The Thrice-Named

 Knock, Knock! Who's There? 

Mickey. Mickey who? 

Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mantle, 

Mickey Rourke, Mickey Finn, 

Mickey Dolenz, Mickey Knox. 

Guilty? You bet your ass. 

But I think Charles Manson 

said it best when he said -- 

"I'm not herrrre, man...

I'm not here!" 

I don't blame Mickey or Mallory. 

I blame Ajax and Jack Frost and Frosted Flakes 

and Achy Breaky, Lyndon Johnson, Johnny Cash, 

Johnny Carson, Johnny Quest. 

I blame the Pope, and Pop-Tarts, 

the Popile Pocket Fisherman. Ahh!

I blame Jif, and jazz and O.J. Simpson, 

JFK, RFK, FDR, FBI, CIA, STP, 

AFL, CIO, ABC, NBC, JVC, VCR. 

I blame John Wilkes Booth 

and 

Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan 

and 

Mary Tyler Moore. 

I blame all people who 

use three names. 

Big Bird, Guilty, 

Barney, Guilty! 

I blame Jesus Christ 

and Jon Bon Jovi! 

I stick my right index finger 

in Wayne Newton's left eyeball! 

Not their parents, not drugs, 

not Society-at-Large. 

Do you want to know who I really blame? 

The Pittsburgh Pirates, because in 1947, 

Major League Baseball scouted 

a hot young pitching prospect 

named Fidel Castro. 

Hot outta Havana High, he had big speed 

and a nasty curveball but at the last minute, 

the teams all rescinded their offers. 

Just think about that - If Fidel had been drafted, huh huh? 

No Bay of Pigs, no Kennedy assassination, no cover-up, 

no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Ford, no bell-bottoms, 

no Brady Bunch, no earthshoes, no Reagan, no crack. 

No, we'd all be eating hotdogs and apple-pie 

and smoking big fat Cuban cigars. 

M-I-C. 

See you real soon. 

K-E-Y

Why? Because 

They Want To, 

That's Why. 

Setting-up Franchises.

 
 

Cornelius/Rupert/Travis and Tyler Durden 

are discussing the impact of Fight Club.

"If you could fight anyone," Tyler asks, 

"who would you fight?"

"I'd fight My Boss."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Who would you fight?"

"I'd fight My Dad."

"I don't know my Dad. 

 
I mean, I know him, but he left when I was like six years old, married This Other Woman, had some more kids. 

He did this like every six years - 

he goes to a new city 

and starts a new family."

"Fucker's setting up franchises."

Tyler pauses.

"My Dad never went to college, so of course 

its real important that I go. 

So I graduate, I call him up long-distance 

and say, 'Now What?' 
He says, 'Get a Job'. 

So, I'm 25, I call again 

and say, 'Now What?' 

He says, 'I Dunno. 

Get Married.'"

"I couldn't get married. 

I'm a thirty-year-old boy."

"We're a Generation of Men raised by Women - 

I'm wondering if Another Woman is really 

The Answer We Need."

Elegy for Newt

ANDREWS:

They may use The Furnace, 

but I want everyone in lockup by 22:00 hours.

We commit This Child and This Man 

to Your keeping, O Lord.

Their bodies have been taken from 

The Shadow of Our Night.

They have been released from all 

Darkness and Pain.

The Child and The Man 

have gone beyond Our World.

They are 

Forever Eternal

and 

Everlasting

[Barking]

Ashes to Ashes

Dust to Dust

DILLON:

Why?

Why are The Innocent punished?

[ Rotweiler whimpers ] /

[ Ox Caucus Rumbles Deep and Heavily ]

Why The Sacrifice?

Why The Pain?

There aren't any Promises.

Nothing's Certain.

Only that some get Called.

Some get Saved.

She won't ever know 

The Hardship and Grief for 

Those of Us Left Behind.

We commit these bodies to 

The Void, with a Glad Heart.

[Growling]

 

For within each Seed there is 

The Promise of a Flower.

And within each Death, no matter how small – 

There's always a New Life

.

A New Beginning.

[ RAISES FIST ]

Amen.

PRISONERS : 

Amen.

St. Helena :

I just wanted to say thanks for what you said at the funeral.

My friends would have appreciated –

DILLON:

Yeah, well you don't wanna Know Me, Lady –

I'm a Murderer, and Rapist of Women.

St. Helena :

Really.

Well, I guess I must make you nervous.

DILLON:

Do you have any Faith, Sister?

St. Helena :

Not much.

 DILLON:

We've got a lot of Faith here.

Enough even for you.

St. Helena :

I thought women weren't allowed.

 DILLON:

We've never had any before – 

but we tolerate anybody...

Even The Intolerable.

St. Helena :

Thank you.

DILLON: 

That's just a Statement of Principle, 

Nothing Personal.

We've got A Good Place to Wait, Here.

And until now... 

No Temptation.

*******

CLEMENS: 

Dillon and the rest of the alternative people embraced religion, as it were, about five years ago.

Take two.

St. Helena :

I'm on medication?

CLEMENS: 

Hardly.

St. Helena :

What kind of religion?

CLEMENS: 

Some sort of apocalyptic, millenarian Christian fundamentalist...

St. Helena :

Right.

CLEMENS: 
Exactly.

When The Company wanted to close the facility Dillon and the rest

of the converts wanted to stay.

With two minders and a medical officer.

And here we are.

St. Helena :

How did you get this wonderful assignment?

How do you like your new haircut?

St. Helena :

It's OK.

CLEMENS:

Now that I've gone out on a limb for you with Andrews, damaged my less-than-perfect relationship with him, and briefed you on the humdrum history of Fury-161 –

Can't you tell me what you were looking for?

St. Helena :

Are you attracted to me?

In what way?

St. Helena :

In that way.

CLEMENS:

You're very direct.

St. Helena :

I've been Out Here a long time.

The Old Maid of Anchorhead

“The exuberance of blood –the erect spirit – of Edwardian times had been drained. 

