Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Part Ten, Chapter Three - Because Nothing Says "Satire" Like Implied Bestiality

Maybe I've misunderstood Hubbard and his ideas on race. I mean, he's not stereotyping skin tones into single roles - he has multiple interpretations of skin tones in this book. We've seen a hulking yellow brute or two in fight scenes, and servile yellow waiters in the Artists' Club. Now Gris is disguising himself Army Intelligence officer Timp Snahp by means of some yellow make-up, black hair dye, and skin strictures to make his eyes slanted, creating a "sinister" sort of Fu Manchu appearance.

So like I said, multiple racial interpretations, all of them negative.

Gris has Ske drop him off in Joy City, where the Army's best and most affluent officers relax in the Ground Forces Play Club, which gets italics, but is commonly known as the "Dirt Club," which doesn't. With a "blade gun" (it shoots pretzels, of course), two high-powered blast sticks, and his Knife Section dagger concealed on his person, Gris goes in to look for someone.

The club itself is fifteen stories tall, decorated with a pair of fire-spewing cannons flanking a woman clad only in a general's hat lounging on the arcs of flame. It's a complex of bars and private rooms, where nearly-naked girls parade on glass-floored catwalks hoping to bring a drinker upstairs with them once he "shoots" them with a spotlight. That's just in the third room:

The fifth room is like the girl's [sic] parade except it is animals doing the parading. They get potted and taken upstairs the same way. The Army, being so much in the field and away from home, can develop peculiar tastes.

Charming. So to recap, in this book we've seen assaults, blackmails, and murder via evisceration. We've seen the results of sadistic doctors' surgeries, had multiple off-screen instances of rape, and watched people be doomed to a life of slavery. And now bestiality has been brought into the story.

And yet all of the cursewords are (bleep)ed out. Absolutely, utterly baffling. What warped values do you have to possess to think "goddamned" is what you need to censor in a story like this? I almost wanna investigate this now, to explore how Hubbard viewed the power of words. The guy obviously liked making up his own terms for his stuff, so was it a way of taking control of the world? Why is he avoiding cursing in this work, did he not like words used towards such crude purposes? Why did he think all this rape and murder was fine but an s-bomb was not? Or is this part of the "satire," an exploration of American attitudes towards sex, violence and language?

Also, it's pretty weird that lonely soldiers on campaign would have to resort to pet lambs in a society rife with prostitution and slavery. What, no camp followers?  They don't go raiding for enemy women? Or women in general?

Moving along. Gris leaves behind the ordinary "gambling" halls and enters the "hypergambling" section. The main attraction here are rotating wheels that girls strap into so that patrons can lob cloth grenades at their naughty bits - if they get a hit, "a shower of tokens seems to fly out of her (bleep)." Gris speculates that there's someone working the handle of the nude chick roulette wheels to dodge the throws, but this is accompanied by a hilarious footnote at the behest of the Ground Forces Play Club (no italics) denying such slander. A footnote positioned at the very end of the chapter, requiring the reader to turn to page to find it, making it more of an inconvenience than anything.

Gris finds his man slumped over a table in the Bunker Room, a dingy bar dressed up like a fortification, where soldiers seeking to escape the horrors of war do so in an environment straight from the battlefield and the waitresses serve "blood cocktails" while wearing skimpy field nurse outfits. Colonel Rajabah Stinkins (yes, really) is described paradoxically as both "beefy" and "much given to lard," and the divorce papers and photos of five kids that Gris finds on him seems to suggest that he's drowning his sorrows. But once the guy wakes up he explains that he's "shelebrating" his new freedom from that "(bleeping) old hag and her five awful brats." You can laugh if you feel like it, I'm much too tired.

So Gris, posing as an old academy friend for the benefit of the waitresses, feeds Stinkins hot jolt and "sobriety pills" so that the next phase of his plan can proceed next chapter. 

From the "animal parade" and "blood cocktails," I guess it's safe to add the military to the Great Big List of Professions Hubbard Hates. So what's that make now: soldiers, psychologists, doctors, policemen, politicians, clerks, intelligence agents... I know I'm missing some stuff.


Back to Chapter Two

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