Great Nebraskans: L. Ron Hubbard
All your mind are belong to us.
(Born March 13, 1911 in Tilden, Neb.) We can be persuasive people, us Nebraska folk. We can persuade you to go to war under suspect pretenses, we can persuade you to feel empathy for characters of suspect morality and we can persuade you to follow a religion based on, well, what the hell do Scientologists believe anyway? Hold on, let Rufus check Google…
“Scientology is further defined as the study and handling of the spirit in relationship to itself, universes and other life.” OK, now that clears up everything.
The founder of the Scientology religion, L. Ron Hubbard, was born in Tilden in 1911. For a town of about 1,000 people, Tilden can churn them out. The town was also the birthplace of baseball hall of famer Richie Ashburn (whoa wait, 2 Great Nebraskans in one article? Pace yourself, Junior).
Tilden practically throws Ashburn in your face on its website, but doesn’t mention its most famous son even once. That’s rough. You ain’t gotta stop believing in Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior to put the man’s name on your website, Tilden. Just because his parents skipped town when he was an infant doesn’t mean he ain’t of your blood! You’d almost think that the town thought it was the root of the antichrist or somethin’…
Hubbard was truly a remarkable man. This Nebraskan was single-handedly able to do something that every politician in the country has been trying to do since the 1950s – control the minds of Hollywood. But he nailed it, and his legacy continues to this day.
Not everyone, surprisingly enough, has accepted this Nebraskan’s style of down-home religion. The German government (hey, they even admit they did some bad things in the ’30s and ’40s, Tilden) ain’t too fond of Scientology, calling it a cult. The nerve.
In fact, they weren’t going to let Tom Cruise, a follower of a Nebraskan, shoot some of his movie Valkyrie at military sites in the country because they were concerned that it would help Scientology profit – never mind the fact that the movie’s subject, the attempted assassination of Hitler, is pretty much the one event of WWII that Germans can point to as “see, we didn’t want to do it.” The Germans eventually did relent and let him shoot the movie there, yet Tilden still did not put Hubbard’s name on its website.
And the Germans, they had a REAL reason to hold a grudge against Hubbard. In 1940, Hubbard tried to out a brother of a female Gestapo officer who was a hotel steward in New York. All he did to you, Tilden, was make you relatively famous for more than your … ah … um…weather?
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