“Though in theory there were enough men for most women to marry, that was cold arithmetical nonsense for the hundreds of thousands who had lost The Only One They Ever Loved, and who were still wearing black and would never wed. 

The current author is old enough, just, to remember great-aunts who did not marry ‘because of the War’ and lived single lives – albeit quite cheerful ones – focused on fruit cake and friendship. 

THE IMPORTANT DISCUSSIONS WE AVOID 

Just one of the negatives of portraying life as this endless zero-sum game, between different groups vying for oppressed status, is that it robs us of time and energy for the conversations and thinking that we do need to do. 

For example, why is it, after all these decades, that feminists and others have been unable to more fully address the role of Motherhood in Feminism? 

As the feminist author Camille Paglia has been typically honest enough to admit, motherhood remains one of the big unresolved questions for feminists. 

And that isn’t a small subject to miss or gloss over. 

As Paglia herself has written, 

‘Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of The Mother in Human Life. 

Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.’

If asked to name her three great heroes of twentieth-century womanhood, Paglia says that she would select Amelia Earhart, Katharine Hepburn and Germaine Greer : three women who Paglia says ‘would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman’. 

Yet as she points out, ‘All these women were childless. 

Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century. 

Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy” . . . 

The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. 

It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature – that is, with procreation.’ 

Or why, ‘in this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration, or devaluing of the role of motherhood.’  

The ongoing dishonesty about this leads to presumption being piled on dishonesty, and ugly, misanthropic notions of the purpose of women becoming embedded in the culture. In January 2019 CNBC ran a piece flagged with the heading, ‘You can save half a million dollars if you don’t have kids’.

As the piece went on: ‘Your friends may tell you having kids made them happier. They’re probably lying.’ 

It then referenced all the outweighing problems of ‘extra responsibilities, housework and, of course, the costs’.

Or here is how The Economist recently chose to write about what it called ‘the roots of the gender pay gap’, a gap which the magazine claimed has its roots in childhood. 

One of the main factors which is responsible for women on average earning less than men during the course of their working life is the fact that women are the ones who bear children. As The Economist put it, 

‘Having children lowers women’s lifetime earnings, an outcome known as the “child penalty”.’ 

It is hard to imagine who could read that phrase, let alone write it, without a shudder. 

If it is assumed that the primary purpose in Life is to make as much money as possible, then it is indeed possible that having a child will constitute a ‘penalty’ for a woman and thereby prevent her from having a larger sum of money in her bank account when she dies. 

On the other hand, if she chooses to pay that ‘penalty’ she might be fortunate enough to engage in the most important and fulfilling role that a human being can have. There is in that Economist viewpoint something which is widely shared and which has been spreading for decades. On the one hand women have–largely– been relieved of the need to have children if they do not want them, the better to pursue other forms of meaning and purpose in their lives. 

But it is not hard for this reorientation of purpose to make it look as though that original, defining human purpose is no purpose at all.

The American agrarian writer Wendell Berry put his finger on this almost 40 years ago when there were already, as he put it, ‘bad times for motherhood’. 

The whole concept of motherhood had come to be viewed in a negative way: ‘A kind of biological drudgery, some say, using up women who could do better things.’ 

But then Berry hit on the central truth: 

“We all have to be used up by something. 

And though I will never be a mother, I am glad to be used up by motherhood and what it leads to, just as–most of the time–I gladly belong to my wife, my children, and several head of cattle, sheep, and horses. 

What better way to be used up?”

Is this not a better way to think about motherhood and life? 

In a spirit of love and forgiveness rather than the endless register of resentment and greed?

“Superhero stories were written to be universal and inclusive, but often they’ve been aimed, it must be said, at boys and young men. Perhaps that’s why a mainstream myth has developed in which comic-book superheroines are all big-breasted Playboy girls with impossibly nipped waists and legs like jointed stilts in six-inch heels. But while it’s true that superhero costumes allow artists to draw what is effectively the nude figure in motion, there have in fact been more female superhero body types than male. 

The first superheroine, you may be surprised to learn, was not a voluptuous cutie in thigh boots but a raw-faced middle-aged housewife called Ma Hunkel, who wore a blanket cape and a pan on her head in her debut appearance, All-American no. 20, 1940. A harridan with the build of a brick shithouse she was the first “real-world” superhero—with no powers, a DIY outfit, and a strictly local beat—and the first parody of the superhero genre all in one. Ma Hunkel, aka the Red Tornado, was a Lower East Side lampoon of Siegel and Shuster’s lofty idealism. 

The mainstream has forgotten Ma Hunkel, although, like all the rest, she’s still a part of the DC universe and now has a granddaughter named Maxine Hunkel, a talkative, realistically proportioned, and likeable teenage girl who also challenges the superbimbo stereotype. But, of course, the comic-book industry in the throes of the war machine did churn out its fair share of pinup bombshells and no-nonsense dames with names like Spitfire and Miss Victory, or the strangely comforting Pat Parker, War Nurse. 

With no particular ax to grind against the Axis forces, Pat Parker was driven only by her desire to dress up like a showgirl and take to the battlefields of Western Europe on life-threatening missions of mercy. 

She was prepared to take on entire tank divisions with a refugee quivering under each arm. What made her tank-battling activities especially brave was the fact that this war nurse had no special powers and wore a costume so insubstantial, there could be nothing secret about her lunch, let alone her identity. But, absurd as she may seem, she did her best to exemplify the can-do, Rosie the Riveter spirit of those women who were “manning” the home front. 

And then there was the most famous superheroine of them all. Wonder Woman was the creation of William Moulton Marston, the man who, not incidentally, invented the controversial polygraph test apparatus, or lie detector, that is still in use today. 

Marston was a professor at Columbia and Tufts universities, and Radcliffe College —and a good one, according to accounts of the time— and the author of several respected works of popular psychology. Like other forward thinkers, Marston saw in comics the potential to convey complex ideas in the form of exciting and violent symbolic dramas. He described the great educational potential of the comics in an article titled “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” which appeared in the popular women’s magazine Family Circle in 1940 and led to his getting hired as an educational consultant at DC-National. 

