to America on the Mayflower. William Bradford, an orphan from nearby Austerfield, would become the first governor of the New England colony, and write the only eyewitness account of the Pilgrim Fathers in America, Of Plimoth Plantation. Other members of the group came from local villages.
Though most accounts of Brewster portray him as a worthy who chose to devote his life to God out of profound religious conviction, in fact he turned to God more because of worldly failure than piety.
Brewster had become interested in radical religious reform while studying at Cambridge University in the 1570s. After graduating he got a job as an assistant to one of the most powerful politicians of the day, Sir William Davison. But Davison - who signed the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots - suffered a spectacular fall from grace and Brewster returned to Scrooby a broken man. Like many before and since, he found God. To make a living, he took over his father's job as village postmaster and devoted the rest of his time to creating a New World Order ruled by God's commandment. With him, perhaps inevitably, as its first leader.
His first step was to establish an underground cell - a small group of men who met in secret in the villages around Scrooby. These were the Separatists, who formed the core of the group of pilgrims who were to found a new country over the Atlantic.
They were known as Separatists because they planned to found a church outside the official Church of England. Sounds harmless? It wasn�t. In their fundamentalist theocracy pubs would be closed, maypole dancing and gambling would be banned, men and women would be forced to dress in a sober and godly way and, above all, the Bible would become the foundation of civil society.
Among the draconian measures later introduced by Brewster and his associates at Plymouth Rock was a law making it illegal to live alone. Solitude was seen as a breeding ground for sin and antisocial behaviour. Children and women - always a favourite target of male religious fanatics - were treated with shocking severity. A statute on the books in the Plymouth Colony allowed for execution of minors who did not obey parents.
By demanding religious freedom, and a spiritual life outside the control of the Church of England, the Separatists had lit a match that threatened to ignite English society. If caught, they had their nostrils slit, their right ears cut off, and the letters SS ('stirrer of sedition') branded on their foreheads. At Clink prison in London (an Abu Ghraib of Puritan England) they were chained up, tortured and beaten, as they stood knee-deep in foetid water. Little wonder that Brewster christened his second child Fear.
In 1608 Brewster plus 14 adults and children, including William Bradford and his family, fled to Amsterdam on the first stage of a journey that would end at Plymouth Rock 12 years later. All except four of the 41 'Saints' who sailed on the Mayflower had previously been in Holland.
Much as London has now become a home to the Islamic jihad, 17th-century Amsterdam was a haven for Protestant fundamentalists, including another group of religious firebrands known as the Ancient Brethren.
The Ancient Brethren was the sort of cult that every Elizabethan father feared his daughter would join. They numbered about 300 and lived communally. Like the Taleban, they wore their beards long. Their spiritual leader was Robert Browne, a Cambridge intellectual and radical pastor. Two of the leading members, brothers George and Francis Johnson, had done time in London�s torture cells.
The sect was a minefield of vicious, personal feuds, theological battles, poverty and sexual tensions. Soon Brewster and his group were sucked in. At the centre of the storm was the thing that religious fundamentalists, almost invariably men, fear most: female sexuality. Like the Mormons, Brewster and his group wore underwear designed to prevent sexual arousal. Like most Muslims, they frowned upon the wearing of sexually suggestive clothing by women.
Enter Thomasine Boyes. Little is known of her except that she was the widow of a successful London haberdasher and had then married one of the most radical Puritan theologians of the day. Her sin was a taste for fine clothes, which flew in the face of the strict dress codes - the Puritan version of the all-enveloping burka was a formless black garment that left no bare skin exposed � demanded by the self-appointed, male guardians of sartorial correctness. But Thomasine persisted in wearing fine clothes and even jewellery.
As a result of her 'scandalous' behaviour she became the focus of a vicious (and to us, risible) war of words that became known as the Millinery Wars. She was vilified in pamphlets. Her brother-in-law, George, wrote a vitriolic, 290-page tract denouncing her as a whore and a servant of the Devil. Eventually, the Millinery Wars moved into the Amsterdam courts in the form of a libel suit, much to the bemusement of the tolerant Dutch.
Faced with the increasingly chaotic scene in Amsterdam, the Scrooby congregation, and a number of members of the Ancient Brethren, decamped to Leyden, where they settled on Stincksteeg, or Stink Alley, one of a network of insanitary lanes in the poorest part of the city.
Eventually, they clubbed together to buy a spacious old house that served as both a home and a meeting house. They also built a further 12 houses in the surrounding area and opened an office on Choir Alley, or Vicus Chorali, as it is known in Leyden today. From there, they ran a clandestine printing press to produce religious pamphlets that were 'vented underhand in His Majesty's kingdoms', as the English Ambassador to Holland wrote back to London.
English undercover agents traced a copy of one of the press's pamphlets back to Leyden and it was denounced as an 'atrocious and seditious libel'. The Pilgrim Press was shut down with the help of the Dutch authorities and William Brewster and the rest of the Leyden group went into hiding.
Two years later they made their way across the Atlantic to found a new country. Their attitudes to sex, God and the Bible would become the cultural DNA of the United States. Now, at a time when fanatics are seeking to turn back the wheel of history, when twice as many Americans are said to believe in the Devil as Darwin's theory of evolution, and the most powerful nation on earth has a President described by The New York Times as a 'messianic American Calvinist', it is worth looking over our shoulders at the fanatics who fled these shores to America in 1620.
Man, you had me all the way up to the NYT's assessment of Bush. They're partisan, and "spiritually" pagan - why would I trust anything they say on the subject?
ReplyDeleteI'm asking that as a conservative atheist. The NYT's bias is too obvious for their opinions to be worth anything on these two subjects. Movie reviews, etc., fine but the stronger stuff? Forget it.
Interesting.
ReplyDeleteI have tried to talk before with people who don't "believe" in consensus reality - usually they are born-again Christians who have their own version of history based on the Bible (e.g. the fossil layer is from Noah's flood) or their own version of science that twists or ignores the parts they don't like.
But I guess there can also be atheists who want to have their own made-up versions of history too - now that I think about it, Communist regimes are almost always atheistic, and these have also been known to reject "bourgeouis history" and teach their own version that has little or no relationship to reality.
Well, thats all neither here no there. I know from experience that it isn't possible to have rational discussions with people who reject history and science, etc as "pagan" and so I will bid you good day.
- Charles