#I printed off radio play transcripts to have people dress up and act out these silly myserties

[redrobin-detective]

I would like to preface about the Sherlock Holmes club, it existed before I arrived. It was made by 3 senior girls who wanted an excuse to get together and watch BBC Sherlock. I still remember running up to the table during the club meet and greet and talking a mile a minute about the stories and they’re like “yeah that’s cool but we mostly talk the BBC show”. I loved the club that first year, we watched BBC Shelock and some of the classic Granada stories, even Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century to compare and contrast. 

When they graduated the next year and I was made president (IE... literally there was no one else in the club to do us, it was just us 4) I’m the one who revamped it and made it in a general mystery appreciation club and put so much mental energy, time and energy into creating a cohesive mystery experience so people could learn/enjoy classic detective stories. I made/compiled fun activities, I paid for and hosted a mystery dinner every year, I found easy to read stories and tried to encourage discussion, rented out the local theater to show movies.... and the only people who showed up were my friends who didn’t often want to enage.

I put my heart and fucking soul into the club and no one reciprocated the tiniest amount except when I got tired and caved and just started doing fandom stuff. Its been 5 years and that still stings.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Lawmakers welcome a guy to Congress – and the messiah shows up

Who Is Rev. Moon? ‘Returning Lord,’ ‘Messiah,’ Publisher of the Washington Times

John Gorenfeld – PoliPoint Press

The following is an adapted excerpt from John Gorenfeld’s “Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created the Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built an American Kingdom” (Polipoint Press, 2008).

The video is from a 1997 Washington Times party where Moon said he founded the newspaper to save the world. In it, he also demands that his employees rid the world of “free sex,” meaning sexual intercourse beyond the purifying influence of his mass weddings.

One chilly Tuesday evening, strange things were afoot on Capitol Hill. The U.S. Senate was hosting a ceremony at the request of a wealthy, elderly newspaper publisher who wanted official recognition as a majestic, divine visitor to Washington. The Dirksen Senate Office Building made for an unlikely temple: a formidable seven-story block of white marble, looming on a street corner diagonally across from the Capitol Dome, its marble pediment is inscribed, “THE SENATE IS THE LIVING SYMBOL OF OUR UNION OF STATES.”

On March 23, 2004, U.S. lawmakers were filmed here in a conference room, paying tribute to the enigmatic Reverend Sun Myung Moon, then eighty-four, and his wife, Hak Ja, sixty-four.

As the cameras rolled, two congressmen presented the Koreans with matching royal costumes. Wearing the burgundy robes and shining crowns, which crested into jagged golden pinnacles, the married couple smiled and waved for the cameras.

Who was this self-proclaimed monarch? In the 1970s, the evening news had presented Moon, the ranting, middle-aged business tycoon who wore flowing robes on special occasions, as Korea’s answer to L. Ron Hubbard, someone for college students to avoid, luring thousands of young Americans into a cult in which they sold carnations on the street and married spouses he chose for them. But the media had moved on to other nightmares, leaving Moon, forgotten, to reinvent himself. Now time had wizened him into an elderly patriarch, wearing an ashen face for his coronation. An orange Senate VIP name tag remained pinned to his gray suit, peeking out from between rows of curly gold filigree, as he stood on stage at the head of a red carpet.

The King of Peace, the Lord of the Fourth Israel, the Messiah, they called him now – and the publisher of the Washington Times. Though over a dozen congressmen attended his pageant, no one spoke a word of it to the press, not at first. By the time the secret was out, and ABC News was broadcasting the strange sights, it was three months later – summertime – and school was coming soon to the States. Soon grand parade marshals would drive teen queens and their bouquets around football fields, and the helmets of varsity teams would crash through banners. And homecoming would not be so different, insisted the two hapless congressmen, from the Reverend Moon’s rites, which had become a scandal.

“People crown kings and queens at homecoming parades all the time,” the liberal Chicago representative Danny Davis (D-IL) said.

“I remember the king and queen thing,” said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD). “But we have the king and queen of the prom, the king and queen of 4-H, the Mardi Gras and all sorts of other things. I had no idea what he was king of.”

Yes, they admitted, it was them on camera, walking in the procession with slow, worshipful steps, bowing to the stage where the Moons stood. Those were Davis’s hands, wearing white gloves to avoid defiling the embroidered pillow he carried, a crown bobbing on it, to be lain on the brow of Mrs. Moon; that was Bartlett carrying the burgundy cape for Mr. Moon’s shoulders. Neither seemed embarrassed.

