Quack Quack

Sometimes, I come a little late to the talk-of-the-town, and, I admit, I'm always a little skeptical of the media mob's latest target. Lately, it seems to be Tom Cruise and Scientology, which I've written before about one experience in my early 20's when I was beckoned off the street in New York (I think I was in Chelsea shopping) in order to take their infamous personality test. Always open to methods that might help me understand the complex machine you might call me, I took the test, but half-way through realized how tiring was the whole process of answering tedious psychological questions, so I stopped before I finished, met a test-taker who aggressively assured me that stopping the test was not allowed (I think I snickered, amused that he thought I had entered a universe where he was the boss), and I assured him that I allow myself to stop taking tests all the time. (I thought he'd laugh with me.) He didn't.

So it is with a tad bit of interest that I watched Cruise's infamous video where he spits and spatters vaguely about saving the world. I was not ready to harnass Cruise with the laurels of a quack, but it's hard not to after watching his performance. But, I agree with scientologists that electric-shock therapy is barbaric and that psychiatrists often over-medicate troubled people, and I'm always supportive of critically analyzing institutions of power especially ones that are so intricately connected to more rampant and troublesome forms of psychological influence like American corporations' departments of public relations and advertising and politicians use of the same forms of influence to drum up fear in order to compel one nation to attack another. So, I'm enjoying the rabble-rousing between the camps. Only, Cruise doesn't seem to have connected the dots between Scientology and pseudo science.

First, you should watch Craig Ferguson lampooning Cruise before you look at Cruise's interview. It makes it much more funny. Here that is:


If you haven't seen the original, here it is:



Tom Cruise is fair game these days. What is that smell? Vulnerability? We don't like talking about beliefs in Amerika:



Also worth seeing is Cooper Anderson interviewing another defender of Scientology. In this footage you can watch the Scientology strategy of "Attack Do Not Defend" since the interviewee avoids answering questions directly and will not admit that benign forms of therapy such as talk-therapy are outside of the realms of chemical-experiments and lobotomies that Scientologists seem so adamantly against. But there was no getting this guy to admit that anything connected to psychology, psychotherapy or psychiatry is benign. Certainly, it needs to be repeated that psychiatry is the ONLY branch that allows doctors to prescribe medication. This huge fact seems lost on both Cruise and Cooper's interviewee.

P.S. I want to smell like Cooper, too. (It's a gawker.com joke, I guess.)