When someone says “you have a face made for comedy,” you can either take it the wrong way or take it like a guy with a sense of humor. I’m sure Don Knotts was told that on many occasions and from what I’ve been reading in his obituaries something tells me he was humble enough to laugh it off and perhaps even appreciate it. Don Knotts was a kind of like a .280 hitter with 30 doubles – not the focus of the team, but a solid, reliable performer. I’ll miss his goofy face and good natured roles. I’m sure his son, Mick Jagger, will miss him greatly. Don’t tell me they’re not father-and-son.
While I can’t find a link for it yet (and I admit to not trying excessively hard), the new issue of Rolling Stone has an excellent feature on Scientology, in which the author appears to try as hard as she can to give it a fair journalistic spin, butthe guess here is that one still comes away just shaking their head in near disbelief at some of the bridges these people are selling. But if they believe it and they’re peaceful and strive to do something good, so be it.
Curious thing, though. Midway through the article (which I read as the sun was coming up at about 6am this morning, making it all the more strange), I found myself, for a brief second, identifying with some of the beliefs. For example, I’m not much of a believer in psychiatry and even moreso, I am highly suspicious of the murky waters that are medication and drugs. Of course, I have never really had much of an occasion (see: injury or surgery) to use them so I suspect I’d become a believer real fast should I require them. I think I speak more from the general over-the-counter medicine side of things – I’m of the strong belief that a lot of them don’t do a damn bit of good other than to soothe your mind.
That’s certainly where the comparisons end in regards to Scientology, my friends. For one thing, I am not signing any contract which binds me to a religion for 1 billion years, which is a requirement of being in the faith. So without spoiling the article, I’ll let you seek it out and read even more mind-blowingly ridiculous stuff about the religion. It’s safe to say that I can almost guarantee you that the article is more than worth reading.
That said, it’s not just Scientology I question, either. I have my issues with a lot of mainstream and minority religions. The supposed origins and core beliefs of Scientology and certain arms of the Mormons may cause a lot of people to try their best Don Knotts face and make fun of it, but the truth is that a lot of the world’s most established religions have similarly out-there stories of how the religions were established and what the core foundation of beliefs are. Perhaps Scientology and the Mormons are more ridiculed solely because their launches came here in the modern day, where media gets boiled down to 15 second sound bites and the actions of so very few are blanketed to a collection of so many.
I don’t know, frankly. I do know this: the best religion, in my eyes, is to let people believe what they want to believe and not kill people for not sharing their beliefs (unfortunately, history has not been kind at all to my wishes of the latter). It really shouldn’t matter if they are worshipping Jesus, Allah or Q-Tips, should it? Dead Heads were as much a religion to me as any other.
On a less serious note, when I bought my guitar, it automatically qualified me for a subscription to Rolling Stone, a magazine I stopped reading sometime in 1991 or thereabouts. While I am still rolling my eyes at 95% of what I see in the magazine, I have to admit I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some of the political writing and feature stories. I even bought some songs based on a record review in the last issue, something I was convinced wouldn’t ever happen again. The artist? A San Francisco-based psychedelic-pop artist named Kelley Stoltz. Good stuff.