The “throne room” itself belonged to the U.S. Senate, whose Rules Committee, under Republican senator Trent Lott (R-MS), had the final say in who booked rooms and whether visitors could be anointed kings in them. And a senator had to sign off on that. The name of the senator, said one of the evening’s hosts, the defrocked Catholic priest George Stallings, was “shrouded in mystery.”

“There are moments that best play straight,” CNN anchor Aaron Brown said after I discovered the pageant. “So here goes. Lawmakers welcome a guy to Congress – and the messiah shows up.”

The coronation had been disguised as a Washington awards dinner, sponsored by a conservative, pro-war senator who had modestly kept his name out of the picture. The party began normally enough, serving portions of chicken and fish from the buffet and windy politicians’ speeches from the podium. But through a bait and switch – and a strange internal logic – room G-50 of the Senate office building, all marble and eagle seals, changed during the course of the evening into a fantasy throne room, complete with long red carpet, for the stern monarch of the Washington Times, the influential conservative newspaper that warns of immigrants and threats to Christmas – and who also controls United Press International (UPI), the formerly great news agency.

Moon walked from the chilly evening into the marble building dressed in a suit with bow tie and rose corsage. When he got up to deliver his keynote address, it was in a gravelly northern dialect of Korean, a farmer’s accent. Gripping the podium, he gruffly admonished the crowd, which included members of Congress, to accept him as “God’s ambassador, sent to earth with His full authority.”

With a printed copy of the speech before them – headlined Declaring the Era of the Peace Kingdom – guests listened to an English translation in radio earpieces. “The time has come for you to open your hearts,” Moon said, “and receive the secrets that Heaven is disclosing in this age through me.” To prove his credentials, he spoke of testimonials on his behalf – from the lips of the dead, with whom he claimed the power to converse. “The five great saints,” he said – meaning Jesus, Confucius, Buddha, Muhammad, and the Hindu prophet Shankara [Socrates] – “and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, who committed all manner of barbarity and murders on earth, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons.”

His boasts were underscored with whoops and cheers from his followers, who had the good seats. To their church, the moment was a shining vindication for years of hardship: for being treated in the press as predators and for seeing their Christ-like hero, the Reverend Moon, forced onto the witness stand by U.S. tax attorneys, Sen. Bob Dole, and others between 1975 and 1984. Behind the gavels of government, these Pontius Pilates had pronounced Moon an enemy of the American family and the advance man for a South Korean dictator. The Reagan Justice Department had even sent Moon to prison [for tax evasion and document forgery]. But now Moon was active in family values politics, and members of Congress were as submissive as puppies. Moon prevailed.

Believing they were saving the world, Moon’s men had faced desperate pressure to arrange the awards dinner. The Senate event’s emcee was Michael Jenkins, leader of the American Unification Church, a white, middle-aged, blandly enthusiastic spokesman for the cause. In the autumn of 2003, Jenkins recalls in a sermon found online, the Reverend Moon had instructed him three times, first in a low voice, then louder, that unless the world enacted Moon’s plan for world peace, millions would die in a new Middle East Holocaust. “Not six million,” Jenkins said, “but six hundred million.” That fall the Times publisher fished for hours on his boat, while his apostles begged him not to strain his health. “You tell me to rest,” Moon retorted, “but I’m determining the course of history.” When Moon goes reeling off the coast of Kodiak, Alaska – where the church-owned True World Foods cannery annually ships out over twenty million pounds of salmon and other seafood – his followers believe his fishing also mends the wounds of the Cosmos. One day, the elderly fisherman accused Jenkins’s American archdiocese of taking the mission lightly. Far from it, Jenkins proclaimed from the pulpit. “Our American members are willing to die,” he said. “They’re willing to die. Once they understand God’s will, they’ll die.”

Had the Reverend Moon’s crowning at the Dirksen Senate Office Building not been filmed and photographed from seemingly every possible angle, and broadcast on ABC’s World News Tonight and Fox, and giggled at by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, and compared in a New York Times op-ed with an act of the Roman emperor who nominated his horse to the senate, it might have remained a mad whisper among Senate aides.

▲ Sun Myung Moon and Hak Ja Han are wearing Korean shaman crowns with symbolic antlers and trees (the seven branches represent the seven levels of heaven with the Moons enthroned at the top).

Continue reading here

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Bad Moon Rising: How Reverend Moon Created The Washington Times, Seduced the Religious Right, and Built an American Kingdom by John Gorenfeld

Sun Myung Moon – Emperor, and God

Shamanism is at the heart of Sun Myung Moon’s church

Sun Myung Moon: The Emperor of the Universe, transcript and links