How Soon We Forget (We're Forgetful)

"These types of events, wrapped in quasi-spiritual trappings like ersatz Native American and Asian philosophies, are not really new. Get rich quick schemes have always fascinated many in Western cultures, and in a shallow-minded, materialistic, capitalistic culture like ours facilitators like James Ray are like Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie 'Wall Street.' There’s never been a shortage of suckers, people who like the quick fix and cut corners to get where they’re going, as PT Barnum noted. Cheap and fast, that’s how we like things, intrinsic or extrinsic.

Go back to the whacky film 10 years before that, when in 1977 'Semi-Tough' was released. A thinly-veiled send-up of Werner Erhard and EST, locking people voluntarily in a room until they 'Get it,' some urinating on themselves due to being prohibited from even a bathroom break, audiences laughed at the absurdity.

Inexplicably, that lesson didn’t sink in, for many who watched it howling are now subsequently paid customers for successors like Rajneesh, Mahara Ji, L. Ron Hubbard, Dr. Phil, Wayne Dyer, one might even add the Dalai Lama and Eckhart Tolle, the list goes on and on. Buy their books and tapes, attend their lectures, become the futuristic Nietzschean ideal, the 'übermensch.'"

-- Roger Butow, taking the issues surrounding the James Arthur Ray case from NewAge to Nazi in only three paragraphs - which has to be a record of some kind: I may have beat him somewhere on this blog, but I don't know where - and not only that, but Butow's writing from, appropriately and ironically, Salem News.com.