The members of the Heaven's Gate cult may have failed to convince anybody, via their Web page, of planet Earth's imminent recycling. And with most of the faithful forever lost in space, they may have missed their opportunity to explain their own recycling. But last Sunday in Berkeley, California, Chuck Humphrey, the sole member to fail the "graduation ceremony," tried.
The video teach-in, which was arranged to include nothing more than a 70-minute screening of the cult's co-founder, Marshall Applewhite, aka Do, discussing the theory and practice behind cosmic evacuation strategies, didn't work out exactly as planned. The media may not have quite physically outnumbered the curious, but the assorted camera, sound, and anchorpeople had the predictable effect of suggesting mass interest, or, at the very least, the expressed intent to manufacture some.
The questions asked of Humphrey were, as a general rule, willfully obtuse: "Why did you choose the Berkeley campus to recruit?" "Isn't this just a ploy to sell merchandise?" and, most amusing, "Will you be providing refreshments for the audience?" Humphrey gamely answered, re-answered, and answered again, explaining that he was certainly a follower rather than a leader, didn't represent a followable group of any sort, and merely hoped to counter the widespread media sensationalism following his friends' "exits." What really marked the event as a media anachronism, while at the same time underscoring much of the anxiety directed toward the so-called cult in the first place, was the fact that it needn't have happened at all. Aside from the sound bites and photo ops, there was nothing said or shown that wasn't available in excruciating detail at Humphrey's Web site: www.righttoknow.to.
Of course, on the media's first time around with this story, flickering shots of the Heaven's Gate page were in almost gratuitous abundance. If, this time, the tripod-toting reporters had deferred to the Web of Death, as Time called it, and given the URL air, it probably wouldn't have triggered a mass exodus, neither to the detailed Web page nor to the afterlife. But, at the very least, it might have delivered, rather than stifled, real information - perhaps even precious reflection. Which may not be good for anybody's health, but certainly isn't bad for news.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