Marston coupled his ideas with an unorthodox lifestyle: his wife, Elizabeth, was also a psychologist, and is credited with having suggested a superheroine character. 

Both were enthusiastic proponents of a progressive attitude toward sex and relationships. They shared a mutual lover, a student of Marston’s named Olive Byrne, said to be the physical model for the original Harry Peter drawings of Wonder Woman. Together, Marston and Peter (with indispensable input from Elizabeth and Olive) developed a fantasy world of staggering richness. 

For sheer invention, for relentless dedication to the core concept, the Wonder Woman strip far surpassed its competitors. But unlike traditional pinups, the girls of Wonder Woman were athletic and forceful. 

They wore tiaras and togas while they engaged in violent gladiatorial contests on the backs of giant, genetically engineered monster kangaroos. 

Wonder Woman was traditionally sexy—there were pinup shots—but in most panels, she yomped and stomped like some martial arts majorette, outracing automobiles for fun. 

1941’s “Introducing Wonder Woman” began when an air force plane crashed on an uncharted island inhabited exclusively by beautiful scantily clad women capable of carrying the full-grown air force pilot “as if he were a child.” 

The man, Captain Steve Trevor of US Army Intelligence, was the first to ever set foot on Paradise Island, and within moments, the queen’s daughter, Princess Diana, had fallen in love. 

A two-page illustrated-text section revealed the history of the Amazons since their slavery at the hands of Hercules. Encouraged by their patron goddess Aphrodite, they liberated themselves and set sail for a magical island where they could establish a new civilization of women, far from the cruelty, greed, and violence that typified “Man’s World.” 

On Paradise Island, the immortal women set about fashioning their fabulous alternative to patriarchal, heliocentric society. 

In this first issue, Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, consulted apparitions of Aphrodite and Athena, who clarified that Trevor had been sent deliberately by the gods. 

It was time, apparently, for the Amazons to emerge from seclusion and join the worldwide struggle against Axis tyranny. 

Trevor had to be sent home to complete his mission against the enemy—but he was not to return alone. 

“YOU MUST SEND WITH HIM THE STRONGEST OF YOUR WONDER WOMEN!—FOR AMERICA, THE LAST CITADEL OF DEMOCRACY, AND OF EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN, NEEDS YOUR HELP!” 

A contest was declared to identify the most appropriate candidate. 

Tests included outrunning a deer and culminated in the favorite sport of these immortal ladettes: bullets and bracelets. A kind of Russian roulette, the game saw the final contenders facing one another with loaded revolvers (where the staunchly antiwar Amazons managed to get hold of working firearms remains a mystery). Bullets were fired at the opponent, who was obliged to deflect them with her bracelets in order to win the game. The loser took a flesh wound to the shoulder. 

In the end one champion remained: a masked brunette, revealed in a not entirely unexpected twist to be Princess Diana herself. 

“AND SO DIANA, THE WONDER WOMAN, GIVING UP HER HERITAGE AND HER RIGHT TO ETERNAL LIFE, LEAVES PARADISE ISLAND TO TAKE THE MAN SHE LOVES BACK TO AMERICA—THE LAND SHE LEARNS TO LOVE AND PROTECT, AND ADOPTS AS HER OWN!” 

However, within this world—and supplying it with depth and enticing richness—lurked barely hidden libidinal elements. 

To begin with, it has to be said that these Amazons were drawn to be sexy. 

Whereas Siegel rendered Superman in dynamic futurist lines and Bob Kane gave Batman the look of a Prague potato print, Peter brought a flowing, scrolling quality to his drawings of superwomen in action and at play. Everything was curved and calligraphic. The lips of his women were modishly bee stung and glossy, as if to suggest that Hollywood-style glamour makeup never went out of vogue among the warrior women and philosopher princesses of Paradise Island. 

However, as you may expect in a society of immortal women cut off from the rest of the world since classical antiquity, the diversions of the Amazons turned out to be somewhat specialized, to say the least. 

As the strips developed, Marston’s prose swooned over detailed accounts of Amazonian chase and capture rituals in which some girls were “eaten” by others. 

Moreover thousands of years of sophisticated living without men had bled the phallic thrust out of sexuality, leaving the peculiar, ritualistic eroticism of leash and lock. 

Marston and Peter built slavery and shackles into “Meet Wonder Woman,” and as the strip progressed, the bondage elements became more overt, increasing sales. 

For instance, chief among Wonder Woman’s weapons of peace was a magic lasso, which compelled anyone bound in its coils to tell the absolute truth and only the truth—shades of Marston’s polygraph. 

Moreover, it wasn’t long before she was breathlessly demonstrating the joys of submission to “loving authority”: A Nazi villain’s slave girls were released in one story, with no idea what to do with their lives out of captivity. 

Wonder Woman’s solution was to allow them to continue to express their nature as born slaves by relocating to Paradise Island, where they could enjoy bondage under the loving gaze of a kind mistress instead of the crop-cracking Hitler-loving Paula von Gunther. 

The flipside of the Amazons’ essentially benign and formalized endorsement of healthy S/M was the dungeon world of sadistic bondage, humiliation, and mind control that existed in the world beyond Paradise Island. 

These were crystallized in the form of Doctor Poison, a twisted dwarf in a rubber coat. Wielding a dripping syringe, Poison hated women and loved to humiliate them. In a surprising twist, “he” was revealed to be a mentally ill woman acting out of her frustrations. 

The women of Paradise Island embodied an enticing blend of the politically right-on and the libidinous. As such, they were exemplars of a newfangled twentieth-century creed that was the same old bohemian “free love” with a new lexicon culled from psychoanalytical theory and the pink and squeezy world of dreams and desire. 

Theirs was a kind of radical Second Wave separatist feminism where men were forbidden and things could only get better as a result. 

Indeed, in Marston’s feminine paradise, happiness and security were in far greater supply than elsewhere in the superworld. 

In looking at other superhero comics he had noted, “it seemed from a psychological angle that the comics’ worst offence was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to the child as the breath of life.” 

