Eruditorum Press

The trap at the end of the clickbait

50th anniversary countdown

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For March Against the Mainstream Media Day

The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki’s true identity.  Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she’s actually…

“Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?”  His tone is patronising.  Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.

“The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five’s transmissions,” says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, “We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people.”

“Ooo, I love it,” he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he’s listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, “Say it again.”

“This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?”

The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he’s a slave himself.

“I answer to the Editor in Chief…. If you don’t mind, I’m going to have to refer this upwards.”

Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.

“What is that?” she asks.

“Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born.”

Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.

“I don’t know anything,” she says proudly.

“Don’t you even ask?”

“Why would I?”

“You’re a journalist.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

She genuinely doesn’t understand him.  She doesn’t know what is on the floors above her… except that on the executive level, the place she’s been trained to yearn for, “the walls are made of gold”.  She doesn’t know why “immigration has tightened up”.  Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random ‘shit happens’ model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures.  And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by ‘News’, in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains.  For all the ‘news’ and ‘information’, they don’t know what’s going on or why.

“This society’s the wrong shape…” says the Doctor.

When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren’t made of gold, they’re made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies – including Suki.

“I think she’s dead,” says the Doctor.

“She’s working,” says Rose.

In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead… or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.

“It may interest you to know,” smarms the Editor, “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…”

There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.

“…yeah, sorry…” the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, “It’s a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client.”…

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Earl plays a C on his harmonica.  It starts a sympathetic resonance in the pipes that stretch under and through the regime on Terra Alpha, like the arteries in a body.  What flows in these arteries is sugarly gloop, the outpourings of the Kandy Kitchen.  It fills the regime with the glucose it needs to survive.  And the regime uses it to kill dissidents or refuseniks or men wearing pink triangles, drowning them in sweetness.  Earl’s note causes the encrusted, crystallised, fossilised sugar coating the insides of the pipes to crack and fall.  Tonnes of the stuff falls on top of Fifi, Helen A’s savage attack dog and beloved pet.  She sent it into the pipes to kill the Doctor and the Pipe People, the surviving aboriginals on her colony.

“Happiness will prevail,” says the artificially fruity voice on the colony tannoy system, “Factory guards are joining forces with the drones to destroy the Nevani sugar beet plant here in sector six. We will keep broadcasting.”

This is a revolution.  The killjoys are marching and demonstrating, and having their own melancholy parties in subversion of the rules.  The factories are falling to strikers.  Even the aboriginals are getting in on the act.  And, as in ‘The Sun Makers’, you know the revolution is really happening when it even gets on the news.

“It’s only one factory, Daisy K,” says Helen A, dictator of Terra Alpha and obvious Thatcher analogue, “I’ve built over a thousand.”  (Not that much like Thatcher then.  She didn’t build up manufacturing industry; she calculatedly decimated it.)

“What about the reports of riots?,” asks Daisy K, “And public unhappiness?”

Oh for the days when things like the Poll Tax (which, like so many things, now looks like gnat’s piss by comparison) used to cause good, healthy, necessary riots.

Helen A wants to use her best, most fanatical enforcer… but it turns out that she’s already been detained in her own Waiting Zone (they don’t have ‘prisons’ on Terra Alpha, there being no need for unhappy places in the best of all possible worlds).  So instead, Helen A asks Daisy K to…

“Get me the Kandyman.”

“You’re not unhappy about something?” asks Daisy K, noticing the cracks in Helen A’s ideological purity when her own self-interest is threatened… just as Thatcher cried for herself when someone subjected her to the strictures of the marketplace of ideas.

“GET ME THE KANDYMAN!”

The Kandyman answers his telephone.

“Kandyman,” he says.  (This bit makes me gurgle with pleasure every time.  It’s so arch.)

He’s an evil Bertie Basset.  Bassett himself is a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit.  The Kandyman is all this and an accretion of various manifestations of authority.  He’s the state torturer of a dictator, a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist… and he’s a tool, a machine, a commodity fetishised into life, alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power. …

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The Doctor, Romana and Duggan have found a painting hidden behind a panel in the basement of Count Scarlioni’s house in Paris.

“It’s the Mona Lisa!” says the Doctor.

“Must be a fake,” replies Duggan.

The Doctor says he doesn’t know what’s currently hanging in the Louvre, “but this is the genuine article”.

Duggan’s astonishment increases when the Doctor folds back yet more panelling to reveal yet another Mona Lisa.  And another.  And another.  Eventually, six identical copies are revealed.

“They must be fakes,” says Duggan again.

“The brushwork’s Leonardo’s,” the Doctor asserts, “It’s as characteristic as a signature. The pigment, too.”

