The Way the Future Blogs

There are quite a few people in this world whom I dislike intensely. A significant fraction of them are described as religious cult leaders, including the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, top man in the Unification Church. However, it is true that some time ago I accepted his invitation to attend some meetings of a conference he had organized as his guest, and have recently written about it in my blog.

This does not mean that I like Moon. What I like is the chance to see parts of our world and its people that I know little about, and sometimes my invitations come from human beings who represent causes or institutions I despise. (This has, for instance, been true of several recent administrations in this country.) I do try to make clear when I write about such things that I am not endorsing my host, and as a matter of fact I thought I had done so here. (I said early on in the piece that I thought Moon was an evil man, with his relentlessly right-wing Washington newspaper and his brainwashed young people confusing him with God.)

But, on the other hand, we only have one planet to share. I wish that the people I have to share it with did not include Moon, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and several hundred others, but they have as much right to be here as I do. Pity. But if they were whisked away to Mars or Ganymede, who would I have to loathe?

Sun Myung Moon

Back in the late 1970s, I got a call from a scientist friend I had last seen at a meeting on energy storage in what then was still Yugoslavia. (I don’t know if he would like me to mention his name in this connection.) We’d had a good time exploring the place between sessions — Yugoslavia was a beautiful and welcoming country, before they decided to begin killing each other off — and now he was offering me an all-expenses-paid trip to South Korea to attend what he promised would be an interesting conference. That was a country I’d never visited before, and I knew just what to say to that offer.

I said it: “What’s the catch?”

“I thought you would ask that,” he said. “Well, it’s the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s, what he calls a Conference on the Unity of the Sciences.”

That was a pretty big catch. I’m not fond of weird made-up religions in the first place (I’m personally an infrequent Unitarian) and of Moon’s in particular, because I think he is an evil man, with his relentlessly right-wing Washington Times and unpleasant doctrines, not to mention that I had been buttonholed in airports by too many of his zombie saved souls to be impartial.

But my friend assured me that I wouldn’t have to fight off zealots intent on converting me — “There will be sessions about the Unification Church but you won’t have to attend. I don’t.” And there were guaranteed to be some good papers and interesting entertainments.

Well, those things pretty much convinced me anyhow, and when you added in that it was a chance to visit a previously unexperienced foreign country, the pressure to say yes was irresistible. I did say yes, though not without some apprehension..

Which increased after I got a call from the Moonie organization in New York inviting me to visit them in New York City to pick up tickets and program and advance copies of some papers.

Like most New Yorkers (all right, I was living in Red Bank, New Jersey, at the time but New York was where my heart was), I was wary of the Moonie outposts. They had bought outright one of the city’s better hotels, the 43-story New Yorker, and made it their dormitory and nerve center. (Just across the street was the new Madison Square Garden, which Moon chartered to hold his mass marriages, several hundred Moonie couples at a time.)

What had been the lobby was now divided into lanes and divisions like a Motor Vehicle Bureau office. I found the right one; they gave me my documents with a minimum of conversation and no proselytizing at all, and I escaped to Penn Station, which sits right under the Garden.

Continue reading ‘Interesting Meetings I’ve Attended:
Weekends with the Moonies’ »