And so, while Batman was a brooding orphan, and the destruction of Superman’s Krypton had robbed him of his birth parents, the magnificent scientists Jor-El and Lara, Wonder Woman could ride her invisible plane down the rainbow runway to Paradise Island and check in with Mom any time she wanted. 

Queen Hippolyta even had a magic mirror that allowed her to observe her daughter at any location on Earth. 

It was closed-circuit television by any other name, but in late 1941, Hippolyta’s magic mirror could only be a product of imaginary feminist superscience. 

There were some similarities with Wonder Woman’s male predecessors. Like Superman, in his way, Wonder Woman fearlessly championed alternative culture and a powerful vision of outsider politics. And, like Batman, she was thoroughly the progressive sort of aristocrat. 

She preached peace in a time of war, although she was as eager as any other superhero to tackle her fair share of Nazis. 

Unlike the essentially solitary Batman and Superman, Wonder Woman had a huge cast of friends. Her allies, the Holliday Girls of Beta Lamda, were a rambunctious group of sorority sisters fronted by the immense, freckled redhead Etta Candy. 

As the gorgeous Wonder Woman’s inevitable fat pal, Etta’s positive energy and physicality added an earthiness and humor that complemented Diana’s cool grace and perfect poise. 

When Marston died of cancer in 1947, the erotic charge left the Wonder Woman strip, and sales declined, never to recover. Without the originality and energy that Marston’s obsessions brought to the stories, Wonder Woman was an exotic bloom starved of rare nutrients. 

Once the lush, pervy undercurrents were purged, the character foundered. The island of Themiscyra was scraped clean of any hint of impropriety, and all girl-chasing rituals ceased, along with reader commitment to the character. 

It wasn’t long before Wonder Woman was coming across as an odd maiden aunt—a disturbing cross between the Virgin Mary and Mary Tyler Moore; but Elizabeth and Olive, her inspirations, continued to live together. 

The unconventional, liberated Elizabeth was one hundred years old when she died in 1993, the true Wonder Woman of this story.”

It Will Hurt More Than You've Ever Been Hurt — And You Will Have a Scar

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. 

By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.

BILL MOYERS: 

And what does it mean, do you think, to young boys today. that we are absent these myths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: 

Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites. 

As a little Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you’re going to be confirmed by, and you go up. 

But instead of having them scarify you, knock your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a mild slap on the cheek. 

It’s been reduced to that, and 

nothing’s happened to you. 

The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah, and whether it works actually to effect a psychological transformation, I suppose, will depend on the individual case. 

There was no problem in these old days. 

The Boy came out with a different body, and 

He’d Gone Through Something.

INT. KITCHEN - NIGHT

Cornelius and Tyler each stir a boiling pot.

Cornelius (V.O.): 

Tyler was full of useful information.

TYLER : 

Ancient peoples found that clothes got clean when they washed them at certain points in the river. 

Do you know why?

CORNELIUS : 

No

Tyler gestures for Jack to come over

TYLER: 

Human sacrifices were once made on the hills above this river. 

Bodies burned, water seeped into ashes to make lye. This is lye, a crucial ingredient. 

Once it mixed with the melted fat of the bodies a thick, white soapy discharge crept into the river. 

Let me see your hand please.

Tyler licks his lips until they're gleaming wet. He takes Jack's hands and KISSES the back of it.

CORNELIUS : 

What is this?

TYLER: 

This, is a Chemical Burn.

The saliva shines in the shape of the kiss. 

Tyler pours a bit of the flaked lye onto CORNELIUS’ hand. CORNELIUS’ whole body JERKS. Tyler holds tight to CORNELIUS’ hand and arm. Tears well in CORNELIUS’ eyes; his face tightens.

TYLER: 

It will hurt more than you've ever been burned. And you will have a Scar.

CORNELIUS (V.O.): 

Guided meditation worked for cancer, it could work for this.

 

SHOT OF A FOREST, IN GENTLE SPRING RAINFALL. RESUME:

TYLER: 

Stay with The Pain, don’t block this out.

Tyler JERKS CORNELIUS’ hand, getting CORNELIUS’ attention…

TYLER: 

Look at your hand. 

The first soap was made from the ashes of heroes. 

Like the first monkeys shot into space. 

Without Pain, without Sacrifice, we would have NOTHING!

CORNELIUS (V.O.): 

I tried not to think of the words "searing" or "flesh."

SHOT OF A FOREST, IN GENTLE SPRING RAINFALL. RESUME:

TYLER: •STOP•. This is Your Pain, This is Your Burning Hand. It’s right here!

JACK: I’m going to My Cave. I’m going to My Cave, I’m going to find My Power Animal !! —

SHOT OF INSIDE THE ICE CAVE - ON MARLA, LYING NAKED UNDER A FUR COAT, TURNING HER HEAD TO LOOK TOWARDS US. RESUME:

TYLER: NO! Don’t deal with it like those dead people do. Come on!

CORNELIUS : I get The Point!

TYLER: No what you’re feeling is premature Enlightenment.

SHOT OF INSIDE ICE CAVE - NAKED MARLA PULLS CORNELIUS  DOWN ON TOP OF HER - CORNELIUS KISSES HER - CIGARETTE SMOKE COMES FROM HER MOUTH - CORNELIUS  COUGHS. RESUME:

 

Tyler SLAPS CORNELIUS’ face, regaining his attention…

TYLER: This is The Greatest Moment of Your Life, man! And you’re off somewhere missing it.

CORNELIUS,, snapping back, tries to jerk his hand away. Tyler keeps hold of it and their arms KNOCK UTENSILS off the table.

CORNELIUS : 

No I’m not!

TYLER: 

•SHUT UP• 

Our Fathers were our models for God — if Our Fathers bailed, WHAT DOES THAT TELL YOU ABOUT GOD....?

Tyler SLAPS CORNELIUS’ face again…

TYLER: 

•Listen to Me.• 

You have to consider the possibility that God DOES NOT LIKE YOU, he never WANTED You –– In all probability, He HATES You. 

This is Not The Worst Thing That Can Happen.....

JACK: It isn’t…?

TYLER: 

We don’t need him. 