“What,” blithers Duggan, “on all of them?”

“What I don’t understand is why a man who’s got six Mona Lisas wants to go to all the trouble of stealing a seventh.”  (The Count has been casing the Louvre, preparing to steal their Mona Lisa.)

This is Duggan’s area.  “Come on, Doctor, I’ve just told you. There are seven people who would buy the Mona Lisa in secret, but nobody’s going to buy the Mona Lisa when it’s hanging in the Louvre!”

“Of course,” says Romana, “They’d each have to think they were buying the stolen one.”

Because only ‘the original’ is valuable.  These collectors wouldn’t even want the Mona Lisa to sell or to display… they’d want it for – to use Duggan’s phrase – the “expensive gloat”.

But where does the value of the work of art lie?  In its ‘authenticity’?  Huge amounts of time, effort, money and research are expended to establish the ‘authenticity’ of artworks; their provenance and history, tracing back to their origins.   Experts compete over the ‘authenticity’ of various iterations of a single painting, fighting over which institution owns the ‘real’ one.  Duggan, the private detective hired to investigate art as a catalyst of crime, responds to the Mona Lisas found by the Doctor with an instantaneous attempt to evaluate their ‘authenticity’, and hence their ‘value’. (A set of assumptions that the Doctor explicitly rejects later in the show, when he mocks the idea that a painting needs to be x-rayed before its value can be ascertained.)

In the modern age, the ‘age of mechanical reproduction‘ as Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork is viewed in a new and historically unique way.  The camera destroyed the idea of timeless images arranged for a single spectator.  The photographic representation cast painting adrift, since it usurped the painter’s role as portrayer of the patron’s property and ideology.  Mass-reproduction of images destroyed the “aura” of a work of art (Benjamin’s word for its unique and materially-intact history), making it seperable from its original time and place and locational context.  The Mona Lisa, for instance, proliferated around the world.  It is now no longer to be found in the Louvre.  It is all over millions of greetings cards, the pages of magazines, the pages of books, posters, tourists’ photos, the internet, the covers of execrable paperback novels.  All this raises the fame of the painting while destroying its singular and unitary itselfness. …

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“You see Vicki?” says Tor, “Not only does the reply have to be true, it has to be the correct answer as well.”

To the Moroks, ‘truth’ and ‘the correct answer’ are the same thing.  And ‘correct’ means ‘official’, ‘integrated’, ‘obedient’.

“Do you understand that all questions are to be fully answered?” asks the computer, “What is your rank? What is your name? Do you have the Governor’s permission to approach? Have you a requisition signed by the Governor? What is its reference number?”

‘Truth’ is defined as the correct answer to all these questions, the correct integration into the imperial system, the correct official position.  Legality is what power says it is.  And only the state, and its functionaries, have the legitimate right to use violence.

“Withdrawal requisition numbers are fed in from headquarters. It has to tally with the number given,” explains Tor.

Systems of oppression run on tallying numbers.

Vicki’s response is to rip the front off the machine and start mucking around in its arcane guts.

She reprograms it; forces it to redefine words according to her insurrectionary imperatives.

“What is your name?” it asks.

“Vicki.”

“For what purpose are the arms needed?”

“Revolution!”

The machinery, suitably seized and retooled, is satisfied with this.  It’s the truth… and it’s now the ‘correct’ answer too, now that Vicki has changed its parameters.

Behind the newly-open door, there is the potential to remake the world; the ability to disrupt the imperial state’s monopoly on violence.

“There’s everything we need here and more!” declares Sita.

Well, he’s wrong about that.  They need a lot more than just the ability to shoot people.  But it’s a start.  It’s a way of defending their challenge to a system that is ruthless in its determination to hold on to power. And the door itself is perhaps more important even than the guns behind it.  They’ve opened it.  They’ve seized control of the machinery – by redefining truth to mean something more than just the imperial state’s idea of  ‘the correct answer’.…

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“The colonists shouldn’t be here,” says Dent. “My Corporation has been assigned the mineral rights on this planet. Our preliminary survey indicates a very rich concentration of duralinium. You know how the Earth needs that mineral.”

“Earth, or your corporation’s profits?” asks the Doctor.

Dent and his mining corporation will go on to prove that they will do literally anything, including mass murder, to obtain the duralinium they want.

“What’s good for IMC is good for Earth,” says Dent, echoing a famous statement once made in the real world.  “There are one hundred thousand million people back on Earth and they desperately need all the minerals we can find.”

“What those people need, my dear sir,” asserts the Doctor, “are new worlds to live in like this one. Worlds where they can live like human beings, not battery hens.”

