Weird Tract Number 88: L Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition Magazine and Exhibition Ticket (both circa 2000)

Troy Davis writes: 

I lived in Los Angeles the first decade of the 21st century. LA wasn’t my lady but there were a lot of great things about being an Angeleno. Mocking Scientology was one of them. All around town, Dianetics zombies set up card tables and offered “personality tests” and sometimes a chance to experience the E-meter’s mystical powers. This led to a steady stream of mockery from wags like me. A few of my choice digs:

• Could you get John Travolta to give me a part in one of his movies?
• I think I have a thetan cluster on my foot--or maybe it’s a really ginormous and smelly corn. If I took my shoe off, could you give me a diagnosis?
• I spoke to Xenu and he told me I was already Clear.
• (To a table with an E-meter) Ain’t nobody gonna hook me up to no jumper cables!

It was after I left LA that I created the Scientology-mocking comic book Cock-Tale: A Modern Tijuana Bible (read it here). 

The Church of Scientology has extensive real estate holdings in Los Angeles from their ill-gotten loot. In Hollywood, it spent lavishly on a museum, The L Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition, dedicated to a mythical ideal life of the deranged cult’s founder. The Church bought the historic 12-story former Guaranty Building on Hollywood and Vine. Like many pre-FDIC bank buildings, the first floor where the bank was located is an example of neo-classical architecture which gave then-depositors the feeling of substance, conservatism, and solvency. 

When I first got to LA, I took a tour (a friend told me to get baked first but doing it straight was enough of a trip). The lobby had a fountain with a sculpture of Hubbard. They wouldn’t let me take my camcorder in the exhibit. The museum was a series of impressive exhibits giving a whitewashed biographical portrayal of the Hubbard's life and career. There is a small movie theater in what used to be the bank’s vault that played a short film about the publishing of Hubbard's book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. The tour ended with walls of plaques Hubbard received from various cities and groups. It was a spectacle. 

After the tour, the Scientology people tried to sell me some overpriced Scientology tapes and books. I gave them my address and a few days later received the magazine. 

Here is the ticket to the exhibition.

 

The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.

For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes.  The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts

The index of tracts for the museum's website is here. 

Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.

Weird Tract Number 87: "The Mini-Skirt Speaks" by Don W. Hillis (Pilgrim Tract Society)

Troy Davis nwrites:

I haven't counted the number of tracts in the museum's collection, but it's in the tens of thousands. Most of them have the standard anodyne accept-Jeebus message; only about five percent of them are truly demented. That's okay because one percent of tens of thousands is still a buttload of material.

It's also good to keep in mind that the museum is actively seeking out new bizarre tracts. There are plenty of tracts I've heard about or seen on the Internet that the museum doesn't have so there are there is absolutely no fear that this website will ever run out of material.

Recently the museum received a treasure trove of demented tracts, some of which are long sought-after treasures. I received the sampler from the Pilgrim Tract Society and it is good stuff. The crown jewel of Pilgrim's sampler is "The Mini-Skirt Speaks." I had seen the cover of this tract on the Internet and thought it might be a parody. Efforts to find the tract had been elusive until now.

This, like many of Pilgrim's tracts, is a reprint of another company's tract from decades ago. This tract originally came out probably around 1970.  This mini-bio is the most I could find on Hillis' life; he served as a missionary in India from 1937 to 1953 then went on to author many books from the fifties through the eighties. In 1959, he wrote a 48-page Catholic-baiting booklet "If America Elects a Catholic President," in anticipation of JFK expected 1960 candidacy; Hillis dedicated it to "the thousands of Christians who have suffered for Jesus' sake at the hands of Romanism."

I've decided to reprint the entire tract because of its so-bad-it's-good quality from Hillis' Neanderthal view on rape and sexual desire as well as its ham-handed narrative style. I haven't fixed my scanner yet so apologies for the quality of the pics.

The Museum of Weird and Demented Religious Tracts is a project of Les Zazous Postmodern Art Galley of Bellaire, Ohio. Read the Welcome Statement of The Museum here.

For more on the gallery, check out the web site here and the gallery's Twitter handle is @ZazousLes.  The Twitter handle for the museum is @WeirdTracts

The index of tracts for the museum's website is here. 

Contributions of weird tracts to the museum can be made by mail: send your weird tracts to Les Zazous Postmodern Art Gallery 3475 Guernsey Street, Bellaire, Ohio 43906.