Fantasia on a Theme by L. Ron Hubbard

                                 
                                                                                                                   Inspector Flying Fox of the Yard!

So the British publisher of the new book on the "Church" of "Scient"ology by the much-lauded Lawrence "Wright of The New Yorker!" has canceled its plans to publish the book (tip: Alan Jacobs), disclaiming any proximate cause therein in the paper-ruffling racket directed stateside at Wright's ears by one or another of the billable counselors tied to said "Church", its heirs, assigns, marks and/or gulls among divers marquee thespians with insider access to the works and ways upon our collective psyche set on course by our intergalactic ancestors  present at, or out getting refreshments during the intermission just after, the Big Bang.

I’d like to learn the art of cartooning, the better to publish a drawing of chef L. Ron Hubbard baking a Danish for his hotel’s guests, a lecherous Mohammed and a German-Jew Holocaust denier, after not noticing the Koran that fell onto the tray, as in the background a goose-stepping Basil Fawlty with the index finger of one hand miming a Hitler moustache smacks his trisexual Canadian First Nations waiter Oprah with a golliwog doll with the other hand, with said drawing-within-a-drawing in turn on the parlour wall of the first couple married after the Supreme Court made same-sex “marriage” between plaintiffs and defendants compulsory, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the latter reprising their Alphonse-and-Gaston turn from the famous David Low cartoon, with, of course, Poland replaced in the mind’s eye of the viewer by America, with Stalin’s caption “If only we had been more patient” countered by Hitler’s “No offense”.

In the mid-1960s, twenty years before I rented a room from her, my Wilton, Connecticut landlady, a former journo for FORTUNE and onetime sister-in-law to Dwight Macdonald (and all-times granddaughter to John Bates Clark, America's leading turn-of-the-C20 professor of economics), and her husband, the head editorialist at LIFE, finding two of their children in the clutch of the Scientologists, sent on a rescue mission their other two, who promptly joined the Hubbardine faithful in turn, with their family saga thus, which involved the enlistment of one of the sons circling Africa aboard ship in L. Ron’s private navy to the accompaniment of his girlfriend’s seaside suicide-by-short-barreled-Mauser-machine-pistol, a longtime staple of the apostate literature both print and Interwebbed – am I right, The Google?

Though Eunice never, over our many whiskey-and-Winston afternoons - to adapt John Entwistle, I always joined her when she drank and we got on just fine - over the six months prior to her star-studded Dixieland-enhanced memorial, mentioned the episode, it does go some way, along with the play-out of the 57 varieties of Marxist fratricide she attended after her sororal baptism at (Mary) McCarthy-era Vassar, toward explaining her regular warning me off the hazards of any and all “isms”.