Goober

When I first moved to Lincoln Nebraska in 1981 I was still a fan of some of my favorite teams. I had been a New York Mets fan virtually from Day One, and since I played a lot of hockey, I was also a big New York Rangers fan. I never really got excited about basketball or football - I don't know why - maybe because I never played football and was really, really, bad at basketball. I was unprepared for the single-minded, fanatical fandom of Nebraska Cornhusker football fans. 

Growing up in one of the top sports markets in the country, there were plenty of teams to root for. Two NFL teams, two major league baseball teams and by the time I'd move away two basketball and two hockey teams. The enthusiasm was spread around a bit. Nebraska had no major league professional teams in any sport, with a AAA baseball team in Omaha and the nearest major league franchise 3 hours south in Kansas City. UNL fielded several sports, but the football team, which had a couple of national titles only a decade in the past, and still very competitive, was the big dog in town. I would probably have jumped on the bandwagon and become at least a casual fan...if the majority of fans that I came in contact with weren't such assholes.

A feature of sports fans everywhere, but especially in places where there's only one viable game in town is the expectation that one will always be a fan of the home team, even if you move away from home. Nebraskans who move out of state will always find a way to watch their team play no matter what corner of the country they move to. They remain as devoted to their team as when they were able to attend every home game in person. I'm sure this is true everywhere else. The paradoxical side of this tendency is the belief that if someone moves into your state or city, they must automatically and immediately become fans of your home team. So while Husker fans expect to remain Husker fans wherever they make their homes, they also expect those who move here from elsewhere to shed their previous allegiance and become Husker fans. (Again - you can undoubtedly find this phenomenon everywhere in the country). 

Early in my residency in Lincoln, friends and coworkers were amazed that I simply was indifferent to the Huskers' game day performance and usually had no idea what bowl they were going to or who the quarterback was. Oftentimes the reaction was even hostile. In one of my mid-eighties management positions, I had the nerve to turn off the game because my employees were standing around listening to the game rather than working. Shortly thereafter I received an angry phone call from an alleged customer who told me "I wasn't in New York any more" and threatened to take his business elsewhere if I wasn't going to have the game blasting over the store intercom system. He finished up with some nasty things to say about New Yorkers in general. 

At another job some years later another co-worker and I would place a friendly bet on the game, early in the season it might be a doughnut or a candy bar, but for more important games it became what we referred to as "public humiliation". Most of the time, since the Cornhuskers regularly posted winning seasons, I lost most of the bets. One year, when the Huskers won their bowl game, I had to wear a string of red and white beads, a Husker jersey and a button that played the fight song to the company Christmas party - all in good fun. But one year, when Colorado beat Nebraska, my betting opponent had to wear a Colorado Buffaloes sweatshirt for one whole shift. She accepted her loss in good humor, but some of our co-workers were aghast and were outraged at someone wearing the "enemy" colors and at me for "cruelly" requiring it. 

For many years I managed businesses where the busiest day of the week was Saturday. Although business usually slacked off during game time, it required a full staff before and after. The number of people who wanted every home game off was always too many to honor, eventually I had to refuse to schedule anyone off on a game day, but allowed anyone who could find a substitute to take the day off. And of course I was considered the asshole, as a New Yorker not understanding true Husker fandom. 

The seriousness with which so many fans seemed to take the game always befuddled me. Harsh words against the players and coaches when they lost and an almost pathological tendency to blame bad officiating for every loss was background noise that I just wasn't interested in hearing. While it still goes on, the fall from college football's pinnacle in recent years has tempered the expectations of many (though not all) fans. More and more people seem to be able to simply enjoy the game and rejoice in the wins, even when they're few and far between. 

Over the last decade or so I have become indifferent, not only to Nebraska sports, but to sports in general, so my lack of enthusiasm, or even interest in, college football, is not ever remarked upon. Most of the people whom I associate with or am in regular contact with are on a pretty even keel when it comes to their fandom and I haven't had anyone be rude to me about my own non-fandom in years. 

Although I still pronounce GBR in my head as "goober". 

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXXVII - Pointing Fingers

The "Woman's Cabal", which included my ex-wife Pat, mainly concerned themselves with criticizing local Way leadership, being part of the informal power as known as "Old Grads" they felt that they had the knowledge and standing to question anyone that they thought was "off The Word". Fred Brown, the newly appointed leader, freshly graduated from the Way Corps and exposed to Way President Craig Martindale's paranoid ravings for four years was not having it. He began cracking down on any dissension,  and in line with what Martindale was preaching every week, directed any dissension among the "believers" away from leadership and toward each other.

This was a big change. The power struggle among leadership during the second half of the eighties had caused the rank and file to question the leadership. Any problems - sickness, financial issues, even divorce was traced back to leaders being "off The Word", or - and this was an accusation that was thrown around more and more - devil spirit possession

. Now the same issues, when they arose, were being laid at the feet of ordinary Way followers to the point where if Martindale caught a cold it was blamed on "lack of believing" by the Way "household" (i.e. the whole body of active Way participants). I was even present when a thunderstorm that caused the campground at a Way event to be flooded was blamed on the lack of "community believing", rather than the poor planning of leaders who designated low ground as a campground during the rainy season in Ohio. 

This change in focus of spiritual responsibility had the effect of making people paranoid that their own "negative believing" could cause harm in the household of believers and also intent on pointing the finger at others. The women of the cabal struck out in multiple directions.  