What nobody mentions during this conversation, or during any of the conversations anybody has about the controversy, is the notion that no non-Uxarians might have the right to appropriate Uxarius.  There are people already living there, you see.  But those people don’t count.  They’re “primitives”.

This story is a reiteration of Western tropes, in both the sense of the genre ‘the Western’ and in the sense of the culture of Western civilisation.  IMC are the cynical railroad men; the colonists are settlers being expropriated by them.  The Uxarian natives are ‘Indians’.  They conform to the stereotypes.  They’re silent and sullen and irrational, scrabbling around in the dirt and waggling staffs aggressively.

But…

In a way, this complete failure to acknowledge the claims of the aboriginal Uxarians adds to the suffocating nastiness of what’s going on.  In the real world, aboriginals were displaced by settlers who then complained when big powers or big companies came to displace them in turn… and the settlers often remained blissfully unaware of their own hypocrisy.  The original inhabitants of settler-colonial states usually ended up enslaved, massacred, and/or crowded into ghettos or bantustans or the Gaza Strip, like battery hens.  Nobody in ‘Colony in Space’ seems aware of this; but then, as I said, that’s only realistic.

It’s a bit like the way Conrad’s Heart of Darkness manages to be both an appallingly racist tract of loathing and contempt for black Africans and a searing indictment of imperialism.  It does this by, as China Mieville observed, allowing no hope within the text that the Africans will liberate themselves.  ‘Colony in Space’ isn’t a visionary, feverish masterpiece… and yet, it does have something of the sublime and terrifying wasteland about it, mirroring Conrad’s nasty view of Africa as a soulless jungle.  ‘Colony’ has the people of the future replaying ancient mistakes (and all for the same reasons) amidst a bleak, hard-scrabble wilderness of grey, dull, flat, featureless rocks and mud.  There’s a protracted fight in a mud pool that is almost nihilistic, like that Goya painting where two guys are still trying to club each other to death while both sinking into the same quicksand.

Uxarius is, of course, a world ravaged by its own technological triumphs, by its trajectory towards total weaponization. …

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“Come in, won’t you?” calls the Doctor, “I’ve been waiting to talk to you.”

Koquillion answers the invitation.

“This used to be the Peoples’ Hall of Judgement,” remarks the Doctor, regarding the empty chamber sadly, “Fitting, in the present circumstances don’t you think?  Mr Bennett, may I remind you that masks and robes such as you are wearing are only used on absolutely ceremonial occasions, hmm?”

Koquillion removes his face.  Bennett is beneath.

He explains that he is a murderer.

“I killed a crewmember on the spaceship to Astra. I was arrested. The ship crashed. My crime hadn’t been radioed to Earth. I knew if I could get rid of the other crewmembers…”

“Get rid of the other crewmembers and blame their deaths on the Dido people, hmm?”

“When we crash landed, the inhabitants invited us all to a grand meeting. It was simple. I just arranged an explosive, using the ships armaments. The whole thing went up. All the inhabitants, the crew, the whole race.”

“You destroyed a whole planet to save your own skin. You’re insane.”

“The girl didn’t know I’d been arrested. When we get back to Earth, she’d support my story. I dressed up as Koquillion to show her how terrible the people here were.”

According to the Doctor they were actually hospitable and sociable people, the few hundred that used to live there anyway.  The ones that survived Bennett’s explosion, and who turn up to get him, are pretty pissed off however. Understandably. But Bennet never had a moment’s doubt that his fable of their murderous fierceness would be believed.

Implicit in the very fabric of the story is the assumption that ‘Earth’ or ‘humanity’ means Whitey.  Caucasians.  Westerners.  This is something that is far from unproblematic, and it occurs again and again, even – perhaps especially – in SF satires of colonialism.  And, when the “Dido people” appear, they’re not represented as people of colour, which tends to rub people of colour out of their own story.  And yet, as ever, there’s a double bind here.  To represent them as people of colour would be for the culture industries Western imperialism to take it upon themselves to represent the kinds of people their own societies decimated.  The solution isn’t to be found within the culture industries, or within the creation of TV texts. The necessary solution is a dialectical and political one that changes society, not just the attitudes of society, or the way society makes television.

And yet, all that being said… also implicit in this particular story is the assumption that Bennett would be believed without question when he dishonestly blamed the aboriginal inhabitants of an uncolonised ‘New World’ for a senseless massacre of his fellow passengers and crew.  Also implicit is the assumption on the part of Bennett that the culture and sophistication of the Didoans counts for nothing, that their People’s Hall of Judgement is just another place that he can use and abuse them without being judged.