Fuck damnation. Fuck redemption. We are God's Unwanted Children? 

¡¡ SO BE IT !!

CORNELIUS looks at Tyler -- they lock eyes. CORNELIUS does his best to stifle his spasms of pain, his body a quivering, coiled knot. He bolts toward the sink, but Tyler holds on.

TYLER: 

Listen. You can run water over your hand and make it worse, OR -- Look at Me! -- OR, you can use Vinegar and neutralize The Burn.

TYLER: First, you •HAVE• to give up —

First you have to KNOW, not fear, •KNOW• That Some Day You Will Die ––

CORNELIUS : 

You don’t know how this feels!

Tyler shows CORNELIUS  a LYE-BURNED KISS SCAR on his own hand. Tears begin to drip from CORNELIUS' eyes.

TYLER: 

It’s Only After We’ve Lost Everything, 

That We’re Free to Do Anything.

Tyler grabs a bottle of VINEGAR -- pours it over CORNELIUS' wound.

TYLER: 

Congratulations –– You’re one step closer to hitting Rock Bottom

BILL MOYERS: You visited some of the great painted caves in Europe.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, yes.

BILL MOYERS: Tell me what you remember when first you looked upon those underground caves.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, you didn’t want to leave. Here you come into an enormous chamber, like a great cathedral, with these animals painted. And they’re painted with a life like the life of an ink on silk, the Japanese painting. And well, you realize the darkness is inconceivable. We’re there with electric lights, but in a couple of instances, the concierge, the man who was showing us through, turned off the lights and you were never in darker darkness in your life. It’s like a, I don’t know, just a complete knockout of, you don’t know where you are, whether you’re looking north, south, east or west. All orientation is gone, and you’re in a darkness that never saw the sun. Then they tum the lights on again, and you see these gloriously painted animals. A bull that will be 20 feet long, and painted so that the haunches will be represented by a swelling in the rock, you know, they take account of the whole thing. It’s incredible.

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever look at these primitive art objects, and think not of the art but of the man or woman standing there, painting or creating? I find that’s where I speculate.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Oh, this is what hits you when you go into those caves, I can tell you that. What was in their mind when they were doing that? And that’s not an easy thing to do. And how did they get up there? And how did they see anything? And what kind of light did they have the little flashing torches throwing flickering things on it, to get something of that grace and perfection? And with respect to the problem of beauty, is this beauty intended, or is this something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit. You know what I mean? When you hear a bird sing, the beauty of the bird’s song, is this intentional, in what sense is it intentional? But it’s the expression of the bird, the beauty of the bird’s spirit, you might almost say, and I think that way very often about

this art. To what degree was the intention of the artist, what we would call “aesthetic,” or to what degree expressive, you know, and to what degree something that they simply had learned to do that way? It’s a difficult point. When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature, you know, it’s instinctive beauty. And how much of the beauty of our own lives is the beauty of being alive, and how much of it is conscious intention? That’s a big question.

BILL MOYERS: You call them temple caves.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Why temple?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Temple with images and stained glass windows, cathedrals, are a landscape of the soul. You move into a world of spiritual images, that’s what this is. When lean and I, my wife and I, drove down from Paris to this part of France, we stopped off at Chartres Cathedral. There is a cathedral. When you walk into the cathedral, it’s the mother, womb of your spiritual life Mother church All the forms around are significant of spiritual values, and the imagery is in anthropomorphic form God and Jesus and the saints and all, in human form.

BILL MOYERS: In human form.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Then we went down to the Lascaux. The images were in animal form. The form is secondary; the message is what’s important

BILL MOYERS: And the message of the cave?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: The message of the cave is of a relationship of time to eternal powers that is somehow to be experienced in that place. Now, I tell you, when you’re down in those caves, it’s a strange transformation of consciousness you have. You feel this is the womb, this is the place from which life comes, and that world up there in the sun with all those … that’s a secondary world: this is primary. I mean, this just overcomes you.

BILL MOYERS: You had that feeling when you were there?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I had it every time. Now, what were these caves used for? The speculations that are most common of scholars interested in this, is that they had to do with the initiation of boys into the hunt. You go in there, it’s dangerous, it’s very dangerous. It’s completely dark. It’s cold and dank. You’re banging your head on projections all the time, and it was a place of fear. And the boys were to overcome all that, and go into the womb of the earth. And the shaman, or whoever it was that would be helping you through, would not be making it easy.

BILL MOYERS: And then there was a release, once you got into that vast, torchlit chamber down there. What was the tribe, what was the tradition trying to say to the boy?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That is the womb land from which all the animals come.

BILL MOYERS: I see.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And the rituals down there have to do with the generation of a situation that will be propitious for the hunt. And the boys were to learn not only to hunt, but how to respect the animals and what rituals to perform, and how in their own lives no longer to be little boys but to be men. Because those hunts were very, very dangerous hunts, believe me, and these are the Original men’s rile sanctuaries, when: the boys became no longer their mothers’ sons, but their fathers’ sons.

BILL MOYERS: Don’t you wonder what effect this had on a boy?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, you can go through it today, actually, in cultures that arc still having the initiations with young boys. They give them an ordeal, a terrifying ordeal, that the youngster has to survive, makes a man of him, you know.

BILL MOYERS: What would happen to me as a child, if I went through one of these rites, as far as we can…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we know what they do in Australia. Now, when a boy gets to be, you know, a little bit ungovernable, one fine day the men come in, and they’re naked except for stripes of white down that has been stuck on their bodies, and stripes with their men’s blood. They used their own blood for gluing this on. And they’re swinging the bull-roarers, which are the voice of the spirits, and they come as spirits. The boy will try to take refuge with his mother; she’ll pretend to try to protect him. The men just take him away, a mother’s no good from then on, you see, he’s no longer a little boy. He’s in the men’s group, and then they put him really through an ordeal. These are the rites, you know, of circumcision, subincision, and so forth.

BILL MOYERS: And the whole purpose is to…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Tum him into a member of the tribe.

BILL MOYERS: And a hunter.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And a hunter.

