NewAge Makes Sense Of Google's Cesar Chavez Doodle

I can't tell if I should stop blogging or reading, because they're definitely hurting my worldview. For example, check out this bit from a Victor Davis Hanson column I was reading:

I opened my Easter Sunday Google browser and did not find a Christian icon on the page, but instead a (badly done) romantic rendition of a youthful Cesar Chavez, apparently our age’s version of a politically correct divinity. 

Yet I wondered whether the midlevel Googilites who post these politically hip images knew all that much about Chavez. I grant in this age that they saw no reason to emphasize Christianity on its most holy day.

Alright, so we've got Google - which is about as NewAge as you can get - slighting Christianity in typical NewAge fashion. So far so good - nothing new or revealing. It's Victor Davis Hanson as Glenn Reynolds. But then Hanson adds this:

Most hagiographies ignore Chavez’s eerie alliance with the unhinged Synanon bunch. In these parts, they had opened a foothill retreat of some sort above Woodlake, not far from here. (I visited the ramshackle Badger enclave once with my mother [I suppose as her informal "security,"], who was invited as a superior court judge to be introduced to their new anti-drug program in their hopes that county officials might save millions of dollars by sentencing supposedly non-violent heroin addicts to Synanon recovery treatments. Needless to say, she smiled, met the creepy  “group,” looked around the place, and we left rather quickly, and that was that.) 

I don’t think that the Google headliners remember that Charles Dederich (of rattlesnake in the mailbox and “Don’t mess with us. You can get killed, dead” fame) was a sort of model for Chavez, who tried to introduce the wacko-bird Synanon Game to his own UFW hierarchy.

 Wha-wha-what? I've been over this before (and been told I was off-base) but Synanon was your average NewAge cult:

The Synanon organization, initially a drug rehabilitation program, was founded by Charles E. "Chuck" Dederich, Sr., (1913–1997) in 1958, in Santa Monica, California, United States. By the early 1960s, Synanon had also become an alternative community, attracting people with its emphasis on living a self-examined life, as aided by group truth-telling sessions that came to be known as the "Synanon Game". Synanon ultimately became the Church of Synanon in the 1970s, and disbanded permanently in 1989 due to many alleged criminal activities, including attempted murder, and civil legal problems, including Federal tax-evasion problems with the Internal Revenue Service.

Note the jargon - "alternative" - and the results. Another great clue is this:

Charles Dederich, a reformed alcoholic and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), was said to be an admired speaker at A.A. meetings.

Alcoholics Anonymous - more cult crap. Or how about this:

Control over members occurred through the "Game". The "Game" could have been considered to be a therapeutic tool, likened to a form of group therapy; or else to a form of a "social control", in which members humiliated one another and encouraged the exposure of one another's innermost weaknesses, or maybe both of these.[4] Beginning in the mid-1970s, women in Synanon were required to shave their heads, and married couples were made to break up and take new partners. Men were given forced vasectomies, and a few pregnant women were forced to have abortions.

And there goes Cesar Chavez. (Words you will never read on Instapundit or Althouse:) So what have we learned (about this world we live in today)?

 

We've learned that, on Easter, a famous and powerful NewAge cult (Google) promoted a famous and powerful NewAge cultist to the world (Chavez) who served in a famous and powerful NewAge cult (Synanon) under a almost-unknown NewAge cult leader (Dederich) and they committed a rash of horrible NewAge cult crimes that hardly anyone talks about. And - in the usual cult fashion - they did it on Easter to piss off their enemies, continue their religious war, and manipulate the public. That's what we've learned. Ugly shit, happening today, right under our noses - and directed at us. Now tell me, if I really want to carry on at all:

 

Should stop blogging or reading?