One of the many classes that The Way created was called "Defeating the Adversary" (i.e The Devil). The Way, despite having a fair number of women in leadership positions, (usually single women) was extremely patriarchal and fundamentalist in its interpretation of verses that related to marriage. They very much believed that the husband was the head of his wife (although not that any random man was the head of any women) although what that meant was left unclear. In the Defeating the Adversary (DTA) class Martindale made reference to Titus 2:3-5 where, in English, women are described as "keepers at home". He claimed that this was a translation of the Greek word oikôdespotês. (I recently looked this up and that's not the Greek word). Oikôs means "house", or "home". As for the second part of the Greek word, I think we all know what a "despot" is. Deprived of the traditional targets of incompetent leadership and armed with supposed Biblical justification for being a dictator over their households, they began refusing to discuss household decisions with their husbands, and if the husbands wouldn't cooperate, accusing them to leadership as "off The Word" or even possessed. Fred was happy to entertain these accusations and fostered an environment where married couples were fighting with each other, justifying their intransigence as "keeping the household pure".  This bubbled beneath the surface for several years. It started to affect me in my marriage, but there were so many other accusations going around, with kangaroo courts and "confrontations" the issues in my own marriage flew under the radar for a while. 

Purges were on the horizon.

Start at the beginning:

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part XXXVIII: 

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2022/12/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-xxxviii.html

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXXVI - The Pyramid

 There was a lot going on from the mid to late nineties, so I may be jumping back and forth regarding the years and events. It was around this time that the escalation in cultishness began to have an affect on my marriage. I mentioned in earlier installments that (1) My wife Pat and some of the other women constituted an informal cabal, where they picked apart the actions of local leadership and gossiped about their fellow "believers" and (2) A new leader was appointed for Lincoln who was trained from Day One in Martindale's post-"Fog Years" paranoia and iron-fist style of leadership. These two facts would come together to make my home life miserable. 

[Pat & I got divorced as the 00's began, and there were many reasons for it, some which had nothing to do with The Way, but others that very much did; I will try to only address the actual cult behaviors and avoid reliving a years long plunge toward divorce]

One of the first things that Fred did upon settling in to his new responsibilities as Way Branch Coordinator in Lincoln was to take on what I have referred to as The Women's Cabal. One thing that many people don't realize about cults is the existence of competing bases of power. Theoretically there's a leader at the top of the cult pyramid who calls all the shots and all the cult members fall into line, obeying the cult leader's demands. That's certainly true, but what that picture misses is the intermediate levels on the pyramid. 

The Way referred to their organizational structure as The Way Tree, which when you looked at it, was just an upside-down pyramid with the power and authority working its way up from the roots, rather than down from the apex of the pyramid. The cult leader's title was the President, he and two other members of a Board of Trustees ran the organization from the root, the New Knoxville Ohio headquarters. Springing up from the root was the trunk, which represented the entire United States. (In theory, other countries could be categorized as trunks if they were large enough, I believe the country coordinator of the United Kingdom at one time was considered the Trunk Coordinator of Europe). The trunk was divided up into limbs, each state was its own limb. (There was an intermediate un-tree-like step, the region, which was made up of several states, and in later years as The Way shrunk, several states would be combined into one limb). Each limb was divided into branches. A branch was composed of multiple home fellowships, usually in the same city. Originally a branch was envisioned as having seven home fellowships, in the 00's Martindale, based on a poor understanding of grammar and an over-reliance on the Old Testament, decided that a "branch" was actually two or more home fellowships. The home fellowships were called twigs, with the individual members as "leaves". (There were also intermediate levels between a limb and a branch during The Way's membership heyday - four branches were an area, four areas, or large geographic areas within a state were territories.) 

That was the official Way Tree, aka Way cult pyramid. But circles of influence existed and functioned outside the official hierarchy. The Way membership was based at the lower levels on a series of classes. Foundational, Intermediate and Advanced Power For Abundant Living. Graduates of the Advanced Class were considered to have achieved a level of knowledge whereupon they could be looked upon as potential future leaders. Advanced Class grads were often called upon to teach at fellowship meetings and could have some influence on what went on in an area. WOWvets were another outside-the hierarchy caste. Veterans of the "Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador" program were looked at with awe by those who never participated. Sometimes alternate sources of influence derived from people who just had natural leadership ability but for some reason weren't officially sanctioned leaders. Then there's the amorphous group informally known as "old grads". Old grads weren't necessarily old in years, certainly not senior citizens, but they were Way members who had been around for as long as anyone could remember. They were usually Advanced Class grads and were often WOWvets as well. An old grad may have come to an area as a WOW and "opened it up", i.e. started the first Twig Fellowship that eventually grew into a branch or a limb. Several members of the Women's Cabal, including my ex-wife Pat, were "Old Grads". Several of them had come to Lincoln in 1972 or '73 as Wows and started the first fellowships. Some had left and come back, some had been here all along. 

One reason that power bases outside the hierarchy flourished during this time was what then-President of The Way Martindale called "The Fog Years", a time of internal divisions. Various leaders spent several years accusing each other of deviating from "The Word of God" as defined by founder Wierwille. When the dust had settled Martindale remained as the de jure head of The Way while other leaders started their own offshoot "ministries". This emboldened Way "believers" at all levels of "The Way Tree" to question, not Way doctrine, but individual leaders' fealty to it. This is what the Women's Cabal saw as their mission, and what Martindale, through his newly appointed field leaders such as Fred Brown, was determined to quash.

Start at the beginning:

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2019/10/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-i.html

Part XXXVII

https://aesduir.blogspot.com/2022/11/so-you-want-to-join-cult-part-xxxvii.html