BILL MOYERS: Because that was the way of life.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, but most important is to live according to the needs and values of that tribe. He is initiated in a Short period of time into the whole culture context of his people.

BILL MOYERS: So myth relates directly to ceremony and tribal ritual, and the absence of myth can mean the end of ritual.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth.

BILL MOYERS: And what does it mean, do you think, to young boys today. that we are absent these myths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the confirmation ritual is the counterpart today of these rites. As a little Catholic boy, you choose your confirmed name, the name you’re going to be confirmed by, and you go up. But instead of having them scarify you, knock your teeth out and all, the bishop gives you a mild slap on the cheek. It’s been reduced to that, and nothing’s happened to you. The Jewish counterpart is the bar mitzvah, and whether it works actually to effect a psychological transformation, I suppose, will depend on the individual case. There was no problem in these old days. The boy came out with a different body, and he’d gone through something.

BILL MOYERS: What about the female? I mean, most of the figures in the temple caves arc male. Was this a kind of secret society for males only?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It wasn’t a secret society, it was that the boys had to go through it. Now, we don’t know exactly what happens with the female in this period, because we have very little evidence to tell us. In primary cultures today, the girl becomes a woman with her first menstruation. It happens to her; I mean, nature does it to her. And so she has undergone the transformation, and what is her initiation? Typically it is to sit in a little hut for a certain number of days, and realize what she is.

BILL MOYERS: How does she do that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: She sits there. She’s now a woman. And what is a woman? A woman is a vehicle of life, and life has overtaken her. She is a vehicle now of life. A woman’s what it’s all about; the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment. She’s identical with the earth goddess in her powers, and she’s got to realize that about herself. The boy does not have a happening of that kind. He has to be turned into a man, and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself. The woman becomes the vehicle of nature; the man becomes the vehicle of the society, the social order and the social purpose.

BILL MOYERS: So what happens when a society no longer embraces powerful mythology?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: What we’ve got on our hands. As I say, if you want to find what it means not to have a society without any rituals, read The New York Times.

BILL MOYERS: And you’d find?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the news of the day.

BILL MOYERS: Wars…

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society. Half the…I imagine that 50% of the crime is by young people in their 20s and early 30s that just behave like barbarians.

BILL MOYERS: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: None. There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God, they’ve translated the Mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. So that, I mean, every time now that I read tile Latin of the Mass, I get that pitch again that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity, you know. The altar is turned so that the priest, his back is to you, and with him you address yourself outward like that. Now they’ve turned the altar around, looks like Julia Child giving a demonstration, and it’s all homey and cozy.

BILL MOYERS: And they play a guitar.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: They play a guitar. Listen, they’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is, is to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.

BILL MOYERS: So ritual that once conveyed an inner reality is now merely form, and that’s true in the rituals of society, and the personal rituals of marriage and religion.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, with respect to ritual, it must be kept alive. And so much of our ritual is dead.

POWER

HABRIS: 

Lord Aukon himself is here.

(Aukon enters and inspects the line.)

AUKON: 

Interesting -

(He goes back to Adric.)

Lord AUKON : 

A mind that shields itself.

 One who pretends to be a dull and stupid peasant, 

but who is different.

ADRIC: 

Who, me?

Lord AUKON : 

You. 

You. 

Come with me.

ADRIC: 

Why?

Lord AUKON : 

Spirit too, I see. 

Excellent.

ADRIC: 

Come with you? 

What's in it for me?

Lord AUKON: 

Wealth.

Power.

Dominion over This World.... 

....and over Many Others. 

EXT. BALCONY - GOETH'S VILLA - NIGHT
 Distant music, Brahms' lullaby, from the Rosner Brothers way down by the women's barracks calming the inhabitants. Up here on the balcony, Schindler and Goeth, the latter so drunk he can barely stand up, stare out over Goeth's dark kingdom.

 SCHINDLER 
They don't fear us because we have the power to kill, they fear us because we have the power to kill arbitrarily. 

A man commits a crime, he should know better.

We have him killed, we feel pretty good about it.

Or we kill him ourselves and we feel even better. 

 
That's not Power, though, that's Justice. 

That's different than Power. 

 
Power is when we have every justification to kill -- and we don't. 

That's Power.

That's what The Emperors had. 

A man stole something, he's brought in before the emperor, he throws himself down on the floor, he begs for mercy, he knows he's going to die... 

And The Emperor pardons him. 

This worthless man. 

He lets him go. 

That's Power. 

That's Power.
 It seems almost as though this temptation toward restraint, this image Schindler has brush-stroked of the merciful emperor, holds some appeal to Goeth. 

Perhaps, as he stares out over his camp, he imagines himself in the role, wondering what the power Schindler describes might feel like.

 Eventually, he glances over drunkenly, and almost smiles.

 SCHINDLER 
Amon the Good.

 EXT. STABLES - PLASZOW - DAY

 A stable boy works to ready Goeth's horse before he arrives.

 He sticks a bridle into its mouth, throws a riding blanket onto its back, drags out the saddle Schindler bought Goeth.

 Before he can finish, though, Goeth is there. The boy tries to hide his panic; he knows others have been shot for less.
 STABLE BOY 
I'm sorry, sir, I'm almost done.

 GOETH 
Oh, that's all right.

 As Goeth waits, patiently it seems, whistling to himself, the stable boy tries to mask his confusion.
 EXT. PLASZOW - DAY
 Goeth gallops around his great domain holding himself high in the saddle. But everywhere he looks, it seems, he's confronted with stoop-shouldered sloth. He forces himself to smile benevolently.
 INT. GOETH'S VILLA - DAY
 Goeth comes into his bedroom sweating from his ride. A worker with a pail and cloth appears in the bathroom doorway.
 MORE TO THE FLOOR --

 WORKER 
I have to report, sir, I've been unable to remove the stains from your bathtub.

 Goeth steps past him to take a look. The worker is almost shaking, he's so terrified of the violent reprisal he expects to receive.
 GOETH 
What are you using?

 WORKER 
Soap, sir.

