As he recounts, the BBC’s John Sweeney was driven very temporarily insane by L. Ron Hubbard’s theocrats:

While making our BBC Panorama film “Scientology and Me” I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a “bigot” by star Scientologists and been chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers.

Back in Britain strangers have called on my neighbours, my mother-in-law’s house and someone spied on my wedding and fled the moment he was challenged.

I have met mothers who say they have suffered Scientology “disconnects” - meaning that their children have cut them completely out of their life so that they can spend more time with an organisation which a judge in 1984 characterised as “corrupt, sinister and dangerous”.

Scientology has two faces - nice and smiley, and sinister and dark. If you do not believe me, go and see their exhibition in Los Angeles, Psychiatry: Industry of Death. You enter through a door that is a mock-up of a torture chamber.

In its business section last Sunday, the New York Times lavished a great deal of attention on the crapshoot that is the book publishing business (though writer Shira Boss was way less than flattering about the business acumen of publishing’s many brilliant practitioners, as Michael Cader pointed out in yesterday’s Publishers Lunch [registration required]):

You’ve probably already seen the latest installment in the NYT’s standing program to demonstrate to their readers that book publishers are idiots and formed plenty of your own opinions, but I thought this little note said it best:”The editor of the Sunday Business section is under contract to Random House and did not edit this article.”And it shows. Good idea for freelance writers: Pitch expose to NYT asserting opposite thesis, that publishers are interrogating readers to find out “what they want” in their books and forcing authors to write to market. I guarantee you’ll make Page 1 instead of just the business section.

That’s kinda inside baseball, though.

Now comes David Blum to examine (forlornly) why a particular novel that he loved, Then We Came to the End (which I happened to mention here), didn’t become a bestseller and didn’t make a mark on the culture.

It’s hardly fair to label “Then We Came to the End” a failure. The book’s publisher, Little Brown, says it has shipped 50,000 copies. It’s in its fourth printing, and still selling well. That’s a goal rarely achieved by any writer, let alone a debut novelist. Its smart yet realistic editor, Reagan Arthur, accurately describes “Then We Came to the End” as “slow-developing but genuine success.” The book has already returned a profit for its publisher, has been optioned by HBO Films (with Mr. Ferris attached to write the script), and has come closer than most to hitting that ever-shrinking bull’s eye of best-sellerdom.

But no one could possibly call the novel a national sensation. And its mid-range sales figures seem especially odd in light of the industry’s recent hand-wringing over the elimination of book-review sections in newspapers, where Mr. Ferris’s book did dominate. Two weeks ago, picketers actually marched in front of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to protest the removal of Teresa Weaver, the paper’s book review editor. Others have howled about publications being gforced to move their book coverage to the Web. The Chicago Tribune’s book review section, once a part of the paper’s high-circulation Sunday paper, has been relegated to the tiny Saturday edition. No less a novelist than Richard Ford decried the shift as “another erosive loss to the public’s cultural discourse.”

I’ll concede the point that book review sections don’t deserve to be whacked. But why doesn’t discourse result in sales? If Mr. Ford is right, then shouldn’t smart, alert readers have been lining up to buy the Ferris novel? Something doesn’t compute.

Indeed, something doesn’t compute. Blum goes on to make some good arguments—namely, that review attention isn’t enough to move copies of a book and that a title no one can remember is a definite black mark against a book. (Rules for Old Men Waiting, a marvelous novel by Peter Pouncey published a couple of years ago, suffered the same fate as Then We Came to the End: it did well, but not as well as it should have. It had bad title for the business climate in which it was published. Oh well.).

Sarah at GalleyCat begs to differ with Blum; Ferris’s book made the extended list, she points out.

First is Blum’s question as to why the book “did not become a New York Times bestseller”: Sure, it didn’t appear on the print list, but came very close - hitting #19 on the April 18th extended list. …

[N]o wonder [the book's editor] Reagan Arthur “got depressed” at Blum’s questioning when the book did fairly well and turned a profit - and more importantly, probably earned out long before publication because buying world rights yielded foreign sales fruit.

If you know what the “extended list” is, you’re inside baseball. If you think making #19 on the extended list is a good result for a book that was featured on the cover of the New York Times book review, you are definitely not deep enough inside baseball. You’re just a bitchy David Blum hater, because he “so happlessly ran the Village Voice into the ground.” (Right. In the half dozen or so months that he was there.)

David Blum’s point is that even the fiction that is highly touted by the alleged know-nothings of the publishing industry (see Michael Cader’s remarks above) and pumped by the New York Times Book Review is not making a dent in the cultural life of America. It’s not getting traction.

That, dear GalleyCat, is the awful truth for those of us who love books. Deal with it.

If there’s anything the MSM likes more than an abduction ***

[[*** unless the story has to do with three U.S. soldiers taken hostage by al Qaeda or one BBC correspondent kidnapped by al Qaeda-affiliated Palestinian thugs]]

it’s a dog fight.

(photo from AP: GOP presidential candidates during the first debate)

And tonight we’ll be getting Round Two:

 As the Republican presidential candidates arrive in Columbia, S.C., for a primary debate to be broadcast on FOX News, polls in the First-in-the-South presidential primary state show Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani in a dog fight for first place.

The latest survey by respected Republican pollster Whit Ayers, who is unaligned with any campaign, shows McCain at 25 percent, leading Giuliani by 5 points. The poll has a 4.4 percent margin of error. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is in fifth place at 8 percent and behind two men — former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — who aren’t even in the race.

If you’d asked me ten years ago what I’d think about dozens of candidates for each of the two parties running for office and campaigning hard for almost two years, I would have laughed in your face. I would have derided it as a circus, totally undignified, and utterly beneath contempt—sorta the way the outraged leftosphere thinks about politics and the MSM now. (Yes, I was still that idealistic ten years ago. Hard to believe, I know.)

Come 2007, however, and I am older and wiser. Now, to the horror of my friends, colleagues, family, and cohort, I applaud and endorse the MSM’s horserace (or dog fight) coverage. +++ Pace Jon Stewart, this stuff is not hurting America. It grabs the attention of Americans everywhere, and thus works to America’s advantage as the men (and one woman) vying for the right to be our president and commander in chief are roasted and grilled by the “journalists” of the MSM, only to be chewed up and spit out by the talking heads and the blogging heads. For better or for worse, it’s the only national conversation we’re having about politics. And having a national conversation—any kind of national conversation—about politics is a good thing, to quote another Stewart, so here’s to infotainment. It rules!

By the way: This horserace stuff is also reaching some of the members of the hardest-to-reach demographic—young males. How do I know? Anecdotal evidence, dear Watson. I am acquainted with a bunch of young males in the demo who are interested in social justice and all that but are not at all political, and they love the debates. They enjoy horserace-type coverage of politics. It engages their interest—(what a concept! It was, of course, JFK Jr.’s concept for his magazine George, in which he was trying to use Hollywood stars and other celebrities to focus the attention of his apolitical cohort on the greatest show on earth [politics]. Young Kennedy was way ahead of the curve—ten years too early. And then he died before he could be proved right. Oh well.)

———

+++ It is such a dog fight, that Fox refuses to allow CSPAN to carry the debate.