They key figure here is the mask. …

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The Doctor, the Brigadier, some scientists and a Ministry bureaucrat have ventured inside Axos, a living ship that has just landed on Earth.

The Axons have greeted them.  They are a nuclear family – man in charge, surrounded by wife and boy and girl – modelled on classical statuary, their skin a lustrous gold.

They reflect the prejudices of those they meet.  They are part of Axos and have formed themselves from the ship/entity.  They easily adapt their image to Westernism, Patriarchy, Classicism, the worship of the commodity and of wealth itself.

In return for shelter (ostensibly), they offer “a gift… a payment”.  They appear unable to quite understand the concept of ‘gift’, immediately amending their use of the word.  They meant ‘payment’, which implies a commodity transaction.

Their payment is…

“Axonite!”

It looks like a mineral, something torn from the ground by labour.  In reality it is just another aspect of Axos, individuated from the amorphous and tentacular mass of the whole so it will pass as a rock.

“Axonite is the source of all our growth technology,” says Daddy Axon, “Axonite can absorb, convert, transmit and programme all forms of energy.”

Note the word ‘growth’.  To Axos, this is a central concept.  It’s why they’re here.

They do a deal.  Axonite will be distributed around the globe.

“This is indeed a rich planet you have brought us to,” Axos tells their unwilling partner, the Master.

Axos has found a new market into which it can spread, new material to consume.

“Axonite must encircle the world,” says Axos.

When it has been distributed globally, Axonite will absorb all energy and return to Axos, glutting it with new power.  Remember, Axonite can be anything.  It can take any form.  It can grow via an occult process.  It covers the world.  It has a “cycle” which ends with its absorbtion and assimilation of everything around it.  It returns to Axos, which is another aspect of itself, bigger and richer, swelling and increasing the whole.  It is the commodity form itself – the commodity fetishised and come alive, personifying itself and then treating people as commodities to be consumed.  It is scrambled, insane, multifarious, protean, yet singular and unitary.  It glitters.  It is lusted after as a transformation of production (of food, technology, anything at all) and as power in and of itself… yet the people who want it to serve them end up serving it.  It is alien to humanity, yet dresses in the clothes of Western tradition, classical values, oppressive gender relations and wealth.  It offers itself as payment, then takes everything as profit.  It is ravenous.  Vampiric.  It circulates and ends its cycle with profit it has sucked from the world.  And then it moves on, still hungry.

It is capital.…

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TW

Adelaide screams at the sight of Palmerdale’s dead body.

Leela slaps her across the face, silencing her.

This is horrible.  It’s one of the relatively few examples of serious, realistic, non-Fantastic, gendered violence in the show.  Companions are captured by monsters, etc., but this kind of thing happens rarely.  It is better in some places.  Worse in others.  In ‘The Time Meddler’, Edith’s implied-rape is in there simply to tick a box of genre tropes.  Yeurch.  In ‘Vengeance on Varos’, Maldak slaps Peri across the face to assuage his bruised ego.  It’s utterly gratuitous and revolting.

But this is a woman slapping another woman.  (That’s not worse… except in the sense that the representation, authored by a man, alibis male involvement in violence against women by ostensibly disappearing its gendered dimension.)

More than that – it’s Leela slapping another woman.  Wonderful Leela, who has never done anything like this before.  Okay, she’s a ruthless killer in battle… but slapping a ‘hysteric’ like she’s James Bond or something?  Normally, though she dreads weakness in herself because of her self-identification as a warrior, she is gentle and kind to the weak, to the scared.  This is part of her warriors’ code.  She will be back to her real self in later stories.  She’s even kind to Adelaide later in this story.

What has actually happened here?

Somewhere along the line, Leela – or perhaps I should say, the character of Leela – has internalized the male attitudes of the time in which she is a visitor: the Edwardian era.

None of the male characters from that period physically abuse Adelaide, but Adelaide is secondary to almost all of them.  To Palmerdale, she is a secretary and, probably, a mistress.  Harker has no doubt about that, dismissing her as “the owner’s fancy woman”.  Skinsale evidently desires her sexually, and also desires her esteem, yet finds her frustrating because she resolutely refuses to like him more than her boss.  His delight whenever she becomes dependant upon him is evident.  Vince Hawkins is the only person to whom she can feel comfortably superior, treating his bashful attentions as the services of a instrumentum vocale.

