So I can strongly see the cult argument
Ginger I recall you once saying your dad eventually came to see Straight and the seed differently to your mum. What do you think turned him around? afterall you were not the only kid in your family to go through this.
Well, my dad was not so fully bought in as my mom was. And that's what makes me think of the ammunition for divorce angle. My conversation with my sil reminded me of that. The program stoked and stroked my mom's martyrdom wrt my dad. This was clear to me about the whole thing, even as a little kid. For a long time, he was banned from the house whenever my older brothers were home. He always had been ambivalent. He was scared shitless that pot smoking would lead to a whole generation of Manson family murders and such. But he also was skeptical of Art Barker, to whom he referred quite correctly as a "professional alcoholic" just like grandpa--his father in law. But then he also went so far as to take time out of his protest walk from Florida to DC to try and have me falsely arrested to 'save my life'.
I think distance had a lot to do with his coming around. My mom had actually talked him into remarrying her on the pretense that the divorce (which happened when I had been no older than 5 or 6) was the reason for my misbehavior. That lasted almost a month after I was out of the house. Without me to pick on she set right to work getting him a little more straight. That ended with a coffee cup lodged in the drywall of the kitchen and him speeding across state back to Pompano with a light bag and full head of steam. LOL I think she kept it there for a couple of months just to illustrate her suffering.
I beat him to Pompano and to our old family friend, who was his lover for the last 20 years or so of his life, by a couple of weeks. I think he just couldn't make the Program doom-saying jive with what he was seeing. I had my problems, no doubt. I was probably as tweaky and strange as any other recent program vet. But I worked, paid my bills, never had any serious legal trouble or in any way acted like the fictional latent junkie he had been promised I would be if I ever left the program.
My mother, on the other hand, had taken to it like a fish to water. She kept her house open as a program "foster home" (later to be called host homes due to the existance of a legal term of art to go with the term "foster home") and kept turning up at open meetings even after they quit sending her kids. I heard years later from a friend who had been on staff at the time that they actually had a staff meeting and delegated some poor shmoe to take her aside and tell her to just go away cause it was too weird how she kept hanging around.
After that, she took to supporting some charity to help pregnant teenagers. I thought that was a pretty good thing at the time, but I hadn't heard of the Bethel type teen 'maternity homes'. I don't know what happened to all that, but in later years she gave over the last of her cash (us kids' inheritence, in other words) to the Billy Graham Crusade. I think she was just beggin' ta crawl, as they say. She loved it.
I think that well explains characters like the Who. Sure, he's making money. But I bet he fully believes that he's investing himself body mind and soul in the most wholesome, good and worthwhile endevour ever imagined. Cults are like that.