 GOETH 
(incredulous) 

Soap? Not lye?

 The worker hasn't a defense for himself. 

Goeth's hand drifts down as if by instinct to the gun in his holster. 

He stares at the worker. 

He so wants to shoot him he can hardly stand it, right here, right in the bathroom, put some more stains on the porcelain. 

He takes a deep breath to calm himself.

 Then gestures grandly.
 
 GOETH 

Go ahead, go on, leave. 

I pardon you.
 The worker hurries out with his pail and cloth. Goeth just stands there for several moments -- trying to feel the power of emperors he's supposed to be feeling. 

But he doesn't feel it. 

All he feels is stupid.

 EXT. GOETH'S VILLA - MOMENTS LATER - DAY

 The worker hurries across the dying lawn outside the villa.

 He dares a glance back, and at that moment, a hand with a gun appears out the bathroom window and fires.

(Habris enters.)

HABRIS: 

My Lord, it is time.

ZARGO: 

How dare you interrupt us!

HABRIS: 

Aukon has seen The Sign. 
The Arising is at hand.

CAMILLA: 

The Arising? Leave us.

(Habris leaves.)

ZARGO: 

We must go to him.

CAMILLA: 

We shall resume this later. 

If you need anything, there are guards outside the door. 

Many guards.

The Great 1 :

You took the one, last 
PERFECT Crystal of POWER. 

I searched all Time, and all Space for it....!!!

I MUST have it! 

The Established Dandy : 

No! No, never. 

GREAT ONE [OC]: 

You are PROUD, Little Man. 

I see that I shall have to teach you to have respect! 

Round you go, Doctor. 

DOCTOR: 

No. No! 

No, I will not! 

(Against his will, the Doctor turns left, stepping high, as the Great One laughs.) 

DOCTOR: 

No! No, I will not! No! 

(The Doctor has turned right round and back to where he started.) 

GREAT ONE [OC]: 

Is that FEAR I can feel in your mind...? 

You are not ACCUSTOMED to feeling FRIGHTENED, are you, Doctor? 

You are very WISE to be afraid of ME...!!!. 

Go now. You must hurry back and fetch the crystal. 

I MUST have it, don't you understand? 

I must have it! I must! 

I must! I must! 

Go now. Go! 

Go! Go NOW! 

K'ANPO: 

We are all apt to surrender ourselves to domination. 

Even the strongest of us. 

DOCTOR: 

...Do you mean me? 

K'ANPO: 

Not all spiders sit on the back. 

SARAH: 

Oh, I don't understand. You're not saying they've taken over The Doctor, are you? 

DOCTOR: 

Oh no, Sarah, no. 

No, he's talking about my GREED. 

SARAH: 

Greed? You? 

DOCTOR: 

Yes, my Greed for KNOWLEDGE , for INFORMATION. 

He's saying that all this is basically My Fault. 

If I hadn't taken the crystal in the first place.....

I know who you are now!

K'ANPO: 

You were always a little slow on the uptake, my boy. 

GREAT ONE [OC]: 

Stop! Have you brought the crystal to me? 

DOCTOR: 

Well if I had not, why should I have returned? 

GREAT ONE [OC]: 

Very well. Very well, advance. 

(The Doctor walks around a corner and sees the universes biggest spider.) 

DOCTOR: 

I've brought you the crystal. 

Now why don't you just take it and leave the humans in peace, both here and on Earth? 

GREAT ONE: 

You think I care for the puny plans of my subjects? Earth? 

One paltry planet among millions? 

Give me the crystal. 

I thirst for it! 

I ache for it! 

DOCTOR: 

Well, why is it so important to you? 

GREAT ONE: 

You see this web of crystal above my head? 

It reproduces the pattern of my brain. 

One perfect crystal and it will be complete. 

That is the perfect crystal I need. 

DOCTOR: 

And then? 

GREAT ONE: 

My every thought will resonate within the web, and grow in power until, until, until....!!!

DOCTOR: 

But you've built a positive feedback circuit. You're trying to increase your mental powers to infinity. 

GREAT ONE: 

Exactly! 

I shall be the ruler of the entire universe! 

DOCTOR: 

Now listen to me. Listen. 

I haven't got much time left. 

What you're trying to do is impossible. 

If you complete that circuit, the energy will build up and up until it cannot be contained. 

You will destroy yourself. 

GREAT ONE:

 You waste the little time remaining to you. 

Even now the cave of crystal is destroying the cells of your body. 

I will grant you one last favour. 

You may watch the completion of my triumph before you die! 

(The crystal flies out of the Doctor's hand and becomes the keystone of the web lattice.) 

GREAT ONE: 

I am complete! 

Now I am total power! 

All praise to the Great One! 

DOCTOR: 

Stop. Stop! 

Don't you see what's happened to you? 

GREAT ONE: 

All praise to the Great One! 

All praise to me! Bow down before me, planets! 

Bow down, stars! 

Bow down, all galaxies and worship the Great One! 

The me! The Great, all-powerful me! 

Argh! 

(The giant spider starts to glow red.) 

GREAT ONE: 

I hurt! Help me! 

I am burning! My brain is on fire! 

(The Doctor runs out of the cave.) 

GREAT ONE: 

Help me!

DOCTOR: 

Compressed information, streaming into her. Reports from every city, every country, every planet, and they all get packaged inside her head. She becomes part of the software. Her brain is the computer. 

ROSE:

 If it all goes through her, she must be a genius. 

DOCTOR: 

Nah, she wouldn't remember any of it. There's too much. Her head'd blow up. 

The brain's the processor. As soon as it closes, she forgets. 

ROSE: 

So, what about all these people round the edge? 

DOCTOR: 

They've all got tiny little chips in their head, connecting them to her and they transmit six hundred channels. 

Every single fact in the Empire beams out of this place. 

Now that's what I call power. 

EDITOR: 

I started without you. 

This is fascinating. 

Satellite Five contains every piece of information within the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. 

Birth certificates, shopping habits, bank statements, but you two, you don't exist. 

Not a trace. No birth, no job, not the slightest kiss. 