This story is all about class in many ways… but it is also about gender.  In many ways, it’s quite good on the subject.  It depicts male attitudes in a non-exculpatory fashion.  Leela is a forceful presence, crossing gender boundaries by putting on “men’s clothes… working clothes”, etc.  Leela’s actions and personality imply that Adelaide isn’t just a dishrag because she’s a woman; she’s like that because she has been trained in a particular kind of social role owing to her gender and class… a role that involves men looking upon her with varying degrees of objectification and contempt, looks which they train at Leela but which bounce off her.  There are other hints at these themes.  Women as property.  Reuben keeps pornographic pictures under his bed, for example.

But there is still a problem with that slap… which is that it comes from someone outside the Edwardian class system (this is, by the way, a depiction of the dynamics of that system that easily outclasses Downton Abbey or ‘Human Nature’). …

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Having devoured Harg, giant green squid monster Kroll is off to the settlement of the People of the Lakes, known to Harg’s compatriots by the derogatory name of ‘Swampies’. 

Constructed from tropes and white liberal guilt, these green space Indians are still better than the blue ones in Avatar.  They don’t get their world back in the end (neither did the Cherokee) and don’t get a white man as a leader.

“The Swampies most certainly do have some problems,” chuckles Thawn – Company man, racist and boss of the Refinery.

“You know,” muses his second-in-command Fenner, a cynical and cowardly man, “I don’t particularly like the Swampies… but I can’t say that I really hate them.”  He is just decent enough to be faintly disturbed by Thawn’s open callousness.

Suddenly serious, Thawn says “Oh, I don’t hate them Fenner.  I just want them permanently removed.  I spent many years persuading the Company to back this project, and now that we’re on the verge of success I’m not going to be stopped by lily-livered sentimentalists wailing about the fate of a few primitive savages.”

Thawn is lying, of course.  He hates them.  He thinks they’re inferior, worthless… but he never mentions the fact that they’re skin is a different colour to his.  In many ways, this story downplays race too much as an axis of oppression… and then, on the subject of axes of oppression being downplayed, there’s the fact that there seem to be no women on the planet at all apart from Romana. 

To Thawn, the worst thing about the Swampies is that they’re in his way.  They’re bad for business.  They sit on resources that Thawn claims, but which happen – irritatingly – to be buried in someone else’s land.  So, for the sake of Progress, you have to get rid of the ‘savages’.

Thawn and Fenner hold these truths to be self-evident.…

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Midge walks into the Gym.  You get the sense that it’s not the sort of place the old Midge would’ve visited.  The old Midge would’ve been scared of the self-defence crowd.

The new Midge is all swagger, in his shades and his shiny jacket.

“Waiting on the Sarge?” he asks the room full of silent, watching, bemused, singlet-and-sweatpants-wearing blokes.  “He’s been held up. He asked me to have a little chat with you.”

This is a lie.

“I learned a secret today. The secret of success. Thought I’d share it with you.”

Midge has been learning all sorts of things.  He’s been quarry in a quarry, hunted through a rocky wilderness on another world, stalked by carnivorous beasts.  He chose to survive at all costs.  He killed… not just to survive but for fun, for revenge, for a feeling of power that – one senses – is entirely new to him, a new experience in a stunted and powerless dead-end life.  Of course, in the process, he adopted the viewpoint of the beasts.  The logic of tooth and claw.  The logic of ‘fuck you, I’m all right’.  The logic that makes you escape the lions by feeding them your friends.

“It’s common sense, right?  It’s just the way of the world, right?  Survival of the fittest.”

And he’s right, in a way.  It is the way of the world.  Everyone in his sleepy little home town, his pokey little corner of Thatcher’s Britain, is obsessed with the survival of the fittest.  It has seeped all the way through society, into every nook and cranny.  It’s in the shops, where Hale and Pace are scared of being driven out of business.  It’s in the suburbs where the net curtains twitch.  It’s in the Territorial Army training sessions where the Sarge says young men have to be taught to fight.  It’s in the housing estate where Midge comes from.

It doesn’t matter that it’s one logic among many in nature, or that sometimes we see it in nature where it isn’t because we often mistake mirrors for windows, or that it may be fitting for the beasts but applying it to people is vacuous and specious and destructive.  Truth is: for the purposes of the people who benefit from it, the more vacuous and specious and destructive it is, the better. 

“Get rid of the deadwood, let the wasters go to the wall, and the strong will inherit the earth. You and me.”

Why do I suspect that some of the lads in this room used to bully Midge when they were at school with him?

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” he demands, furiously, enraged by their failure to respond to his glib soundbites, “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

He takes off his shades.  Beneath them, his eyes are the yellow, mindless eyes of an animal.  But that’s what he chose.

The Master is there.  A stalking, diseased old man, seething with resentment and malice.  Through Midge, his slavering pet, he casts his hypnotic spell over the young men in the room. …

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