Oh, my bad. Picked up The Fifth Elephant by mistake.
So, Gris. Name evokes "grease" and "gristle," both slimy, unlikeable stuff. Not very subtle, but more subtle than "Psychlo" or "Catrists," so good work Hubbard.
Well, Gris has passed through miserable all the way to borderline suicidal. He wants to go to the hangar and check on Heller, but every time he so much as thinks about it he is overtaken by stomach pains. Convinced that someone's going to figure out that Mission Earth is just spinning its wheels (much like how Mission Earth is just spinning its wheels), or that the Countess will be "caught," Gris considers just hurling himself from his window.
But he perseveres, even though he's gone almost two days now without food or drink. He stamps his paperwork to the cheers of a crowd of admiring junior clerks, and then a Turkish dancing girl sways in with a tray of enticing baklava. It's at this point that Gris speculates that he might be going insane.
This leads to an interlude involving Bugs Bunny.
See, the agents of the Apparatus assigned to infiltrate Earth are instructed with native texts, such as Kindergarten primers or comic books. And Gris made the "hilarious" mistake of reading a Looney Tunes comic and assuming Bugs Bunny represented the dominant lifeform on Earth, rather than Elmer Fudd. Ha ahaha. Even afterward, Gris holds a soft spot for that wascally wabbit due to Bugs' skill at manipulating others.
And now a beloved, timeless cartoon hero has connections to L. Ron Hubbard.
But that's not all Gris studied - he was also given an opportunity to study other Earth subjects, and he chose, drumroll please, psychology, which is all about manipulating people in ways that would impress even Bugs Bunny:
It is a government monopoly but it is taught in their universities. They claim everybody is evil. They say sentient beings are animals and have no soul. And while this last is unique to Earth and is not believed on any other planet anywhere, I so often fervently hope that I will never live another life anywhere that I was eager to accept it. And naturally, like Lombar, I believed everybody was evil.
The obvious question is whether this is a deliberate misinterpretation of the field of mental health, or if Hubbard truly believed what he typed here. I don't know. It meshes pretty well with what he said in Battlefield Earth, and is actually more restrained than some of his rants I've read on Wikiquote. So maybe this is another glimpse through his eyes, in which case I have to say he's about as well-informed about psychology as Jack Chick is about Dungeons and Dragons. But on the other hand, this chapter also makes a point about psychology's impotence and uselessness, so it's difficult to say which perception is "true" to Hubbard.
Thanks to his understanding of psychology, Gris is able to deduce that the dancing girl hallucination is the product of "fulfillment-denial," and that he really wants to escape from this place. By mastering the evil, cynical arts of psychology, Gris is able to state the blindingly obvious. After experiencing this stunning revelation, Gris... continues to work at his desk. Yeah. He starts thinking about how isolated he'll be from what's happening at the office once he's on Earth, and wonders what Bugs Bunny would do in the this situation. Gris' solution: blackmail and gay sex.
Why did you have to drag Bugs into this, Hubbard? I liked Bugs Bunny. Everyone does. And now he's tainted just from appearing in this chapter.
There are two special clerks working in Section 451, "Too-Too" Twolah and "Oh Dear" Odur, both girlishly pretty young men whose student careers were ruined by homosexual affairs. They don't speak, they "mince" or "lisp" their dialogue. And Gris has a special mission for them: take turns as couriers aboard the routine Apparatus freighters to Earth, while the other stays on Voltar and gathers intelligence and rumors by serving as Lord Endow's lover. Gris sets up something called a "magic mail" system involving self-delivering messages that can be canceled with a special code or something like that; if the two don't perform well, he lets a certain order go through, but if they do alright they get a code to cancel it.
The offensive gay stereotypes aren't thrilled at the idea, so Gris asks them if they love their mothers, in an attempt to take advantage of what I assume to be Freudian psychology; the pair think Gris is threatening their families. Then Gris throws down his knife, which he intends to be a powerful and overwhelming phallic symbol; the boys see a death threat and fall to their knees, weeping.
So Gris' mastery of psychology is pretty much useless, and would be funny if psychology were presented as a quack pseudoscience not to be taken seriously. Except Hubbard still treats it as mind cancer that corrupts and conquers entire civilizations. Which works about as well as giving Emperor Palpatine a clown nose and a polka-dot robe while leaving the rest of the Star Wars trilogy unchanged.
Old Bawtch spends a minute just staring at Gris when he shows the boys out. Next chapter we have a nightmare sequence. Instead of, you know, getting to Earth and laughing at the foibles of 1980's America as seen through alien eyes or anything like that.
Back to Chapter Three
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