Wild Wild Country

Behold! I tell you a mystery. 

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 

in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. 

For the trumpet will sound, 

and the dead will be raised imperishable, 

and we shall be changed.

Wild, Wild Country is a six-part documentary series that spins a yarn as compelling as anything you might choose at your local multiplex. All the way through, I kept asking myself what I was doing in the early 1980s, when this story was actually going on out in the dusty hills of Oregon, what I was doing that I could have missed it. All I knew of the story was the guru's name, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a title a friend of mine still throws around to describe preening pseudo-potentates. 

Devotees of the Bhagwan, thousands of them, purchased and developed 60 thousand of acres of land only an angus might like, turning it into a city by doing all the hard work themselves whilst dressed religiously in three or four shades of red. It happened. 

Those thousands loved the Bhagwan, worshiped him--and worship is no metaphor. In his flowing robe, he'd stand before them, hands up in front of his chest as if in prayer, and they'd bow and weep in the agony of love. Seriously. For four years he didn't even speak. Silence became his message.

People copulated openly and with varieties of partners. The whole place was a kind of flowering of flower children, a sexual and religious cult perhaps like none other in size and devotion.

The land they bought, paid for, and colonized hadn't been totally empty. A tiny town wasn't all that far away. Think Doon maybe, some prairie hamlet not even big enough for its own elevator or grade school, a place that time didn't forget so much as shrug off, a place where the residents, the only survivors were, well, getting old--church-going NRA types.

Oil and water. Dogs and cats. It was a recipe for disaster. The cultists, who became known as “sannyasins" and were by no means penniless (the Bhagwan owned 19 Rolls-Royces), dabbled in the torrid therapies of the era, screaming, laughing, crying, shaking, all of it while dressed in wine-colored garm, and always in groups. You can only imagine what Doon thought.

The star of the mini-series is Sheela, the woman Rajneesh designates as his secretary. She's unflinching. She stuffs criticism right back in the face of those who disapprove of sannyasins or the utopian village they create for their madcap excesses. Today, in Switzerland, she runs a home for Alzheimers patients.

What happens in the Oregon hills is not pretty. The locals have a right to feel besieged. Sheela and her gendarmes eventually take them over and focus the entire country government in their sights. To do so, they collect the homeless from America's desperate streets, bus them all to Oregon, and enlist their voting power in a scheme that doesn't work because the locals create new voting laws. (Sound wierdly familiar?) 

It's not pretty. What transpires is not Jonestown or Waco. There's no blood shed, but there's bombings and gas warfare and, in the upper circles of cultic power, even attempted murder. 

Wild, Wild Country makes compelling television. Long and intimate interviews with the principles, the cultists themselves all these years later, combine with archival footage of what went on is often mesmerizing. There's never a dull moment among the truly faithful. 

What Wild Wild Country doesn't do, however, is press the whole difficult issue of faith itself. Thousands truly believe in a tall, thin man with a long beard who goes nowhere without his robe, more often than not in his turban. Thousands sink their faith into a man who literally doesn't speak for four years. Thousands leave lives and families and emigrate to a place they fully believe will usher heaven to earth.

Why? That's a question the filmmakers don't pursue, perhaps because they know it's a question neither they nor anyone else can answer. All they can do is document what in this case is yet another story of faith. Maybe the most mysterious moments in the whole series occur when former devotees confess tearfully, decades later, that their faith in Bhagwan, who died a decade ago in India, is still unwavering. 

Last night, famously, a porn star accused the President of the United States of a kind of collusion the President himself liked to brag about a decade ago. Will it hurt him? No. As he said famously right here in Siouxland, he could shoot a man on Broadway and it wouldn't affect those who believe in him.

Not long ago people believed in President Clinton with similar fervor. Some believe in Hillary.  

Why do we believe what we do? What was it about the Bhagwan that made him a savior? Wild Wild Country is fascinating, compelling viewing, but it doesn't suggest an answer to what it can't begin to address, a question that remains a mystery--why do we choose what to believe, or do we choose at all?