How can you walk through the world and not leave a single footprint? 

ROSE: 

Suki. Suki! Hello? 

Can you hear me? Suki? 

What have you done to her? 

DOCTOR: 

I think she's dead. 

ROSE: 

She's working. 

DOCTOR: 

They've all got chips in their head, and the chips keep going, like puppets. 

EDITOR: 

Oh! You're full of information. But it's only fair we get some information back, because apparently, you're no one. It's so rare not to know something. Who are you? 

DOCTOR: 

It doesn't matter, because we're off. 

Nice to meet you. Come on. 

(Suki grabs Rose's arm. Two other zombies grab the Doctor.) 

EDITOR: Tell me who you are. 

DOCTOR: Since that information's keeping us alive, I'm hardly going to say, am I. 

EDITOR: Well, perhaps my Editor in Chief can convince you otherwise. 

DOCTOR: And who's that? 

EDITOR: 

It may interest you to know that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it's not actually human at all. It's merely a place where humans happen to live. 

(Growl, snarl.) 

EDITOR: 

Yeah. Yeah, sorry. It's a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client. 

(Who we finally see is a giant lump hanging from the ceiling, with a very nasty set of teeth in a mouth on the end of a pseudopod.) 

ROSE: What is that? 

DOCTOR: You mean that thing's in charge of Satellite Five? 

EDITOR: That thing, as you put it, is in charge of the human race. For almost a hundred years, mankind has been shaped and guided, his knowledge and ambition strictly controlled by it's broadcast news, edited by my superior, your master, and humanity's guiding light, the mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe. I call him Max. 

(Down on Floor 139 Adam avoids Cathica as she goes to take another look at the schematic that the Doctor called up. Then she goes to the lift and punches in the code for Floor 500. 

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Rose have been placed in hefty sets of manacles.) 

EDITOR: Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed. It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy, change a vote. 

ROSE: So all the people on Earth are like, slaves. 

EDITOR: Well, now, there's an interesting point. Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved? 

DOCTOR: Yes. 

EDITOR: Oh. I was hoping for a philosophical debate. Is that all I'm going to get? Yes? 

DOCTOR: Yes. 

EDITOR: You're no fun. 

DOCTOR: Let me out of these manacles. You'll find out how much fun I am. 

EDITOR: Oh, he's tough, isn't he. But, come on. Isn't it a great system? You've got to admire it, just a little bit. 

ROSE: You can't hide something on this scale. Somebody must have noticed. 

EDITOR: From time to time, someone, yes, but the computer chip system allows me to see inside their brains. I can see the smallest doubt and crush it. 

(Cathica arrives on Floor 500. Adam goes to the broadcast room on 139.) 

EDITOR: Then they just carry on, living the life, strutting about downstairs and all over the surface of the Earth like they're so individual, when of course, they're not. They're just cattle. In that respect, the Jagrafess hasn't changed a thing. 

(The Doctor and Rose spot Cathica behind the Editor's back.) 

ROSE: What about you? You're not a Jagrabelly 

DOCTOR: Jagrafess. 

ROSE: Jagrafess. You're not a Jagrafess. You're human. 

EDITOR: Yeah, well, simply being human doesn't pay very well. 

ROSE: But you couldn't have done this all on your own. 

EDITOR: No. I represent a consortium of banks. Money prefers a long-term investment. Also, the Jagrafess needed a little hand to install himself. 

DOCTOR: No wonder, a creature that size. What's his life span? 

EDITOR: Three thousand years. 

DOCTOR: That's one hell of a metabolism generating all that heat. That's why Satellite Five's so hot. You pump it out of the creature, channel it downstairs. Jagrafess stays cool, it stays alive. Satellite Five is one great big life support system.

[Adam's home]

(Adam settles in the broadcast chair and opens his portal, then phones home.) 

ADAM [OC]: It's me again. Don't wipe this message. It's just going to sound like white noise, but save it because I can

[Newsroom]

ADAM: Translate it, okay? Three, two, one and spike. 

(Information beams into Adam.)

[Floor 500]

EDITOR: But that's why you're so dangerous. Knowledge is power, but you remain unknown. Who are you? 

(The Editor snaps his fingers and energy surges through the manacles. Back in the now, the little dog watches energy encircling the telephone answering machine.) 

DOCTOR: Leave her alone. I'm the Doctor, she's Rose Tyler. We're nothing, we're just wandering. 

EDITOR: Tell me who you are! 

DOCTOR: I just said! 

EDITOR: Yes, but who do you work for? Who sent you? Who knows about us? Who exactly 

(He stops. The Jagrafess growls.) 

EDITOR: Time Lord. 

DOCTOR: What? 

EDITOR: Oh, yes. The last of the Time Lords in his travelling machine. Oh, with his little human girl from long ago 

DOCTOR: You don't know what you're talking about. 

EDITOR: Time travel.

[Newsroom]

(Adam screams as information is sucked out of his brain.) 

ADAM: Help!

[Floor 500]

DOCTOR: Someone's been telling you lies. 

EDITOR: Young master Adam Mitchell? 

(The Editor calls up the holo-monitor showing Adam in the broadcast chair.) 

ROSE: Oh, my God. His head! 

DOCTOR: What the hell's he done? What the hell's he gone and done? They're reading his mind. He's telling them everything. 

EDITOR: And through him, I know everything about you. Every piece of information in his head is now mine. And you have infinite knowledge, Doctor. The Human Empire is tiny compared to what you've seen in your T A R D I S. Tardis. 

DOCTOR: Well, you'll never get your hands on it. I'll die first. 

EDITOR: Die all you like. I don't need you. I've got the key. 

(The Tardis key rises from Adam's pocket.) 

DOCTOR: You and your boyfriends! 

EDITOR: Today, we are the headlines. We can rewrite history. We could prevent mankind from ever developing. 

DOCTOR: And no one's going to stop you because you've bred a human race that doesn't bother to ask questions. Stupid little slaves, believing every lie. They'll just trot right into the slaughter house if they're told it's made of gold. 

(The Jagrafess snarls, and Cathica leaves.)